'Reform UK will run Wales after the next Senedd election'

Political Editor Ruth Mosalski interviewed Oliver Lewis, Reform UK's Wales' spokesperson about the party's ambitions for the 2026 election

This newsletter looks at the huge hopes Reform UK has for the Senedd election in 2026. But before we get into that, a quick plug for the latest piece in our rail campaign. One of Wales’ foremost rail experts, Professor Mark Barry, believes the Welsh Government is repeating the biggest mistake it ever made by failing to press the case for full devolution of rail infrastructure in the Railways Act set to come before Parliament this year. But onto Reform UK and its new Wales spokesperson Oliver Lewis.

Oliver Lewis does not have a classic voice for Welsh political life. He speaks with the kind of cut-glass accent that comes from a childhood in Oxford, a short career in financial services and a switch to academia where he now teaches British politics and has written a book on George Orwell.

Finding a political home hasn’t been a straightforward path for him. He first stood for the Conservative Party in Scotland and later joined Labour. He has spoken in grandiose terms about the failure of the British state and last year told the Hiraeth podcast that he settled on Reform UK because he had reached the view that the UK needed a brand new political party that was a total reset for our style of politics and our style of government.

Since 2017, he’s had a home in Montgomery in mid Wales and stood for Reform in the Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr constituency at the general election last year, coming second to Labour with 20.6% of the vote and pushing the incumbent, albeit disgraced, Tory MP Craig Williams into third place.

We’ve looked previously in this newsletter at what that election might mean for the parties’ hopes at the next Welsh election in 2026 - and found Reform could well be on course to come third. Since then a YouGov poll in December put the party neck and neck with Labour but both parties marginally behind Plaid Cymru. That would put Reform on course for up to 30 seats.

However Mr Lewis thinks the party will win 40 of the 96 seats on offer in the expanded Senedd and becoming the ruling party.

He told us the party now has branches in every region of Wales, that Nigel Farage will have a significant role in the Senedd election campaign and that they will have a full field of candidates who will have been vetted to avoid embarassments.

Reform is not a political party in the traditional sense, but a company run by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, both now MPs in Westminster. When the group leader Nigel Farage visited Wales in November, he said he planned to formalise their organisation in Wales. It remains, in legal terms, a business.

Mr Lewis suggested that there was a highly organised effort to put together a campaign for the Senedd election.

The group said this week they have 7,800 members in Wales, a figure they believe exceeds the figure for the Conservatives. You can read more about that here. Mr Lewis said people are being allocated to seats where they are suitable and there is a "talent spotting" process going on.

After questions over vetting of general election candidates, which meant Reform did not have a candidate in Blaenau Gwent in May last year, he said the plan is for a "rigorous" and "corporate-style" process with the first stage of appointing candidates will be vetting those who are interested. There would be an assessment centre and "possible psychometric testing" of hopefuls.

"The attitude we're taking is not just selecting jobs for the boys who are going to pick up seats, we're interviewing people to do a job,” he said.

"Lots of new, genuinely impressive people are coming forward. Make no mistake about it, we wish to be a credible party of government and to be that, you need to make sure you have people on the candidate list, able and capable enough to be ministers. We're in this for the long haul," he said.

"We're not just the usual political shenanigans," he said, adding he plans to putting his name forward as the candidate for Gwynedd Maldwyn, the vast seat straddling the entire breadth of mid Wales from the cost of west Wales to the border with England.

Mr Lewis said the speed at which Reform has managed to create branches and fill positions shows that there is a "political revolution taking place". "There are a lot of very frustrated and discontented people who don't just want to complain, they don't want to report problems but want to see solutions. They see a new political party like us going back to those first principles and say, 'we've got issues with waiting lists and the health service, and how do we solve this?"

He expects candidates selected by the time they hold a conference in Wales this autumn. Asked how many seats he expects the group to win, he said 35 to 40 and that they will be the largest party.

"We've still got another six months to a year of likely declining Labour popularity and the Conservative brand is now so toxic that I think vote share is likely to diminish further so we're only at the start of our momentum. Whereas the other parties, because they're so much older than us, are trading off old brands, some tired, tarnished reputations. For us, I think it's safe to say we could be the largest party. I wouldn't have said that a month ago, but the polls are now showing such a trend I can't see it being reversed".

Reform did not publish a manifesto before the general election, but a "contract with the people". It has yet to make public any policies as such. However, Mr Lewis has shared a speech he gave at the conference at Celtic Manor during a private session not open to journalists.

"I'm a historian so I very much see us as an heir to the Levellers or the Chartists who fought for democratic reform and democratic change in the 17th and 19th century. The suffragists would be another equivalent type of group. We're radicals. Nigel has always said that. Because of our two party system, the radical tradition died a death but Nigel is the embodiment and heir to that tradition.

"Reform is for a fundamental reset of our institutions and our political culture," he said. He said a Reform Government in Cardiff "could, in our first budget, take one pence off every rate of income tax. At one stroke this could make Wales the only place in the UK where more of a citizen’s earnings will be retained by the person who worked for them; in one stroke we make Wales an attractive place to move for entrepreneurs and change-makers from all over Britain, who will see Wales as the only place in the UK where the government wants to facilitate economic activity, not tax it out of existence."

His speech said they would look to scrap the "madness" of Net Zero. Each of Wales' commissioners - those representing the Welsh language, old people, children and future generations, could too be scrapped.

He said the group's "working hypothesis" on a UK level is that a number of agencies like Passport Agency, DVLA, Ofwat, Ofgem, Public Health England, are "beyond the control of ministers" and agencies have been appointed by ministers to take the decisions that should be being made by ministers and or these organisations provide a very handy, and creative get out of jail free card, a blame culture, and this is arguably the point of their creation, I would say," he said.

On paper, he said politicians are culpable for decisions but he said they are not. Mr Lewis said the organisations can't be scrapped en-masse because "they're serving a public function" but "in a very inefficient way". But he said their roles and responsibilities could be "reabsorbed" into government. Agencies which generate revenue are, he said, "in effect businesses and so keeping an arm's length has some merit".

In Wales, it would be the commissioner system that could be scrapped. He told conference: "Wales has developed a system of government where there is a named commissioner for everything. It seems as if every duty of government is not the duty of a Minister – as is the supposed constitutional norm in Britain – but by crony-style appointees, paid by the public purse but rarely (if ever) accountable to it. A Reform government in Wales could abolish every single commissioner and return decision making to where it should lie; with the Minister, who we elect and who is paid to make decisions on our behalf, removable at an election and accountable to us, the electorate, at elections."

He backs too Richard Tice's proposal to renationalise the "natural monopolies" of bringing electricity and water boards back into public ownership and says the group want to "ensure every last pound of taxpayers money spent as efficiently as possible". "So the state should be smaller, but it should be more powerful," he said.

Mr Lewis has campaigned to bring British Rail back, and was a remain campaigner who switched his allegiance three days before the referendum then voting for leave, after he said he came across a speech by Clement Attlee who he describes as the "godfather of Brexit". He left Labour because the party "didn't respect the referendum" and he then joined the Brexit Party and is now part of Reform UK.

Asked if the existing parties understand the threat Reform pose, he said: "I think they do, but for different reasons. I think the one party that hasn't realised the threat to them is Plaid. While the leadership of Plaid, is very, in effect, Marxist, say, the, the demographic that votes in them is arguably reasonably socially conservative.

"My family in Wales are all Welsh speaking from deepest, darkest Carmarthenshire, and I've been amazed how many of them are sympathetic to some of our ideas," he said.

"In Montgomeryshire, even in the July election before a recent growth, I had lawyers basically for me, I had teachers, head teachers, GPs, people who you would on every other count, you would assume they're polite middle class chattering classes types who vote Lib Dem. The response to our appeal to people goes far beyond this cliché of deprived communities where is legitimate grievance.

"I would emphasise that on the grounds that voter turnout in those areas is very, very low, disturbingly and distressingly low, because of this kind of disengagement and disenfranchisement in these communities. Don't forget most of the people who vote are salaried, in a job. and feel this responsibility to vote.

"So if we can do that, well, amongst an electorate that's registered to vote and does vote, imagine the scale of the opportunity with the people who are totally disengaged.