Observations

Firstly, we are grateful to Ben Habib for giving up his time on a Sunday morning to speak to us. This was in fact only possible because a previous engagement had been cancelled by Reform Head Office. He had been due to speak to a gathering of Reform campaigners in Runcorn, Cheshire. It was partly this which drove Mr Habib to take the decision he did, and leave Reform UK.

The impression we formed during the interview was that here is a man who is not angry, nor 'bitter and twisted', but rather deeply saddened by the course of events. The other major thing which emerges from the interview is that Ben Habib is a principled man and a conviction politician - somewhat rare qualities in politics these days.

Ben Habib and Reform UK

This parting of the ways between Ben Habib and Reform UK had of course been in the making for months. This is based primarily on three main points of difference. Mr Habib believes passionately that Northern Ireland should regain its place as a full part of the United Kingdom. Secondly he believes that “Brexit is not done”, which partly follows from the first point. And finally he feels that Reform UK’s structure must be changed with all due speed to make it into a party controlled by its Members. Currently it is controlled by its two shareholders, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice.

We can’t comment on any arrangements underway to change the party’s current structure, as we are not aware of these. We do know that in the party’s early days Nigel was anxious to prevent large numbers of hostile individuals joining as members purely in order to destroy it. This now seems less likely, given that Reform UK has over 100,000 paid supporters.

In the interest of balance we asked Reform UK to respond to Ben Habib’s accusations and observations, but they declined.

COMING UP - the rest of the fascinating content from Sunday's event

This interview forms part of a longer video for the Global Discussion Forum last Sunday (plus some 'shorts' for social media), where Ben Habib was one of the three guest speakers. That Forum was mainly about sovereignty, democracy, and Northern Ireland. The event was popular and lively. We will be publishing the full video in the next day or so, but we felt it appropriate to separate out the comments from Ben Habib about Reform UK and his decision to leave, and to put these into a short video featuring Ben, which is what we have done for today’s report.

As a result, GB News – with whom we shared the above prior to publication – will be running this story today or tomorrow.

Finally, we appealed to readers to help to fund all the video production costs for Sunday’s event and the subsequent films and ‘shorts’ we will be running. We would like to thank those readers who generously contributed. We are still short of our revised target by £395 – can you please help?

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