There are just over three years until the next General Election in the UK. It’s going to be a very interesting one for several reasons. The first is that hopefully Brexit will finally be sorted out and secondly because the Tories have mismanaged the covid issue appallingly, there will be many voters, myself included, who will be wary of voting Tory next time. There are no indications at this point that Labour will suddenly be gripped by common sense but they could end up being elected because of voter apathy and anger at the behaviour of the Tories by former Tory voters.

There are now two relatively sensible and liberty-favourable alternative parties that have been formed and it will be interesting to see how they fare at the next General Election. How they do will depend in my view in large part to how well they get their ground game going.

The time for these new parties Reclaim and Heritage to get this ground game going is not a year or two before the General Election but now. This is because we have a large number of local council elections coming up in May 2021. Quite a few county, district and metropolitan elections, including votes for big city mayors like that of London, will be fought for. This will provide an opportunity for parties like Reclaim and Heritage to get their names and policies out there and in front of an electorate that, as is usual for Britain, is not heavily engaged in politics outside of election time.

What Heritage and Reclaim need to do is analogous to launching a new product to a market where there is not already strong brand recognition. First you need your product for which market research has determined that there is a market for. In the case of politics the market is dissatisfied voters from Tory, Labour and Lib Dem camps are the market for Reclaim and Heritage. Then the product needs to be promoted along with the brand. Only a fool would launch a product with minimal advertising and especially without significant pre-launch advertising, as with no recognition from the public most people would know bugger all about both the product and the brand.

This is why Reclaim and Heritage need to get their ground game going now nearly seven months or so before the local elections. It may not make a massive impact on their electoral performance at the locals, although I suspect that they could pick up a few seats, but it will build their political brands. Actions done now will I believe, stand these parties in good stead when the next General Election comes around.

Both these parties need to get to work now, of which more later. At this stage I’m not too worried about these parties targeting the same voters as from what I’ve read and heard, they are targeting different voters but who all have one thing in common, a disillusionment with the current and historical governing parties. Many of us have been disappointed in the performance of the Tories and their enthusiastic embrace of wokeness and statism and are wondering just what is the difference in reality between the Tories and Labour? As I said in my previous article on Reclaim in particular, they are going for a different set of voters, disaffected centrists and classical liberals than Heritage which seem to be going for traditionalist Tory voters.

If I were Mr Fox and Mr Kurten, the leaders of Reclaim and Heritage parties respectively, then I’d be embarking on a policy of building brand recognition and trying to get, as a short term goal, some seats in local councils come May 2021. I’d most certainly take a leaf out of the Liberal Democrat’s book and get leafleting as soon as possible. The Lib Dems manage to hang onto local authority seats by being pro-active and leafleting outside of election times. This is something that both Reclaim and Heritage need to be organising as soon as they possibly can along with recruiting volunteers to distribute said leaflets. I’d also like to see some form of guerrilla marketing being engaged in by Reclaim and Heritage, not the sort of destructive fly posting as used by the Socialist Workers Party for example, but maybe if possible, signs placed with permission by property owners along with intelligent publicity stunts that can make people sit up and take notice.

The Reclaim and Heritage Parties need to get their messages and their brands in front of the public and they need to do so in an environment where the mainstream media is liable to be extremely hostile to them. Neither of these parties can be assured of sympathetic or even impartial coverage on BBC shows like Newsnight or from Channel 4 News. Most MSM outlets will not want to upset the political apple cart and will do their best to destroy these parties if they can.

There is a lot in the political and media structure that is against both Reclaim and Heritage. First and foremost is the electoral system of first past the post. This puts a very big obstacle in front of new parties because the swing needed for them to take a Parliamentary seat is huge. This is why building a brand for these parties outside of Parliamentary elections is so important. People are more likely to vote for a party if they recognise it and understand what it is for. The other part of the problem facing Reclaim and Heritage is the media. They will go all out to destroy these new parties. I suspect that even now, at this early stage in the development of both Reclaim and Heritage, there are ‘journalists’ from the Independent for example, who are digging around trying to find dirt on both of these new parties, or stuff that they can present to the public as ‘dirt’ such as ‘so and so from X party liked a Tommy Robinson tweet in 2015’ for example.

Without the media onside and without an existing Parliamentary base, both Reclaim and Heritage will need a decent ground game in order to grow and achieve. These parties also need this ground game to counter the coming hostility from the MSM, who will try to get these parties to fight on a political and moral battlefield of the media’s choosing. I can well imagine that many MSM interviews with Reclaim and Heritage Party activists will begin with ‘so what you are saying is that you are a racist’ to those from these parties who only wish to protect the history and culture of the UK. The media will be hostile and this needs to be planned for. A decent and effective ground game in order to promote these parties will go a long way to counteract a hostile media..

The new sensible alternative parties, Reclaim and Heritage need to be pounding the streets now, not just one month before the locals and even in areas where there are not expected to be local elections in 2021. Kicking off the ground game now would in my view be good brand building. These parties need to look at how UKIP and the Brexit Party were treated by the media and by the political classes and build public support before the propaganda from the media and the Establishment parties gets going. I would be delighted to see a flyer for the Reclaim or Heritage Party drop through my letterbox and I believe so would many other Britons who have been continuously been either ignored or abused by the Establishment parties that have governed us for so long and maybe for too long.