Reform UK, the technocratic arm of the British Nation
Britain needs reform, not a vague signalling of 'values'
2019: A Revolution Betrayed
It is not even a rhetorical exaggeration to say that Boris Johnson is the worst traitor to have ever sat in Number 10. For a man who had such great pretensions to History and his role in it, this fate is tragic; as if it were ripped directly from the pages of Aeschylus that he is likely able to recite from memory.
What is staggering, probably even to the man himself, is how much of a slave he became to his own defects. An excellent article by J. Sorel written shortly after the 2024 election reminds us just how catastrophic this was. It is now obvious that the chief battle in British politics, from the referendum in 2016 to the present day, was (and is) the battle over the levers of government itself. At the beginning of this story, ‘Ideas’ had come to mean almost nothing. Nor did this battle accord to a standard Left-Right axis. In any proper sense, this was not ‘Politics’ as popularly understood. One iteration of democratic reformism arrayed against the mandate of Brexit, the Corbynism of 2017, was eventually forced to give way to the rank oppositional proceduralism of 2019. Every week there was a new Remoaner plot to frustrate the mandate of the government, each time with diminishing purchase with the wider population, increasingly exhausted by dither and delay.
The battle was eventually won by the forces of reform from the Right because, at the end of the day, the fair-minded British public largely agreed that even if they personally (of those that did vote Remain) disliked this vision of a Singapore-on-Thames fuelling the development of the hinterland, they did not see it as legitimate to arbitrarily stymie the process to the point of preventing the government calling an election. Every day that was spent on Leave vs. Remain was one in which the practical questions of what would come next and the practical terms of settlement were held back.
Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings didn’t rub their faces in it. In fact, in the months of politicking before the 2019 election, they had made a pitch to the public that they would sweep aside all of the blockers, both political (including twenty of the absolute worst Tory MPs) and institutional, thus achieving a peaceful end to this interminable paralysis. The stonking majority they earned was finally enough to quiet down the obstinate screeching of those vested interests that fought tooth and nail to preserve their unearned privileges.
How did they do this? They did so not by presenting their message as a permanent cultural, political and institutional war within the government and across wider society; instead, they presented it as something that completed the project for which there had already been two definitive mandates granted. ‘Getting Brexit Done’ and over with, ‘Uniting [the country] and Levelling Up’ the poorer regions of the country, and, crucially, reforming the machinery of government, which had acted as an independent and partisan legislator in its own right, yet would not be challenged for blatantly political reasons, but primarily because it was entirely unfit for its basic purpose — namely, delivering the pledges of the elected government, whether that be in infrastructure, law and order, border policy, public services, and the many other facets of public life in which the state was already quite clearly failing to deliver on promises that were already well established.
This was hardly the Trumpian sabre-rattling for a Manichaean internal battle against ‘the swamp’ that took place over the pond at the same time. That was an altogether different plea to restore a fraction of democratic control over the permanent government. As J. Sorel noted, the difference lay in the fact that
‘…Britain would have been the first major country to break with the bureaucratic-oligarchic model... [and] is further along in this historical process than any other country. Even the most extreme Project 2025 stretch goals would leave a President Trump with far less control over the state than Boris Johnson enjoyed in January 2020.’
The essential quality here is that the revolutionary gift of reopening political life itself did not, in fact, put off the nice, respectable coalition of Cameron in any serious numbers — all because it came in the right packaging and was sold by a familiar and cuddly salesman who wore a blue rosette and a blond mop of hair.
If the mandate of 2019 didn’t begin this process, it was subconsciously understood by all — the Blob included — as a coronation of a new age. The political battle had been won decisively; a quiet consensus had been forged; the manifest Will of the British Nation. All that was left to do was the boring work of administrative reform. Even a small (but not insignificant) number of renegade administrators from within the Blob itself were ready to explore this strange new world and the opportunities that it might grant them should they cooperate.
It was only by the skin of its teeth that the Blob survived. Even the Pandemic wouldn’t have been enough to save it. As Dominic Cummings himself noted at a Civic Future event in 2024:
‘The Civil Service think the kind of thing, the kind of Westminster story about 2020, is the VoteLeave maniacs wanted to change Whitehall, and old Whitehall said no, and there was a big battle. That story, like most conventional stories in Westminster, is fake.
What actually happened in Summer 2020 was that senior civil servants themselves had seen the complete implosion of the Cabinet Office structure. Just in the weeks earlier... [they] came to me and said... “We’ve had this once in a century event, the entire centre of government is completely collapsed under the pressure of it, everybody around here knows that we can’t go back to normal... You’ve said all the stuff about the Civil Service, it’s obviously now going to change, let’s basically negotiate the terms of the surrender from the deep state to VoteLeave.” … We had conversations and the core of it was actually pretty simple, it’s Singapore has a good model to a large extent, we shift to the Singapore system … We said, shift of appointments from almost completely appointed internally inside the caste system to open by default so we can actually just recruit the best people in the world shift to far fewer and better officials for better pay… [et cetera, full version here]
In Summer 2020, an untold story is the system actually surrendered and agreed to shift to what is a completely revolutionary change in approach in terms of how the Civil Service would work. The tragedy is, of course, that Boris Johnson then looks at the situation in quarter three and says, Starmer is a joke, I can beat him without actually changing anything, Carrie says “I want to run Number 10”, so all of the things that were actually agreed, that process that begun in 2020 which would have been the biggest revolution in how the state operates since the 1850s... all of that was abandoned.’
The fault for the revival of government by quango, of the ethics committee, of stakeholder privileges lies squarely at the feet of Boris Johnson and his entirely personal defects that led him to choose to spurn his mandate. To a far lesser degree, at least after ‘Partygate’, one could also blame the media and its relentless effort to return to the era of ‘decency’ in public life, because of… a piece of cake? But this is only so in the way that the Bully XL can be blamed for its unquenchable thirst for the blood of small children. It really all goes back to Boris Johnson.
Last week at Pimlico Journal, George Spencer and I wrote a piece recognising Morgan McSweeney’s left-wing attempt to square the modernisation of the machinery of government from within, from the belly of the beast itself, thereby directing the most Bourbon of governments, one that had been brought to power on the back of the restoration of rule by quango, in a marginally more productive direction. McSweeney, recognising the calamity (electoral and otherwise) that a genuine restoration would be, seized the initiative from a laughably (and laughable) reactionary rear-guard action of government by ‘ethics’ in Sue Gray’s ‘Ultra’ direction of Former Spooks for the Starmerite Restoration of Britain, attempting to chart a course somewhere between Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, and François Guizot under Louis XVIII.
That ship has sailed, and the mantle of reform now has to be taken up by, well, Reform. It must be remembered that Johnson’s national, cross-sectional coalition had won over all-too-comfortable shire Tories and a section of the globally-minded elite by an appeal to peace and modernisation. So too must Reform. The same forces are aligned: blue-collar ‘alarm-clock Britain’, Boozy Thatcherite bankers, Mumsnet, frustrated graduates, ambitious administrators, the ‘squeezed middle’, and basically every social group in Britain beyond the diminishingly small cadre of ideologically left-wing activists, with even some of the native public sector client voters and welfare recipients breaking ranks from the Left. Recent Conservative defections may go some way in soothing the anxieties of those shire Tories for the task that is at hand.
Indeed, the overall diagnosis of what is wrong with Britain is one that is increasingly shared by them too. This is evident in the not-so-secret support of David Cameron and George Osborne for Robert Jenrick during the Conservative leadership contest. The once ‘cuddly’ Jenrick was always the clearer representative of this type more than the monochromatic culture warrior Kemi Badenoch — someone who, yes, may have been able to break out of this mould in a very limited sense, but for the most part seems to have been lifted directly from the ‘anti-Woke’, ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ of 2022 (as observed in J’accuse). The social consensus is, if anything, now stronger than ever: Britain is broken. Nothing works. Great swathes of the country have been left to a state of permanent decay. Exhaustion with even the most ‘flagship’ of British public services, like the NHS, is at an unprecedented level. This is a state of affairs that is recognised increasingly even by those on the Left to not be problems of ‘insufficient funding’ or ‘Tory austerity’, but rather of deep structural issues in the delivery mechanism. British society needs practical reform from the state — above all else — to make the country work for its people.
What the country does not need now, and did not need in 2024 — or indeed in 2019 — was a government that came to power with its chief objective being putting a ‘decent’ man in Number 10. Vague commitments to ‘values’ are actually quite irrelevant. Government by ethics committee and quango, despite its inexplicably ‘technocratic’ presentation, has been flatly incompetent and provides no answers to the fundamental problems of British society. The instinct of many on the Right after 2024 was to respond by ‘thinking about the meaning of conservatism’. This is entirely the wrong approach.
Likewise, the habitual recourse of online rightists to ‘Based’ dead-ends, such as in their support of ‘Restore Britain’, suggests a similar impotence. The spiritual revival of European civilisation is a very important but exceptionally complex problem, with its ultimate source in the death of God (as understood by Nietzsche) and the uniquely modern dislocation produced by commercial and industrial society. It certainly cannot be resolved (or even understood) by the burblings of Charlie Downes (who apparently believes England deserves the rape gangs for creating this modern world, and is, by the way, the Campaigns Director for Restore Britain), or by his nonsensical, converted-six-months-ago Catholic Distributism, or indeed by any of his comic-book-collecting clique who think that Warhammer 40k is an accurate description of our reality. It would be best for them to stick to reviewing video games. ‘Beau Dade’ can complete his ‘Epochs’ World Tour.
For all of the rest of us who aren’t fortunate enough to be a member of this tiny groupuscule of self-promoting, teetotal TradCaths, a ‘Great Repeal Act’ is necessary not for a ‘restoration’, or any other such ludicrously grandiose task, but simply for the state to be able to perform its basic functions. The delivery mechanisms of public services need to be overhauled, and yes, the right people — experts with backgrounds outside of career politics — must be brought in to set things right. The basic pattern of Cummingsite reform of the Civil Service and the entire policymaking apparatus is fundamentally correct (at least outside of his insistence on jobs for the movers and shakers of the VoteLeave campaign). The public cares little for the ‘how’. It simply demands that the state do whatever is necessary to uphold its promises.
Regardless of how Farage (or indeed anyone else associated with Reform) has used this term as a pejorative, the basic pitch of Reform is therefore technocratic. Reform lives up to the idea that this crossroads in British political history requires a cadre of outside experts to return the state to its mission. Any right-minded technocrat should understand this ‘mass political’ moment is one that demands their abilities — as, in fact, they have historically.
Technocracy and Mass Politics
The experience of so-called ‘neoliberalism’ has misshaped our understanding of what the word ‘technocratic’ actually means. After all, in the conventional account, the technocrat is:
An apolitical, independent actor to whom the
(a) leadership of a state; or,
(b) someone to whom an aspect of its policymaking,
can be ‘offshored’ away from regular political forces.
There are only a few examples of this leadership model being put into practice in modern political history, not just in Britain but globally. Probably the most prominent are Mark Carney (although he has, probably sensibly, gradually drifted away from this model since he entered politics), and (more purely, but rather less successfully, though in more difficult circumstances), Mario Draghi. Beyond this there is only a very limited — and almost completely unsuccessful — cast of characters who were shipped into positions of national leadership during exceptional moments of ungovernability. For various reasons, most importantly our strongly majoritarian electoral system, there has never been a genuinely ‘technocratic’ moment in modern British political history under this definition. Certainly, no Prime Minister has ever legitimised themselves in such a way. In short, this is a term which is very widely used, but has little practical application; it therefore seems like it would be wise to abandon it altogether.
But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that ‘neoliberalism’ was indeed a ‘technocratic’ moment in Britain — as it is often claimed to be, whether under Thatcher, or Blair, or indeed both. Let us also consider the ultimate results of this ‘technocracy’ (or any such technocracy that preceded it) entirely neutrally; we will simply examine how change was implemented rather than whether it was good or bad, and consider whether the term ‘technocracy’ has any use in contemporary political discourse and, if so, whether our definition should be adapted to make it ‘fit for purpose’.
To what extent did this narrow definition, as outlined above, ever accord with any reality in ‘neoliberal’ Britain? Did Margaret Thatcher ship the Chicago Boys across the Atlantic and into the Cabinet? Did she make an octogenarian Friedrich Hayek her Lord Chancellor? No. Her acolytes — Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe, Ken Clarke — were largely from the old gang of public school boozers. They were frustrated by the years of Tory limpness under Ted Heath; they also knew that at least two (and arguably three) democratically-elected governments in a row had been brought down, to a greater or lesser extent, by the intransigence of the trade unions. They were eventually won over by Keith Joseph’s conversion to free-market liberalism and believed that this was the only political solution to restore democratic, not sectional, control to national economic policy.
In doing so, the economy as a whole had to be actively de-politicised and de-technocratised. It had to be taken out of the hands of government planners and into the hands of agents operating in markets with narrower foci. To this end, the new ‘regulatory watchdogs’ (of which, for the newly-privatised utilities, there were several) were set up to act independently of the government or any political agenda as a ‘neutral’ mediator of economic activity. It is on this second aspect of the conventional understanding of technocracy that one might be able to argue that neoliberal technocracy ever existed in Britain — but, despite the best efforts of her successors to extend this depoliticisation to even more levers of government control where the political vs economic distinction became blurred, Thatcher herself was deeply resistant to the genuine abrogation of democratic control to Europe. Indeed, after the failure of the ERM, most Thatcherites (including those, like Nigel Lawson, who had originally supported the ERM as a form of inflation control, but not deeper European integration as an end in itself) consolidated around the populist and sovereigntist position. The Thatcherite legacy is now one which postulates the ‘technocrat’ restricting the state’s economic agency is a national good, without similar constraints in the non-economic realm.
Tony Blair is the other of the two so-called ‘neoliberals’ within contemporary demonology. Blairism was indeed ‘technocratic’ in at least one sense: Gordon Brown extended the depoliticisation of economic control of monetary policy in Bank of England independence. But, more importantly for those who (like Pimlico Journal) despise New Labour, Blair also outsourced strictly non-economic — and quite obviously political — functions of the state to sectional actors and formalised the privileges of the quango. We all know the story: offshoring political functions created the basic unwieldiness of policymaking today. Needless to say, lawyers, civil servants and most of all ‘the stakeholders’, being sectional actors, just like miners’ unions, deserve no special right of veto on national policy. If this were neoliberalism, it was neoliberalism placed against technocratic governance.
Insofar as it means anything to those willing to use the term non-pejoratively, ‘neoliberalism’ in the abstract is the use of strong states co-operating internationally via law and regulation primarily to enforce a depoliticised market (whether this could be real is not the question here). The intrinsic association of depoliticisation with ‘technocracy’ is completely nonsensical. Historically, we see a spectrum of technocratic government (legitimacy by expertise) and technocratic governance or instruments (the use of experts towards defined political ends). In the British story, where the parliamentary system has faced no serious challengers, only technocratic governance (in a particularly bounded sense in neoliberalism) has had any expression. It was the Labour Party — well before Blair, and neoliberalism — that came closest in Britain’s history to creating a lasting technocratic settlement along these lines.
Closer analysis shows us that many of the ‘technocratic moments’ of the twentieth century have operated on a single basic pattern. As mass politics emerged along new lines of ‘class’ and ‘nation’ instead of more narrowly sectarian ones, the political forces seeking to respond to these new conditions — political forces which often still lacked foundations within the established political system — turned to outside expertise to help form the operation that would meet these new demands.
In response to Russia’s backwardness and return-to-the-land native Slavophilism, Marxist-Leninism (and ‘administrative utopianism’ in general) was attractive to many pre-revolutionary intellectuals as a highly-ideologised version of a state made the plaything of technocrats, impressed by motifs of modernity, the ‘throbbing dynamo of development, national greatness and power’, to which electricity and the machinery of clockwork became central. Leninism pitched itself as populist, ‘peace, bread and land; all power to the workers’ councils’, but thought of its means as the opposite. ‘Vanguardism’, put simply, means that the ‘technocrat’ is charged with realising the popular political will, even if it lies subconscious.
Similarly, it is underappreciated how far this was a tendency characterising fascism, and particularly Italian Fascism — which into the mix of mass-mobilising nationalism and the exaltation of youth and violence, folded in the dry expertise of classical economists who imagined the rampaging Squadristi and Ras to be the vehicle to pacify economic and left-wing class warfare at home. This meant anything but the depoliticisation of economic life. Their prescriptions were made into political missions for which society at large had to be psychologically mobilised, just as it was for warfare, in ‘the Battle for the Lira’ and ‘the Battle for Grain’.
It is certainly true that these were extreme edge cases responding to underdeveloped states sent into extreme crisis by their transition into mass politics in a competitive world (though a similar analysis could certainly be made of many other states, such as the modernising dictatorships in East Asia). It is true that in the British case, the transition was far less tumultuous. And yet: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was also the period of Britain’s gradual reassessment of the liberal orthodoxy that had served it well in earlier times. This reassessment also fits into the same basic pattern outlined in the previous paragraphs. The liberal state made limited promises and offered limited representation. Democratisation was paired with an increasing feeling that the British state was not fit for purpose; that the country was ‘falling behind’ its international rivals, industrially and militarily. The embarrassments of the Second Boer War made this feeling even more acute: Britain was a nation led by blustering, aristocratic amateurs who had neglected the questions of fostering its human and economic capital; too reliant on slapdash methods, improvisation, and half measures in industry, commerce, education, and the practice of government.
The Earl of Rosebery took up the cry of ‘National Efficiency’. It was precisely because this was such a vague catchphrase, something that could mean whatever it needed to the myriad discontented with the old liberalism, that it won such popular purchase. What united those who used it was the idea that British society had to be put on a new footing for a new age, with plans as diverse as introducing the Top Business Brains into the operation of government (Rosebery and the Administrative Reform Association were of a more laissez-faire orientation) to the Co-Efficients dining club (which included Fabians like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, eccentric Radicals like Joseph Chamberlain, Liberal Imperialists like Asquith and Haldane, and Conservatives like Leo Amery). They idealised a meritocratic, scientifically-led society, for which each of its aspects would be assigned the guidance of appropriate experts. They channelled socialist and labour demands for social reform into a programme for a Germanisation — taking cues from Bismarck — of education, welfare and health policies and modernising national institutions. But, in spite of its wide social base, the movement ultimately broke down over the issue of free trade after Joseph Chamberlain’s conversion to the cause of imperial preference, which revived the old political divides along broadly class lines and ended the National Efficiency movement for good.
Where the National Efficiency movement did have cut-through in the end was their aspiration to ‘National Government’ — a classless, sectionless governing alliance that would pragmatically address the country's issues without any particular bias, instead acting for the national interest as a whole. This was an aspiration to a kind of ‘Unipartyism’, imagined either as a coalition or single party in the failed attempts to create a Liberal-Unionist coalition in 1902 and 1910, and later permeated David Lloyd George’s thinking in attempting to ‘fuse’ his Liberal-Conservative coalition into a broad party of the centre. It finally manifested in the creation of the first National Government in 1931, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, leading a coalition of Conservative, Liberal, and ‘National Labour’ MPs. It was not to be: the Labour Party denounced MacDonald as a class traitor, and the Liberals broke out again in 1932 over their great fetish, Free Trade. The National Government, now even more overwhelmingly Conservative-dominated, would win another huge majority in 1935, but the ‘Uniparty’ was finished.
The truly technocratic moment in British governance — if ever there was one — finally found its manifestation in the Labour Party from 1945 to the 1960s. Labour from 1945 applied technocratic means to a new construction of ‘nation’. Out were the first ‘globalist elites’ — the elites of the imperial class system. In the cultural politics of Labour in the early post-war period, a rooted working-class culture was the authentic national culture, historically trampled underfoot by a world-facing and cosmopolitan aristocracy, financiers, and imperialists. This was based on a romantic idea of working-class life, based on improvement, communalism and a kind of public-mindedness, which justified what had been discarded. The Labour Party understood itself as the political and policymaking arm of this nation newly set free.
Into this peaceable — yet revolutionary and populist — class revolution, Labour was informed by the ideas of Keynes and Beveridge to make their pledges real. With the increasing managerialisation of the economy following Stafford Cripps, technocrats were charged with managing the promises of the Keynesian economic settlement, the most important of which was full employment, with the expert ‘fine-tuning’ of demand this entailed. But it was only natural that at this time the trade-union library was supplanted by the local bingo hall, the comfort of the home television set, the fridge-freezer, and the car. If there was something once public-facing and nationally-minded in this economic order, it could not last in a period of stagflation when union demands could only be satisfied at the cost of sharpening sectional divisions between those who were unionised and those not. In this settlement, which had provided unprecedented security for workers, it eventually became impossible to sustain the notion that the country could be governed nationally, rather than sectionally.
We can debate endlessly whether these various political projects were good or bad. No doubt some readers will probably do so in the comments. But what is important is that at no stage throughout this history did ‘technocracy’, as we have steadily redefined it from the original (standard) definition, suggest an abrogation of political power. On the contrary: it went along closely with the expanding remit of the state as a necessarily political mobilisation towards particular ends. Attempts to foster a national ‘Uniparty’ and subsequent use of technocratic means in twentieth-century Britain failed because of the country’s class divides. The liberation of politics from its religious-sectarian division in the preceding century into mass political organisation meant something like it could have been grasped at. The class paradigm created the potential to govern in the interests of all, but party affiliation and structure led to situations in which alliances dissolved, such as over free trade vs protection, which could only break down sectionally, and pit class against class.
Beyond the vastly different cultural politics of Britain today, the social and class distinctions in the country are actually flatter today than ever before. The sharp regional divides in political orientation that came as a painful (but necessary) cost of ending the ransom of the state by trade unions, which naturally had a long memory in many parts of the country, are now beginning to fade. Ancestral party allegiances are weaker than ever before. The 2010s and the emergence of the ‘Deano’ phenomenon, the geographical breadth of the Cameron and (especially) Johnson coalitions indicate that such regionalist political divides, at least in England, are now in reverse. For these areas, social dysfunction, mass immigration, and failing services have been the decisive issues. How different this is from ‘the South’ is — at best — simply a question of degree and an imprecise understanding of modern Britain’s economic and social geography. Nowadays, Britons share broadly the same ambitions for themselves and their children. The Red Wall has been shattered and the Blue Wall has been broken, ushering unto us an age of a truly national politics.
It is because of this that, even in the darkest days of 2021 under Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party was still poised to dominant force of the decade had it not degenerated into straightforward farce. The idea of Britain becoming an ‘uncompetitive democracy’ — something that was glimpsed by many intelligent people in 2019 — was not at all ridiculous even with the benefit of hindsight. To be clear: I do not point out the failure of the Tories to achieve this destiny with any lamentation at all. The fact that the rotten appendage of the British body politic that was the Conservative Party is close to being fully cauterised only brings me the utmost joy. This Party may have seemed to shed any of its class or sectional loyalties, but this is only because their loyalties lay above all else with their social club for geriatrics and perverts. It is the nation that they failed that is now grasping at any opportunity to fulfil the promises it was made in 2019.
Despite the nation now being more uniform, the government which takes power in 2029 — or sooner — faces challenges just as great as those of 1945. How it fares will depend entirely on its ability to suspend old shibboleths to complete the work that we now all know needs to be done.
Reform UK and ‘Unipartyism’
Where does Reform lie in all of this? What is the cultural manifestation of Reformism? Reform-themed football shirts and camp daytime television rallies with bingo hall aesthetics are not exactly my cup of tea (though, to be fair, I might be more partial to their unabashed booziness and cultural libertinism which — if instantiated — could well lead to a neo-Hanoverian Golden Age, so I suppose there is something in there for everyone after all). But it is an honest expression of the national culture of 2026. Reform being able to communicate with the electorate in these terms by no means repudiates their technocratic potential. I do not think Farmer Lowe and his circus of TradCath Chuds can communicate with any ‘public’ outside of the audience of ‘Breakfast with Beau Dade’, American podcast hosts, and Malaysian swing voters like Ian Miles Cheong. And frankly, it is utterly laughable that they even have the audacity to claim that their ‘cultural’ (or, as they would like to put it, ‘spiritual’) offering is any more highbrow than that of Reform.
Reform UK, as it stands currently, is the one party without shibboleths. Any institution in the British state, no matter how ‘hallowed’ or ‘ancient’, can be remade — including the House of Lords, which they have floated to be a new vehicle to reintroduce practical expertise into the Cabinet. It is said that Farage recently finished reading Mr. Balfour’s Poodle: Peers vs. People (1954) by future Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins on the constitutional crisis of 1909-11. He will surely have at the back of his mind the obstinacy of the ennobled with everything to lose.
If they manage to secure the Labour defections that they so clearly want, could anyone say they have not transcended the old political dichotomies? The possibility of forging a new ‘Unipartyist’ consensus is more real than ever before. The fact Farage could barely contain his excitement about the prospect shows that these are — at least implicitly — the terms in which he is already thinking. Reform is even the party that seems to be able to cut through the mental prison of the absurd, anti-reformist notion of ‘national assemblies’ which seemed virtually impossible at any stage — even the high point of Conservative success in 2019.
All of the basics are right. The danger lies only in the temptation to redefine Reform’s mission as anything other than to serve the immediate interests of the British people as a whole: radical reform to immigration and citizenship, a growing economy, and a return to mission statement in the government; a plea to historical promises never fulfilled. These objectives are entirely within reach without sectionalising the coalition. Deregulation and lowering energy costs, cutting taxation across the board, planning reform (if pursued intelligently) and improving services by reforming delivery mechanisms are all low-hanging fruit. But doing any of this will require them to finalise the work that was begun in 2016. They certainly won’t have time to introduce political Christianity into the equation, and nor should they.
Labour and the Conservatives may have historically had a more coherent class and social base, but for Reform, maintaining this classless and structureless orientation is key. There is no abstract, perfect policy platform based on ‘sound’ values, as Kemi seems to believe she can cook up in her basement. It is exactly this ethos that Reform’s newly-appointed Head of Policy James Orr has made explicit in what he calls ‘the politics of national preference’: Reform is not conservatism, and does not care to develop abstract doctrines. All that will matter in the aftermath of the coming election is making the country work for its people. Britain needs Reform — not restoration.
This article was written by Francis Gaultier, Commissioning Editor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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