Reform UK’s former party chair Ben Habib has hit out at leader Nigel Farage, writes Ian McGreal, accusing him of ditching former Unionist allies in Northern Ireland
Nigel Farage is again being accused of political dishonesty, and this time the name calling is not from those he likes to call “Remoaners”, but from his own side.
Wealthy property developer Ben Habib left the Tories and became an MEP for Farage’s Brexit Party at the 2019 European election, in the dying days of Tory Prime Minister Theresa May’s failed efforts to resolve Brexit’s contradictions. He was the party’s lead candidate in London.
In March 2023, Farage’s front man Richard Tice made Habib co-deputy leader of Reform UK and, in February 2024, he was the party’s most successful parliamentary by-election candidate when he gained 13% at Wellingborough. Then, only days after the general election, Farage sacked him as deputy leader.
By that time Habib was already well known as Reform UK’s most enthusiastic Unionist. For years he has campaigned regularly with the former Labour MP Kate (now Baroness) Hoey and Jim Allister, a barrister who leads the hardline Ulster party, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV). Habib, Hoey and Allister even launched a joint legal action against the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Leading TUV members (as Searchlight has previously exposed) included two veteran National Front (NF) activists, Paul Kingsley and John Hiddleston. At the general election Hiddleston campaigned in Belfast South & Mid Down. His fascist activism dates back to his student days at Queen’s University Belfast, and he edited the NF’s journal British Ulsterman before heading to South Africa to campaign for parties that were extreme even by the standards of the apartheid regime.
Kingsley is another who always saw himself in the intellectual vanguard of fascism, active in three far-right parties, the NF, the National Party and the British Democratic Party. This year, he was part of the TUV team in East Belfast, as well as acting as one of the party’s strategists at head office.
In advance of this year’s general election, strongly influenced by Habib, Reform UK and TUV announced an alliance. The problem is that Farage himself has never shown much enthusiasm for the Ulster cause, and soon after his dramatic return to the party as its effective leader as well as owner, Farage ignored the pact and endorsed two of TUV’s rivals in the Democratic Unionist Party.
Excluded
All seemed to be forgiven when TUV leader Jim Allister defeated one of these Farage-backed candidates, Ian Paisley Junior, and became the party’s first Westminster MP. Ever since his election, Allister has been hand in glove with Reform in what amounts to a House of Commons group of six Reform-TUV MPs.
But Farage chose not to invite Allister or anyone else from TUV to Reform UK’s annual conference in September. Allister maintained a diplomatic silence, but Habib is not so tactful, and at the start of October hit out in articles for the Belfast News Letter and the Daily Express.
Reform’s former deputy leader lashed out at Farage, accusing him of ignoring his “obligation” to “save Northern Ireland”. He spelled out what was already obvious, that since Farage resumed the leadership “our wonderful alliance seems to have ended”. After the early fumbling in the election campaign, Habib wrote, “now it seems Reform has positively rejected the alliance. There is no common cause” made between its MPs and Allister. Habib concluded that if Farage failed to challenge the government “to finish the job of Brexit and save Northern Ireland/the country, there will be little point to Reform”.
This is the latest in a series of attacks on the party by Habib since the general election, and there is no sign of him toning down his remarks. We can expect him to try to become a spokesman for dissidents inside Reform. Right now, the constitution gives no one but Farage any power, but if he is serious about democratising the party, then these dissidents will have to be given a voice. This is a dangerous situation, especially now that Reform’s members have been led to expect further electoral success.
As he showed during the Southport riots, Farage is happy to play with incendiary rhetoric but then back down, frustrating those in his party who hope either for extreme racism or extreme Unionism.
If Loyalist paramilitaries return to the streets, trying to wreck the Protocol and eventually undermine the Good Friday Agreement, Farage will have to get off the fence. The signs are that, as with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, he will be happy to play with matches but run away from the fire.
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Searchlight