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Rethinking Britain's Energy Strategy: From Net Zero to Energy Realism

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:14:22 GMT

Reform UK has bold plans to reverse Britain's economic decline. Measures include scrapping carbon taxes, removing VAT from domestic energy bills, cutting average household energy bills by £250 within the first 100 days of the next government.

How much should Britain be prepared to pay to reduce its carbon emissions? And how certain must the underlying scientific and economic assumptions be before governments commit hundreds of billions of pounds to transforming the country's energy system?

For Lord Christopher Monckton and the growing ranks of climate sceptics and climate realists, these questions deserve far more scrutiny than they currently receive. Lord Monckton was joined by Richard Tice MP in a fringe meeting at the Reform Conference 2026 discussing where Britain has gone wrong in terms of its energy mix and energy security.

The discussion included Reform UK's plans to dismantle Net Zero policies. Lord Monckton provided many of the scientific and economic arguments behind what a future British energy strategy should look like. His case is deliberately provocative.

He questions mainstream estimates of climate sensitivity towards carbon dioxide, arguing that natural changes in cloud cover deserve greater attention in explaining recent temperature variations. He also challenges the economic logic of adding ever larger quantities of intermittent wind and solar generation, making the case that Britain's contribution to global emissions is too small to justify imposing substantial economic costs domestically.

Many of Monckton's scientific conclusions are disputed by mainstream climate science and the UN climate lobby. But his wider policy question remains important: how should Britain balance climate objectives against energy affordability, security of supply and industrial competitiveness?

It is certainly correct to say that public opinion over the last two years has swung further and further against the significant costs of the Net Zero ideology.

Start With the Scale of Britain’s Influence

Speaking at the Reform Conference Lord Monckton highlighted a question that is frequently overlooked in mainstream media representations about Net Zero. How much influence can Britain acting alone actually have on global temperatures?

The UK represents only a small proportion of global greenhouse-gas emissions. That means even extremely large reductions in British emissions would represent only a fraction of the global total unless comparable reductions occurred internationally.

This creates a basic cost-benefit question.

If Britain continues to impose substantial costs upon households and industry to reduce emissions, what measurable effect could those sacrifices have on the global climate?

The answer is that Britain's direct climatic impact would be extremely small.

Lord Monckton presented some precise temperature calculations in relation to Britain's impact on global temperatures, but suffice to say, the underlying policy problem is real.

Climate change is global.

National climate policy is implemented locally.

The effectiveness of unilateral action by Britain therefore is going to depend upon what happens elsewhere.

The ‘Climate Leadership’ Argument

Supporters of an aggressive British climate policy have an answer to this.

Britain does not need to solve climate change by itself.

Instead, early action by developed countries can help develop green technologies, reduce their costs and encourage other countries to adopt similar policies.

This is the argument for climate leadership.

But more and more people are becoming deeply sceptical about this approach.

Major emerging economies will pursue their own economic and energy interests rather than deliberately imposing higher energy costs because Britain has done so.

The crucial test, therefore, is not simply whether Britain reduces its emissions.

It is whether British policies contribute to global emissions reductions large enough to justify their huge domestic economic cost.

That is a much more demanding standard.

Challenges to Climate Attribution

Lord Monckton is well known for challenging some of the weak scientific assumptions around climate science.

His most controversial argument concerns the causes of recent warming.

Mainstream climate science attributes the dominant part of observed modern warming to human activity, particularly increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.

Lord Monckton is joined by a growing body of scientists globally in disputing that underlying assumption of man-made climate change, asserting that it is unnecessary and scientifically flawed. There are many global organisations, think-tanks, and leading scientists challenging the Net Zero agenda. Their criticisms generally focus on the economic viability, grid reliability, and the underlying scientific consensus of net-zero targets.

CLINTEL based in the Netherlands has authored the World Climate Declaration, which states "there is no climate emergency". The declaration has amassed over 1,900 signatories, including eminent scientists, geologists, and engineers. The CO2 Coalition is a US-based organisation of scientists and energy experts who advocate that increased carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial to plant life and agriculture, arguing against policies aimed at eliminating fossil fuels.

Prominent members include atmospheric physicist Dr William Happer (Princeton University) and physicist Dr Richard Lindzen (MIT). These organisations oppose Net Zero primarily through an economic and policy lens, arguing that the regulations destroy industrial competitiveness and cause energy poverty.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a UK-based think tank that challenges the economic feasibility of net zero policies. They publish reports questioning renewable energy costs and grid reliability. The Heritage Foundation and The Heartland Institute are US-based conservative think tanks that heavily lobby against international climate treaties (like the Paris Agreement) and domestic net-zero legislations, promoting fossil fuel resilience instead.

Dr John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (2022) who joined the board of the CO2 Coalition and has publicly stated that the "climate emergency" narrative is a dangerous corruption of science. Dr Steven Koonin, theoretical physicist and former Under Secretary for Science under the Obama administration argues that the data does not support the catastrophic economic disruptions required to hit a net-zero target by 2050.

Instead of man-made impacts on climate, this body of scientists presenting an alternative view point towards changes in cloud cover and the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth's surface.

The basic physical observation behind this argument is not controversial.

Clouds have an enormous influence on Earth's energy balance.

They can cool the planet by reflecting incoming sunlight back into space.

They can also warm it by trapping outgoing infrared radiation.

Changes in cloud type, altitude, distribution and extent can therefore affect global temperatures.

The disagreement concerns cause and effect.

What CERES Actually Measures

To advance this argument, Lord Monckton invokes NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System — CERES — satellite observations.

CERES measures the Earth's radiation budget, including incoming solar energy, reflected sunlight and outgoing thermal radiation.

These observations are extremely valuable for understanding clouds and climate. Observed variations in cloud cover can explain much of the warming during the satellite period.

That is a much stronger conclusion than NASA or the IPCC draws from the evidence.

Mainstream climate science generally treats changes in clouds as part of a complex climate system in which clouds can respond to warming and can then either amplify or diminish the initial temperature change.

The distinction is fundamental.

This counter argument is essentially: cloud changes may be driving a substantial proportion of the warming.

The mainstream interpretation is closer to: greenhouse gases drive warming, while clouds are among the important feedbacks that influence how much warming ultimately occurs.

Determining which processes are forcing climate change and which are responding to it cannot be established from correlation alone.

The Bigger Scientific Question: Climate Sensitivity

Lord Monckton's second scientific challenge is equally interesting. Even if increasing carbon dioxide causes warming, how much warming should we expect?

This is the question of climate sensitivity.

Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation.

The initial warming then changes other parts of the climate system.

Atmospheric water vapour changes.

Snow and ice change. Clouds change. Surface reflectivity changes.

These responses are known as feedbacks.

Some amplify the original warming. Others can reduce it.

The magnitude of those feedbacks is therefore central to estimating future temperature change.

The Feedback Critique to IPCC Climate Modelling

Lord Monckton and others have long argued that mainstream climate models overestimate the strength of climate feedbacks in their assumptions.

In his presentation at the Reform Conference, he attributes this to a mathematical error in applying feedback theory from engineering to the climate system.

The conclusion is dramatic: conventional models substantially exaggerate the amount of warming that additional greenhouse gases will produce.

This claim is not, of course, in agreement with mainstream climate science proposed by the UN.

The IPCC's climate-sensitivity estimates incorporate multiple lines of evidence including observations, palaeoclimate records, physical understanding and climate modelling.

But the debate highlights something important for policymakers. Climate sensitivity matters enormously in terms of economics, jobs, and the price consumers are being asked to pay.

If the climate is highly sensitive to additional greenhouse gases, rapid emissions reductions become easier to justify on a cost-benefit basis, notwithstanding that the Net Zero agenda itself is purely prescriptive and doesn't contain any discussion of cost-benefit.

If sensitivity is towards the lower end of plausible estimates, the economic balance between mitigation, adaptation and energy affordability changes.

Scientific uncertainty therefore does not eliminate the need for policy decisions.

It makes understanding the range of plausible outcomes more important.

From Climate Science to Electricity Policy

We can start to see that these underlying assumptions in climate science have a massive impact on the British electricity system.

The central argument, accepted by Reform, is that even if governments remain concerned about climate change, Britain's current approach to renewable electricity does not necessarily represent the most economically rational response.

The problem is intermittency.

A wind turbine can generate electricity only when wind conditions permit. Solar panels produce electricity according to sunlight.

Electricity demand, however, continues regardless of weather conditions.

Hospitals need power.

Factories need power.

Homes need power.

Data centres need power.

The electricity system therefore has to be capable of meeting demand when renewable output falls. This creates a fundamental distinction between installed capacity and dependable capacity.

Nameplate Capacity Is Not Electricity Generation

The argument being put forward by Reform, Lord Monckton and other climate realists places considerable emphasis on Britain's installed wind and solar capacity. And this needs careful interpretation.

A power station's nameplate capacity describes its maximum rated output. It does not tell us how much electricity that generator actually produces over a year.

This is particularly important for weather-dependent generation.

A 1 gigawtt wind installation does not continuously produce 1 gigawatt. Neither does a 1 gigawatt solar installation.

Consequently, comparing renewable nameplate capacity directly with average electricity demand can illustrate the scale of installed infrastructure, but it does not automatically demonstrate that Britain has more renewable electricity than it needs.

The relevant questions include annual generation, output at times of peak demand, capacity factors, geographic diversity, storage, interconnection and the availability of dispatchable generation.

One thing is certain however, the cost of renewables (wind, solar) plus the back up needed to deal with intermittency (gas, nuclear, coal) will always be more than the costs of the back up alone.

Britain Gets Around Half Its Electricity From Renewables

The scale of Britain's energy transition is nevertheless substantial. Renewable generation reached a record level in 2025 and supplied more 52.5% of UK electricity generation, up from 14.6% in 2013. Energy bills have soared during that time.

Wind provided the largest share of renewable output, while solar generation also reached record levels.

That represents an enormous change from Britain's historical dependence on coal and gas.

But the system still relies substantially on gas generation and nuclear power. That illustrates Lord Monckton's underlying reliability argument.

Building renewable capacity does not automatically eliminate the requirement for other forms of generation.

Britain must design an electricity system capable of functioning during periods of low renewable output as well as periods of abundance.

The Constraint-Payment Problem

Another issue which is a part of Reform's plan for Britain's energy grid is constraint payments.

Sometimes electricity is available from a generator but cannot be used efficiently because the transmission network lacks sufficient capacity to move it to where demand exists.

Generators may then be paid to reduce output while other generation is used elsewhere. This can appear economically perverse.

Consumers effectively support generating capacity that sometimes has to be switched off.

The underlying cause, however, is more complicated than simply having "too much renewable energy."

Britain's electricity grid was largely designed around an older geography of generation.

Large amounts of wind generation are now located far from major centres of demand. That creates network bottlenecks.

The policy choice is therefore between several alternatives:

build more transmission capacity
locate generation differently
increase storage and flexibility
change market incentives
or alter the electricity generation mix itself.

Reform favours the latter much more strongly than the current government. Britain is currently facing a massive £150 billion grid overhaul managed by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) to meet a projected 30% increase in electricity demand by the mid-2030s and a doubling of demand by 2050.

A massive expansion in AI data centres is driving a surge in computing power and localised grid demand. Estimates from NESO indicate roughly £64 billion is required for transmission projects by 2030, with an additional £89 billion beyond that (exceeding £150 billion total).

Under the current scenario, up to 4,000 miles of new power lines and major subsea cables are needed by 2041 to route renewable energy from northern generation sites to southern demand centres. Much of this is unnecessary additional electrification cost that would be loaded onto consumers.

The Case for Firm Power

This leads directly to the opportunity for a different UK energy mix. Whatever role wind and solar play, Britain needs electricity that can be delivered reliably when required.

That creates a strong case for firm power and nuclear energy is particularly significant.

Nuclear plants can generate large quantities of low-carbon electricity without depending upon weather conditions.

Their principal disadvantages are different: extremely high upfront capital costs, long construction periods, financing risk and the long-term management of radioactive waste.

A successful British nuclear programme would therefore need to become considerably better at delivering projects on time and controlling costs.

But if those problems can be addressed, nuclear offers something increasingly valuable: low-carbon electricity combined with dependable generation. It is a tragedy that previous Conservative and Labour governments have allowed Britain's expertise and scientific leadership in nuclear power to be run down.

Gas Still Has a Strategic Role

Natural gas of course also remains important. Unlike wind and solar, gas-fired power stations can increase output on-demand when the electricity system requires it. That makes gas particularly useful for balancing weather-dependent generation. The trade-off is obvious.

Gas of course produces carbon dioxide.

It can expose Britain to international commodity prices when domestic production is insufficient, although long-term domestic supply agreements could minimise this.

A different energy strategy under Reform would retain substantial gas capacity as part of the country's security architecture while pursuing greater domestic production and, over time, potentially using new technologies to reduce emissions.

The key principle is that Britain should retain enough dispatchable capacity to guarantee supply.

The Opportunity in Domestic Oil and Gas

Britain also has a broader energy-security question. The country continues to consume oil and gas.

As domestic production declines faster than consumption, imports have been increasing to fill the gap. That import replacement creates greater exposure to international suppliers and geopolitical events. Ironically it also increases the carbon dioxide effect as imported LNG gas in particular adds transportation costs.

Lord Monckton's argument aligns here with our broader Reform energy position: if Britain is going to consume hydrocarbons anyway, there is an economic and strategic case for producing more of them domestically. This does not mean domestic oil and gas would necessarily be cheap. Prices remain influenced by international markets.

So domestic oil and gas production can contribute to security of supply, employment, investment and tax revenues. A future government can take steps to take costs and the regulatory burden out of the system, so as to favour domestic production for the long term.

British North Sea gas is cheaper to use than imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), but drilling new fields has become more expensive than importing, due to the way it has been regulated and taxed.

Using current North Sea gas reserves is cheaper than buying global LNG, potentially saving billions on imports. But, as of 2026, heavy windfall taxes make extracting new UK gas roughly 50% more expensive than shipping US LNG. Gas commodity prices are set globally, so extracting more North Sea gas will only lower household energy bills if the future government makes the necessary regulatory corrections.

Nuclear, Gas and Renewables Rather Than a Single-Technology Strategy

The most constructive implication of this critique is therefore not necessarily that Britain should eliminate renewable energy. It is that Britain should think much more carefully about the optimal mixture of technologies.

An energy system built almost entirely around any single technology carries risks.Heavy dependence on imported gas exposes consumers to international price shocks. Heavy dependence on intermittent renewables creates balancing, storage and network requirements. Heavy dependence on nuclear creates construction and financing risks. A diversified system can spread those risks.

That could mean a future British electricity mix under a Reform government combining:

nuclear for dependable low-carbon baseload generation
gas for flexible and dispatchable generation
domestic oil and gas for broader energy security and lower costs with long-term domestic supply agreements
wind and solar where they can produce electricity economically
storage where commercially viable
and interconnectors where they strengthen rather than weaken security.

The argument then moves away from ideological battles between "green" and "fossil" energy. The question becomes:

Which combination provides Britain with the cheapest reliable electricity system?

Technology Should Compete on System Cost

All of this suggests a different principle for energy policy under a Reform government.

Instead of government deciding in advance which technology should dominate, based on a single dominant ideology, competing technologies could be assessed according to their contribution to the overall system.

That means accounting not simply for the price of generating a megawatt-hour but for reliability, network costs, balancing requirements, storage, lifespan and security of supply.

A technology that appears cheap at the generator level may impose additional system costs elsewhere. Another with high construction costs may provide decades of dependable output. A rational comparison therefore needs to examine whole-system costs.

This is one area where Lord Monckton's argument connects directly with Reform's critique of Net Zero.

Adaptation Versus Mitigation

There is also a wider climate-policy question. Governments can respond to climate risk in two broad ways. They can attempt to reduce future climate change by cutting emissions.

Or they can increase society's resilience to whatever climate change occurs. In practice, countries can do both.

For example flood defences can be improved. Water infrastructure can be expanded. Buildings can be designed for temperature extremes. Agricultural systems can adapt. Emergency planning can improve. All of these things can happen under a Reform government, whilst at the same time moving to more mixed base of electricity generation.

The scepticism of Lord Monckton and others about the scale of future warming leads naturally towards placing greater emphasis on adaptation rather than costly unilateral mitigation.

Mainstream climate assessments argue that mitigation remains necessary because adaptation becomes progressively more difficult as warming increases.

The economically relevant question is therefore not simply mitigation or adaptation. It is, how much should be spent on each?

Climate Policy Should Be Subject to Cost-Benefit Analysis

Climate policy should not be exempt from ordinary economic analysis, as it has been under Conservative and Laabour governments.

Every policy has costs.

Every policy has benefits.

Every pound spent on one objective cannot simultaneously be spent on another.

If a climate programme costs billions of pounds, policymakers should be able to explain what measurable benefit those billions are expected to purchase.

How much will emissions fall?

How much difference will that make globally?

What will happen to energy prices?

What happens to industrial competitiveness?

Could the same resources achieve more through adaptation, research or alternative energy technologies?

These are not arguments for ignoring climate risk.

They are arguments for evaluating climate policy in the same rigorous way governments should evaluate every other major intervention.

A New British Energy Settlement

Britain now has an opportunity to reconsider what it wants from its energy system. The objectives should not be mysterious or based on climate hysteria.

Electricity should be affordable. Supply should be dependable. The system should be resilient to international shocks.

Industry should be internationally competitive. Environmental impacts should be taken seriously. And government should avoid locking consumers into unnecessarily expensive technologies.

The real disagreement is about how those objectives should be balanced.

At Reform we say that policymakers have given far too much weight to modelled climate risks and insufficient weight to the immediate economic consequences of Net Zero.

Mainstream climate scientists would strongly dispute his assessment of the physical science.

But Britain still has to answer the economic and engineering questions his critique raises.

From Net Zero to Energy Realism

The next phase of Britain's energy debate may therefore be less about whether climate change exists and more about what constitutes a proportionate response.

How certain are estimates of future warming?

How should uncertainty affect public policy?

How much should Britain spend reducing a relatively small share of global emissions?

How much intermittent generation can the grid economically accommodate?

What is the correct balance between renewables, nuclear and gas?

How much domestic energy should Britain produce?

And should policy concentrate more heavily on resilience and adaptation?

These are legitimate questions even when some of the answers from Reform differ from what has hithehrto been mainstream climate science.

Britain Needs an Energy Strategy, Not an Energy Religion

Energy policy is ultimately an exercise in engineering and economics as much as politics.

Electricity systems have to function every second of every day.

Factories cannot operate on political aspirations.

Households cannot heat themselves with emissions targets. And an advanced economy cannot remain internationally competitive without reliable and reasonably priced energy.

At the same time, climate risk cannot simply be wished away because responding to it is expensive.

The challenge for the next Reform government is therefore to distinguish between evidence, uncertainty and political assumption, and then build an energy system capable of surviving whichever forecasts ultimately prove correct.

For the climate realists like Lord Monckton, that means challenging the scientific assumptions underpinning Net Zero and dramatically reducing the economic weight placed upon decarbonisation.

For mainstream climate scientists, they say the evidence points in the opposite direction: human greenhouse-gas emissions are the dominant cause of recent warming, making emissions reduction an important component of managing future risk.

But those opposing assessments still leave Britain with a practical decision.

What combination of nuclear, gas, domestic production, renewables, storage and international connections can provide the country with the most affordable, secure and resilient supply of energy?

That is ultimately going to be a more productive starting point for Britain's next great energy debate, based on the economic reality - jobs, costs and industry - and not just on one particular ideology.

Powering Britain: Reform's Plans for Energy Cost Cutting Explained

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:27:59 GMT

Britain's energy supply currently has the worst of all possible worlds: record high costs, exposure to global conflict and global prices, and a massive burden of green mandates, levies, transfer pricing, and Carbon Price Support (CPS) on gas generators.

Britain cannot become a prosperous industrial economy again without abundant, reliable and affordable energy.

That is the starting point for Reform's argument for cutting he UK's existing Net Zero policy framework. Reform wants to join nations like the USA, Australia, Netherlands and others, who are scrapping the long-term 2050 Net Zero targets, to cut costs and to reprioritise domestic jobs and domestic energy production.

Speaking during a Reform Conference 2023 discussion about electricity prices and energy policy, Richard Tice MP set out the case for the Reform approach: reducing renewable subsidies, cutting carbon-related charges, reconsidering expensive grid expansion, restoring domestic oil and gas production and rebuilding dependable electricity generation.

In the Reform argument, the objective of Government should be straightforward: to bring down our record-breaking high electricity prices, restore British industrial competitiveness and strengthen the country's energy security. For Reform UK, this represents considerably more than changing an environmental target. It means restructuring Britain's entire energy strategy.

Britain’s Energy Problem Is an Economic Problem

Energy policy is often discussed primarily in environmental terms. At Reform we say this should be reframed and understood as economic policy.

Every factory needs energy. Every data centre needs electricity. Every shop, office, warehouse and transport network depends upon reliable power.

Households experience energy policy directly through their bills.

Consequently, when electricity becomes structurally expensive, the effects spread throughout the economy.

Manufacturers become less competitive. Investment becomes less attractive. Businesses pass the costs onto consumers.

Then as a resullt household disposable incomes fall.

And energy-intensive industries face increasingly difficult decisions about whether production remains commercially viable in Britain. It becomes a doom spiral of rising energy costs and smaller industrial capacity.

For Reform, reducing energy costs should therefore be regarded as a central component of any future growth strategy. Many countries have begun a pragmatic retreat from the Net Zero timelines, even if they have not abandoned Net Zero altogether, as the US has done.

Faced with infrastructure bottlenecks (like grid congestion) and public anger over high energy prices, governments around the world are choosing to slow down implementation, effectively pushing the heaviest decarbonisation burdens past 2030 and beyond.

Here in Britain, the compounding crisis of uncompetitive industrial electricity prices (among the highest in the developed world), coupled with geopolitical shocks from the Iran conflict disrupting global gas markets, has forced numerous energy-intensive industries UK to shut down, scale back, or relocate.

The sectors hit hardest by closures and financial collapse include Britain's oil refineries and petrochemicals. Thousands of jobs are being lost due to Net Zero.

The Grangemouth Refinery, one of Scotland’s most critical pieces of industrial infrastructure shuttered its oil refining capabilities. The Lindsey Oil Refinery followed shortly after, leaving Britain with only four operational refineries and heavily expanding our import dependency for diesel and aviation jet fuel.

On Teesside the American-owned chemical giant Huntsman has warned of imminent shutdowns at remaining British facilities due to soaring spot energy prices, noting it is cheaper to import products from China or the US. At Scunthorpe British Steel has been plagued by massive daily operating deficits and the site required direct government intervention. Cross-party MP committees have flagged that Britain lacks a viable profitability plan for sovereign steelmaking.

British fertilisers and other industries such as paper, glass and ceramic making have also seen plant closures. Output in these heavy sectors has steadily shrunk, with many operations scaling back factories or choosing to import bulk products from overseas rather than manufacturing them domestically.

Rather than deal with the root cause, the Labour Government's response has been to launch the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme (BICS) and the British Industry Supercharger. These offer discounts on electricity network charges to thousands of eligible manufacturing firms. However, industrial bodies point out that these measures are no more than short-term sticking plasters rather than structural fixes to the country's grid issues.

Britain’s Industrial Electricity Prices

The international cpst comparison is particularly concerning for British industry.

Britain's industrial electricity prices have been extremely high compared with those faced by businesses in many competing economies.

There are several reasons for this.

Wholesale gas prices (and the associated levies and green taxes) matter. Network costs matter. Taxation matters. Environmental levies and renewable-support schemes matter.

Balancing an increasingly complicated electricity system also carries costs.

The debate is therefore not simply about the price at which a wind farm or gas plant generates an individual unit of electricity.

The economically important figure is the total cost of delivering reliable electricity to the consumer.

That distinction sits at the heart of our Reform argument.

The Hidden Cost of the Electricity System

Renewable electricity is frequently discussed in terms of the generation cost of wind or solar power. At the Reform Conference, in his speech, Richard Tice demonstrated that this does not capture the full cost of the system.

Wind and solar generation vary with weather conditions. Electricity supply and demand, however, must remain balanced continuously.

That means an electricity system with large amounts of intermittent generation also requires networks, balancing mechanisms, storage, interconnection or dispatchable generation capable of responding when required.

There are then additional costs associated with expanding the transmission network to connect new generating capacity.

Our Reform argument is therefore that energy policy should be evaluated on a whole-system basis. The recent blackouts in Spain showed the risks of relying on an energy system which is inherently intermittent and reliant on the behaviour of the weather.

The relevant question is not simply: how cheaply can this wind farm generate electricity?

It is: how much does the complete electricity system cost while maintaining reliable supply?

This is not a complex question to grasp. When intermittent sources of energy (wind, solar) have to be backed up with a fail-safe of continuous supply from other sectors (gas,nuclear, coal), the cost of green energy is always going to be higher than the cost of the back up alone.

Reform Will Reverse the Direction of Travel

Our Reform proposals are more radical than simply slowing Britain's Net Zero timetable. A future Reform government will actively unwind substantial parts of the existing policy architecture.

That will involve changes to legislation. Some taxes and levies will be abolished.Subsidies could be removed. Existing support schemes could be reviewed. Future contracts could be cancelled. Some existing agreements could potentially be renegotiated.

Government spending programmes associated with decarbonisation could be reduced or eliminated.

In other words, Reform's proposal is not simply: stop adding new Net Zero policies.

It is: to start dismantling parts of the system already created, and make it start working in the interests of the consumer again.

A £30 Billion Cost-Reduction Ambition

The Reform plan is to remove approximately £30 billion annually from projected electricity-system costs by around the end of the decade.

On an electricity system delivering roughly 300 terawatt-hours annually, the argument presented is that £30 billion represents approximately 10 pence per kilowatt-hour.

Whether the full cost reduction could actually be achieved would depend on wholesale prices, contracts, network investment, government finances and how the reforms were implemented.

Nevertheless, the scale of the ambition is becoming clearer as we get closer to the next election.

Reform is not contemplating marginal reductions in energy costs.

We are discussing a fundamental restructuring designed to make British electricity substantially cheaper.

Reforming the Renewables Obligation

One target is the Renewables Obligation. Introduced to encourage investment in renewable electricity, the scheme requires suppliers to support qualifying renewable generation.

It has been closed to most new generation since 2017, but consumers continue to support existing projects.

Richard Tice MP and others have been urging that the remaining costs should be reduced much more rapidly.

The wider principle is that subsidies introduced to establish technologies should not necessarily continue indefinitely once industries have matured.

Supporters of the existing arrangements would counter that investors committed capital on the basis of long-term policy frameworks and that retrospective intervention could increase perceptions of political risk.

That creates an important trade-off.

Reducing legacy costs at the end of the day is going to lower energy bills.

But governments also need to consider the effect that changing established arrangements could have on confidence in future UK infrastructure investment.

Contracts for Difference Would Face Major Reform

The Contracts for Difference system would also be targeted.

CfDs provide qualifying low-carbon generators with a contractual strike price for their electricity.

When the relevant market price is below the strike price, support is paid to the generator so that they are effectively guaranteed a supply price, underwritten by bill payers and by British taxpayers.

When it is above the strike price, generators can pay money back.

Richard Tice MP argues that a Reform government should cancel certain future CfD commitments and examine whether some existing contracts could be renegotiated.

A Reform government will contemplate legislation if voluntary renegotiation proves impossible.

That would represent a major intervention in established contractual arrangements and might raise some legal and investment questions.

The Reform argument is that government cannot regard contracts as politically untouchable if their cumulative effect imposes excessive costs on households and businesses.

The counterargument is that governments need to consider carefully what retrospective intervention would do to the cost of financing future British infrastructure.

Carbon Pricing Would Be Targeted

Carbon pricing is another major component of the proposed reforms.

Britain currently uses the UK Emissions Trading Scheme to place a price on emissions from covered sectors.

Reform argues that carbon costs ultimately feed into electricity prices, particularly where gas-fired generation is setting the marginal wholesale price.

Reform therefore wants to reduce or abolish significant carbon-related charges.

This illustrates the fundamental difference between the two approaches to energy policy.

Supporters of carbon pricing regard it as a mechanism for incorporating the environmental cost of emissions into economic decisions and encouraging investment in lower-carbon alternatives.

Reform regards the resulting increase in energy costs as damaging to competitiveness and living standards.

The disagreement is therefore not merely about implementation.

It concerns what energy policy should prioritise. At its heart, the Reform policy makes the case that Britain has already made substantial strides in carbon reduction. The British consumer should no longer have to carry on carrying the huge costs of what has become an ideologically-driven energy sector, created by Conservative and Labour governments of the past.

The Grid Expansion Question

Another substantial cost in the current energy mix is Britain's electricity network.

Moving large quantities of electricity from geographically dispersed wind and solar installations requires considerable transmission infrastructure.

National Grid and other network operators are investing heavily in upgrading the system. But this expansion is itself partly a consequence of the chosen generation strategy.

A different generation mix could therefore require a different network.

Reform would consequently review planned grid investment rather than accepting every proposed expansion as inevitable.

This is an important point because energy infrastructure has very long investment horizons.

Decisions taken today can affect consumer bills for decades.

But reducing investment also involves risks.

Britain needs sufficient network capacity regardless of the generation mix, particularly as electricity demand potentially increases through data centres, industry and new technologies.

The challenge is determining which investment is essential and which exists primarily to support a particular Net Zero pathway.

The Intermittency Problem

With the Reform vision for Britain's future energy mix, we also have to look closely at intermittency, as touched on previously.

Wind and solar can produce large quantities of electricity when conditions are favourable. But output varies.

When renewable generation falls while demand remains high, another source of electricity must compensate.

That can involve gas generation, storage, interconnection or other dispatchable capacity.

Conversely, when renewable generation is abundant but the network cannot use or transport all of it, generators can sometimes be paid to reduce output.

These balancing and constraint costs form part of the wider electricity-system debate.

Ar Reform we make the case that Britain has concentrated too heavily on building intermittent generating capacity without sufficiently accounting for the cost of making the overall system dependable. Again, the total cost of intermittent energy sources plus back up sources, will always cost more than the cost of the back up alone.

Britain Needs Reliable Power

This leads to another central principle of our Reform plan: Britain needs more firm power.

Firm power means electricity generation that can be made available reliably when required rather than depending principally on weather conditions.

That could include gas generation and nuclear power, alongside other technologies capable of providing dependable capacity.

Britain should rebuild this part of its electricity system. This does not necessarily require eliminating every wind turbine or solar installation.

It means constructing an energy system in which security of supply is not dependent upon favourable weather.

For Reform, reliability should be designed into the system rather than treated as a secondary problem to be solved after renewable capacity has been installed.

British consumers for too long have suffered the consequences of governments not building enough resilience into the energy mix, to the extent that Britain was forced to import over 14 % of our electricity use in 2024, despite being surrounded by rich sources of our own oil and gas, both onshore and offshore. Overall in 2024 Britain had to import 43% of its energy, mostly foreign oil and gas.

It is an industrial policy based on high costs and foreign dependency that is doomed to fail.

Restarting Britain’s Oil and Gas Industry

The Reform strategy will also include renewed development of Britain's domestic oil and gas resources.

Reform argues that continuing to use fossil fuels, for example from Norway, Qatar or US shale gas, while deliberately restricting domestic production will simply increase dependence upon imports. The recent data shows this to be correct.

From an energy-security perspective, we want Britain to produce more of the energy it continues to consume.

The argument is that domestic production can support employment, tax revenues and security of supply while reducing reliance on foreign producers.

Opponents argue that expanding oil and gas production risks locking in fossil-fuel infrastructure and making legally binding climate objectives harder to achieve.

There is also an important economic limitation: oil and gas operate in international markets, so increasing domestic production does not automatically insulate British consumers from global prices. But when oil and gas or nuclear producers are signed up to fixed price domestic supply agreements, most certainly those reduced costs will start to flow.

The energy-security argument is therefore stronger than a claim that domestic production alone guarantees cheap energy.

Carbon Capture and Hydrogen Would Face Scrutiny

So naturally at Reform we are sceptical about technologies being promoted as part of the Net Zero transition. Governments have been very opaque in the way they have loaded substantial taxes and contract costs onto oil and gas consumers, so as to continue the Net Zero narrative.

Carbon capture and storage would face substantial reductions in government support under the approach being outlined by Reform.

Green hydrogen programmes would also be reconsidered. Our objection at Reform is based on efficiency and cost.

Converting energy into hydrogen and subsequently using that hydrogen involves energy losses.

Capturing, transporting and permanently storing carbon dioxide also requires additional infrastructure and energy.

Supporters argue that these technologies may nevertheless be important in sectors that are difficult to decarbonise directly, including parts of heavy industry.

A Reform government would apply a much tougher economic test: d oes the technology really produce enough economic and strategic value to justify taxpayer support?

Heat Pumps and Home-Decarbonisation Subsidies

Household energy policy will also change under the Reform government.

The Reform strategy proposes ending or reducing programmes that subsidise heat pumps and other home-decarbonisation measures based on, at best, flimsy and unproven scientific principles.

The argument is that government should not use taxation or energy bills to push households towards particular technologies.

The alternative view is that upfront subsidies can accelerate adoption, build supply chains and eventually reduce costs.

The Climate Change Committee responsible for setting Britain's carbon budgets, for example, argues that electrification can reduce household energy costs under the right conditions, although it also acknowledges that Britain's unusually high electricity-to-gas price ratio remains a significant problem.

Interestingly, this creates an area of partial agreement between otherwise opposing positions.

Both Reform's critics of Net Zero and the Climate Change Committee increasingly recognise that British electricity needs to become cheaper.

They disagree profoundly of course about how that should be achieved.

Moving Social Costs Away From Energy Bills

Not every energy proposal coming Reform is going to involve eliminating programmes.

Some involve changing how they are funded.

The Warm Home Discount, for example, provides support for eligible lower-income households but is financed through the energy system.

Richard Tice MP in his presentation suggested that this kind of social support should instead be financed through general taxation and the benefits system.

There is a straightforward economic argument behind this.

If government wants to redistribute income, it can do so transparently through taxation and spending rather than increasing the price of electricity.

The Climate Change Committee has similarly argued for removing policy costs from electricity bills, although as part of an ideology intended to encourage electrification rather than dismantle Net Zero, and without any consumer benefit.

Again, different political philosophies can sometimes identify the same structural problem while proposing very different long-term solutions.

What is clear though,is that there is no public interest in hiding energy costs covertly within the already-ballooning benefits system.

What Happens to the Climate Change Committee?

Richard Tice MP also proposes institutional change.

The Climate Change Committee would be abolished under the Reform energy strategy. Other energy institutions and government structures would be substantially reorganised.

The rationale is consistent with Reform's wider programme concerning quangos and arm's-length bodies.

If government changes its fundamental energy objectives, institutions established to advance the previous framework would inevitably face review.

Supporters of the Climate Change Committee argue that independent expert scrutiny helps governments understand the long-term consequences of energy and climate decisions.

Reform's position raises the opposite democratic question: if elected governments decide to pursue a fundamentally different energy strategy, how much influence should unelected statutory bodies exercise over that choice?

One thing that nobody can deny: the Climate Change Commitee has presided over massive increased costs of energy being loaded on Britain's industrial and household consumers.

How Can the Plan Be Revenue Neutral?

Reducing levies and carbon-related revenues will create new challenges for the Treasury.

Subsidies and taxes removed from electricity bills do not automatically disappear from the public finances.

The Reform plan therefore attempts to identify offsetting savings, to make the changes fiscally neutral to the public purse.

Richard Tice MP points towards reductions in spending on carbon capture and storage, heat-decarbonisation programmes, green hydrogen, international climate finance, EV incentives and other Net Zero programmes.

The argument is that the overall package could be designed to be broadly revenue neutral for the Treasury while producing substantially lower electricity-system costs.

That claim would require detailed independent costing once a complete policy package exists.

But the objective is important.

Reform wants to argue that cheaper electricity need not simply mean transferring tens of billions of pounds of costs from consumers to taxpayers.

It wants to remove the underlying expenditure as well.

The Investment-Risk Question

There is, however, one major issue any government pursuing such a programme would have to confront. Britain needs enormous amounts of private investment in energy.

Nuclear power stations, gas plants, electricity networks and other infrastructure all require capital. Investors care about expected returns. But they also care about whether governments honour established rules and contracts.

A policy of retrospectively changing support arrangements could therefore lower some existing costs while potentially increasing the risk premium demanded by investors financing future projects.

That does not mean contracts or policies can never change. Governments change regulatory frameworks constantly.

But a serious programme will need to demonstrate how Britain could achieve both lower energy costs and a credible long-term investment environment. It is going to involve accelerating Britain's much-delayed Small Nuclear Reactor (SMR) programme, accelerating the issue of new oil and gas licences, and creating the pricing and investment landscape for this to happen.

The new types of clean coal technology could also be a part of the mix. Britain, for now, continues to consume coal for steel making and other heavy industries.

Energy Security Means Diversity

The wider energy-security question should also extend beyond the argument between fossil fuels and renewables. A resilient energy system should avoid excessive dependence on any single technology, fuel or foreign supplier.

Domestic oil and gas can contribute to that resilience. So can nuclear.

Renewables can reduce fuel-import requirements because wind and sunlight do not have to be purchased from international commodity markets.

Storage and interconnectors can provide flexibility.

The strategic question for the next Government is therefore how those technologies should be combined, and at what total cost.

Reform's distinctive argument is that affordability and dependable generation have been given insufficient weight within that calculation over many years.

From Net Zero to an Energy-Abundance Strategy

Perhaps the clearest way to understand the Reform argument is that we want Britain to replace a decarbonisation-first strategy with an energy-abundance strategy.

The first question would no longer be: how rapidly can Britain reduce the carbon intensity of the energy system?

It would become: how can Britain produce abundant, reliable electricity at internationally competitive prices?

Environmental consequences would still exist and would still require policy responses.

But they would no longer determine the architecture of the entire energy system. For Reform UK, that represents the fundamental change.

Cheap Energy as Industrial Policy

The implications for this strategy extend far beyond household bills. Artificial intelligence requires enormous amounts of electricity to be consumed in data processing centres. Advanced manufacturing requires reliable power. As mentioned previously, steel, chemicals and other energy-intensive industries depend heavily on energy prices. This is going to continue for many years into the future.

Future investment decisions will increasingly compare jurisdictions partly according to the availability and cost of electricity.

Cheap energy can therefore function as industrial policy.

Instead of government attempting to identify every future industry and subsidise individual companies, it can create an economic environment in which a wide range of businesses find it profitable to invest.

The clear Reform argument is that abundant energy provides an economy-wide competitive advantage.

If Britain can substantially reduce electricity prices, the benefits could spread far beyond the energy sector itself.

The Choice Facing the Next Government

Britain's energy debate is consequently becoming much larger than the question of whether Net Zero can, or should be achieved in 2050. It is becoming a debate about Britain's economic model.

How much should consumers pay to support decarbonisation? How much renewable capacity should the country build? How should intermittent generation be backed up? How much should Britain invest in electricity networks? What role should nuclear power play? Should domestic oil and gas production expand? Which costs belong on electricity bills and which belong in general taxation?

And how much economic cost should governments accept in pursuit of emissions targets?

Reform UK is providing one increasingly clear answer.

Britain must reverse substantial parts of the existing Net Zero framework, reduce subsidies and carbon costs, expand dependable domestic energy production and make lower electricity prices a central economic objective.

Critics argue that such an approach could undermine emissions reductions, weaken some areas of investment confidence and sacrifice the (ideological) benefits of moving away from volatile fossil-fuel markets.

That is the choice the emerging energy debate will have to confront.

Britain Needs an Energy Policy That Works

Whatever happens to Net Zero, one principle is difficult to dispute.

Britain needs an energy system capable of supporting a modern industrial economy.

It must keep the lights on.

It must remain resilient during international crises.

It must provide power for new industries and technologies.

And its costs cannot become so high that British businesses are placed at a permanent disadvantage against international competitors.

For Reform, that requires dismantling much of the policy architecture constructed around Net Zero and replacing it with a strategy centred on affordability, reliability and national energy security.

The scale of the proposed reforms would make this one of the most consequential changes undertaken by any future Reform government. Because energy policy ultimately reaches into almost everything else.

Cheap and reliable power means lower costs for households.

It means a more competitive environment for industry.

It means greater resilience during geopolitical shocks.

And in Reform UK's argument, it provides one of the foundations on which Britain could begin growing again.

The fundamental question is therefore becoming: should Britain's energy system continue to be designed primarily around achieving the notion of Net Zero? Or should affordability and energy security once again become its overriding priorities?

Who Should Make the Law? Reforming DEI and Britain's Politicised Judiciary

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:28:48 GMT

Reform has important plans to restore power to Parliament and to Britain's long-standing constitutional model.

Who should ultimately decide the rules under which Britain is governed?

Parliament?

Domestic judges?

International courts?

Or an increasingly complex interaction between all three?

For us at Reform, this question lies at the centre of our plans for constitutional and judicial reform.

Speaking about the judiciary, legal training and the growing influence of international law at the Reform Conference 2026, Danny Kruger MP argued that Britain has gradually blurred the traditional distinction between judges interpreting law and politicians making policy.

We need to look at this deeply as it goes to the heart of the coming national recovery, even though it receives very little attention in mainstream media. Part of the problem has been weak legislation which has left a massive grey area for judges to interpret the law in any way they wish. Another part of the problem is that Britain has still not left behind its attachment to European laws and EU Directives.

The concern is not that Britain should abandon an independent judiciary.

On the contrary, judicial independence is fundamental to the rule of law.

The Reform argument is that judges should operate within clearer constitutional boundaries, Parliament should take greater responsibility for politically contentious decisions, and international legal frameworks should not be allowed to override what we at Reform regard as the democratic authority of elected governments.

This is ultimately a debate about where legal authority ends and democratic authority begins. Over the last 20 years governments have failed to deal with these important constituional questions.

The Traditional Constitutional Division

The British constitutional model rests on a relatively simple principle.

Parliament makes the law.

The courts interpret and apply it.

Government acts within it.

That division has never been entirely straightforward.

Judges inevitably make difficult interpretative decisions.

Parliament sometimes deliberately passes broadly-worded legislation and leaves the courts to determine how it applies in individual cases.

And governments themselves can be challenged when they act outside the powers Parliament has given them.

Nevertheless, the basic principle remains important, and it is in need of a renaissance.

Parliament is the supreme legislative authority in the UK constitution.

The courts cannot normally invalidate an Act of Parliament simply because judges disagree with the policy it contains.

At Reform we say this constitutional distinction has become less clear over recent decades.

When Does Legal Interpretation Become Policymaking?

The difficult question is where interpretation by judges should stop.

Courts frequently confront legislation whose wording does not provide a simple answer to a new problem.

Judges must consider statutory language, previous judgments, established legal principles and, where relevant, international obligations.

That is an unavoidable part of adjudication.

Our concern at Reform is that judicial interpretation has been moving beyond resolving individual disputes and it has begun shaping policy in areas that should, in our view, be determined more directly by elected politicians. Judges have been granted freedom to make what the public sees as politicised judgements, on the grounds of interpretation and in deference to internatioal laws and treaties.

Immigration provides one of the most politically contentious examples.

Questions involving deportation, asylum and family life can engage domestic legislation as well as rights protected under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Courts must then interpret how those obligations apply to individual cases.

Supporters of the present system argue that this is precisely what independent courts are supposed to do: ensure that governments exercise power lawfully and that individuals can enforce their rights.

But at Reform UK we take a different view of where the balance should lie.

Parliament should regain greater control over politically-significant decisions, particularly in immigration and border policy. It is becoming clearer and clearer, this is the only way Britain can take back control of immigration and overcome the mountain of case law that is preventing deportations and border control.

The Rise of International Law in Domestic Politics

The second part of the Reform argument concerns international law.

Britain increasingly operates within a network of international treaties, conventions and courts.

Some concern trade.

Others concern security.

Some establish human-rights commitments.

These agreements can create legal obligations that influence domestic policy.

The European Convention on Human Rights is perhaps the most politically prominent example.

The UK remains a party to the ECHR, and Convention rights are incorporated into domestic law principally through the Human Rights Act 1998.

At Reform we are proposing to change that fundamentally. Our current policy is to withdraw the UK from the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act.

For Reform, this is not merely an immigration policy.

It is a constitutional policy.

We argue that decisions affecting Britain’s borders and other major areas of public policy should ultimately be determined by Parliament rather than constrained by an international court. Every other legal avenue for getting back to border control has been tried and failed by previous governments.

What the European Court of Human Rights Actually Does

It is important to distinguish several institutions that are frequently confused in political debate.

The European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution.

It interprets the European Convention on Human Rights, a separate treaty system administered through the Council of Europe.

Britain remained within that system after Brexit.

Domestic British courts also apply Convention rights through the Human Rights Act.

This means debates about the ECHR involve two related but distinct questions:

What role should international human-rights obligations play in British law?

And: h ow should British judges interpret those obligations domestically?

Our argument at Reform is that the present framework gives too much influence to broadly framed rights interpreted through evolving international case law. Successive governments for 20 years have been elected with a mandate to reduce immigration, but they have all failed in this policy area, because of Britain's inability to govern itself freely.

Supporters of the ECHR framework respond that human rights are deliberately protected from ordinary political majorities because their purpose is to constrain the state when fundamental liberties are at risk.

That is the constitutional disagreement at the heart of the debate. But Reform is not planning to abandon Britain's commitment to fundamental human rights, but rather to enshrine them in a new British Bill of RIghts.

Judicial Independence Is Not the Same as Judicial Supremacy

Our Reform position also requires an important distinction.

An independent judiciary is not the same thing as a judiciary with unlimited constitutional authority.

Judicial independence means judges should be able to decide individual cases without political intimidation or interference.

A Home Secretary should not be able to telephone a judge and dictate the outcome of a criminal prosecution.

A Prime Minister should not decide whether a particular defendant is guilty.

Those principles are fundamental to the rule of law.

But independence does not answer the separate question of what laws judges are being asked to interpret.

That remains a matter for Parliament.

Reform is making the case that politicians have sometimes avoided difficult political decisions by transferring contentious questions to courts, regulators or international institutions. We have heard it time and time again from failed Conservative and Labour ministers.

If Parliament dislikes the consequences, in our argument, Parliament should take responsibility and change the law.

Reform UK’s Proposed Constitutional Reset

Reform UK has increasingly made this distinction explicit. We say that Parliament should be in a position to more clearly make the law, and judges should interpret it.

It has also indicated that judicial appointments could be reconsidered as part of a broader constitutional programme if the courts were seen as frustrating legislation enacted by a Reform government.

That raises significant constitutional questions.

Judicial appointments in England and Wales are deliberately structured to reduce direct political control.

The rationale is straightforward.

If judges owe their careers directly to ministers or policymakers, as in the US for example, public confidence in their impartiality could be weakened.

Any proposal to change that system would therefore need to balance two objectives: democratic accountability and judicial independence.

Our challenge at Reform will be to demonstrate that reforms designed to make the judiciary more constitutionally-restrained will not simply make it more politically dependent.

Is the Judiciary Politicised?

At Reform we argue that the legal profession and judiciary increasingly operate within a particular cultural and intellectual environment. It has been a creeping progress built up over many years.

We can especially point to equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives within legal education and professional institutions.

There is evidence that EDI is formally embedded in parts of the legal profession.

Barrister training includes qualifying sessions covering equality, diversity and inclusion, while chambers are subject to equality rules concerning recruitment, workplace policies and diversity monitoring.

The judiciary has also established a Judicial and Legal Diversity Board and a Judicial Diversity and Inclusion Strategy for 2026–2030.

It is a process of judicial “politicisation”, even though the supporters of this movement seem determined to deny it, even when shown the training manuals, the policies. And the results speak for themselves in terms of court judgements and interpretations that are constantly out of step with public opinion.

Supporters argue that such initiatives are intended to widen access to the profession and ensure fair treatment.

But we come back to the observation that institutional expectations around DEI have been introducing contested ideological 'woke' assumptions into bodies that should strive for political neutrality.

The important policy question is therefore not whether equality before the law matters.

It plainly does.

The challenge is whether professional equality initiatives can be designed in a way that commands confidence across different political and philosophical traditions.

The ‘DEI Oath’ for Judges

The contention is that someone must take a specific DEI oath before becoming a British judge. The documented system for becoming a judge is in fact more nuanced. But at Reform, again, we say the results speak for themselves, in terms of the many high-profile, deeply unpopular court judgements.

There are equality-and-diversity obligations within the regulated legal profession.

There are EDI-related elements in barrister training.

There are judicial diversity programmes. And professional legal bodies actively promote equality of opportunity. They actively promote discussion around issues such as critical race theory, and re-writing Britain's constitutional heritage.

And obviously at Reform we accept, that is not exactly the same as requiring judges to swear allegiance to a particular political doctrine.

But it is a serious constitutional argument, the distinction matters. Judges should not be trained or coached in any way, in any type of political doctrine,

Training the Next Generation of Judges

At Reform we look at this area in terms of a broader and more interesting question about legal education.

Judges do not arrive on the bench without intellectual formation.

They spend years studying law, practising within professional institutions and absorbing the legal culture around them.

That culture inevitably influences how lawyers think about questions such as rights, statutory interpretation and the relationship between courts and Parliament.

We argue that legal training should place greater emphasis on the traditional constitutional role of the judiciary: interpreting legislation, respecting parliamentary intent, following precedent, and recognising the limits of judicial policymaking.

Others would respond that modern judges must also understand international law, equality law and developing human-rights jurisprudence because Parliament itself has made those areas relevant to domestic law.

Again, much depends on what laws Parliament chooses to maintain.

Why European Law Still Appears in Legal Education

There are also important questions as to why lawyers continue to study European law after Brexit. It is true that that Brexit did not make European law irrelevant.

The UK remains economically and legally interconnected with Europe.

EU law may still be relevant to retained or assimilated law, cross-border commerce and disputes involving European institutions.

The ECHR remains a separate source of law and is not part of the EU system at all.

For lawyers practising in areas involving international trade, regulation, human rights or cross-border disputes, understanding European legal systems can therefore remain professionally relevant.

The stronger Reform argument is not that lawyers should be prevented from studying European law.

It is that British constitutional law should make sufficiently clear which authorities ultimately govern domestic decisions. In all of this we can see how much British institutions have been culturally reluctant to disconnect from the European Union. It is an approach that is going to have to change if Britain is going to be able to reshape our own legal system.

Parliament Cannot Outsource Every Difficult Decision

This argument about legal paralysis and the quagmire of European legal judgements, the case law developed for previous times and previous administrations, connects to our wider criticism of Britain's system of arm’s-length government.

Whether the issue is a foreign court, a regulator, public agency or expert body, at Reform we see a recurring political tendency: ministers make decisions less directly. Then institutions acquire greater operational autonomy. And elected politicians increasingly say that controversial questions are outside their control.

At Reform we say, all of this is contributing to the weakening of our democratic accountability.

If voters elect a government to change policy, they should be able to identify who is responsible when that change does not occur.

The counterargument is equally important.

Some decisions are deliberately insulated from direct ministerial control because political interference could itself be dangerous.

Courts are the clearest example.

No democratic government should determine the result of a particular prosecution simply because ministers dislike the defendant.

The challenge is to distinguish independent adjudication from independent policymaking.

Individual Cases Must Remain Independent

Of course, we accept that governments should not determine the outcome of particular legal proceedings.

Judges must remain independent when deciding cases.

Police must remain operationally independent when investigating particular suspects.

Prosecutors must decide cases according to evidence and law.

But at Reform we argue that wider policy has to remain properly political, and open to the exposure of parliamentary scrutinty.

If elected governments disagree with the legal framework producing particular outcomes, the democratic answer is to change that framework through Parliament.

That is constitutionally different from ordering a judge how to decide an individual case.

This distinction is essential if judicial reform is to remain compatible with the rule of law.

Parliament Must Take Back Responsibility

There is an uncomfortable implication here for politicians.

If Parliament is sovereign, politicians cannot always blame judges.

Parliament, under the Tony Blair government, enacted the Human Rights Act.

Parliament approved Britain's participation in international legal frameworks.

Parliament passes the statutes courts subsequently interpret.

If legislators dislike the results, they have constitutional mechanisms available to them.

They can amend legislation.

They can clarify statutory language.

They can change regulatory structures.

And, subject to international consequences, Parliament can alter treaty commitments through the political process.

Our wider Reform argument here comes with some criticism of political abdication as well as judicial activism.

Politicians need to take responsibility for making difficult choices.

Human Rights After the ECHR

Leaving the ECHR would also raise an important question that any Reform government would have to answer.

What would replace the current framework? Withdrawal from the Convention does not necessarily imply abandoning human rights.

Britain protected many fundamental liberties long before the Human Rights Act.

Common law, statute and parliamentary democracy all provide protections.

A Reform government leaving the ECHR can therefore establish a domestic rights framework of its own, Reform's proposed British Bill of RIghts.

But the details are going to matter enormously.

Which rights would be protected?

Could courts enforce them?

What remedies would citizens have against unlawful government action?

How would Northern Ireland's constitutional arrangements be affected?

How would the UK meet other international obligations?

These questions will require careful legal preparation before any constitutional transition.

The International Court Question Is Bigger Than the ECHR

The wider issue also extends beyond the decisions of judges based in Strasbourg.

Modern governments operate in a world of international agreements, arbitration mechanisms, trade tribunals and treaty bodies.

Britain benefits from many of these arrangements.

International rules make trade more predictable.

Treaties help coordinate security.

Common legal frameworks can protect British businesses and citizens abroad.

The problem is therefore not simply whether international law should influence Britain.

It inevitably will.

The question is which powers Britain should delegate internationally, under what conditions and with what democratic safeguards.

A serious sovereignty agenda has to distinguish useful international cooperation from obligations that unnecessarily constrain domestic democratic choices.

Reforming the Judiciary Without Undermining the Rule of Law

This is ultimately the test the Reform government is going to face. Criticising judicial overreach is comparatively easy.

Designing constitutional reforms that strengthen democracy without weakening judicial independence is much harder.

Britain needs courts capable of ruling against government when government acts unlawfully.

Citizens need legal protection against arbitrary power.

Contracts must be enforceable.

Property rights must be secure.

Criminal trials must be independent.

Businesses and investors need confidence that governments cannot simply rewrite legal outcomes for political convenience.

These are not obstacles to democracy.

They are fundamental components of a stable constitutional order. Any successful reform therefore needs to preserve them.

A Different Constitutional Settlement

In summary, we can see how this direction of travel points towards a different relationship between Parliament and the courts.

Parliament under a Reform government would take steps to legislate more clearly, with less room for interpretation.

Government would take greater responsibility for policy decisions.

International commitments would face greater scrutiny.

Judges would remain independent in individual cases but operate within a more clearly defined statutory framework.

And Reform would seek to reduce the extent to which major policy questions are determined through expansive interpretations of international or human-rights law.

Whether such reforms would restore democratic accountability or weaken valuable constitutional safeguards will be one of the central arguments around any future programme of judicial reform.

But the underlying question cannot easily be avoided.

Who Governs?

For centuries, Britain's constitutional system has evolved through a delicate relationship between Parliament, government and the courts.

That relationship has never been static.

The Human Rights Act changed it.

Membership of international legal systems changed it.

The creation of the Supreme Court in the Tony Blair government changed the institutional landscape.

And future governments can change it again.

For Reform UK, the supremely important objective is a restoration of clearer constitutional roles.

Parliament should make law.

Government should be accountable for policy and a reinvigorated Parliament is going to be a part of that.

Judges should interpret law independently.

International institutions should not acquire powers that fundamentally displace democratic decision-making without explicit political consent.

The difficult part is determining exactly where each boundary should lie.

Because the central constitutional question is not whether Britain needs independent judges.

It unquestionably does.

The question is more fundamental: w hen law and politics collide, who should have the final democratic responsibility for the decisions that govern the country? We say that fundamental duty has to reside with the voice of the people, spoken through a reinvograted British Parliament.

Who Really Runs Britain? Reform Plans for Quangos and Unelected Public Bodies

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:17:41 GMT

Past governments have complained about the difficulty of governing Britain's complex 'quangocracy'. But in reality, all past Conservative and Labour ministers have done is to create more of them.

How many public bodies does Britain actually need?

And, perhaps more importantly, how many important government functions should be exercised by organisations operating at arm’s length from elected ministers?

For us at Reform, these questions go to the heart of our proposed restructuring of the British state.

Speaking about quangos and public bodies at the Reform Conference 2026, Danny Kruger MP outlined an approach that would examine organisations across government individually rather than simply imposing an indiscriminate programme of abolition.

Some bodies or functions could disappear altogether.

Others could be returned directly to government departments.

Some activities could potentially be outsourced to businesses, charities or community organisations.

And in certain areas, self-regulation could replace government regulation.

Behind these different possibilities lies one central principle: where important public functions are exercised in the name of the state, democratic responsibility for them should ultimately be clear. Under a Reform government, where there is any question of democratic accountability, or delivery, quangos are going to be brought directly under the portfolio of ministers.

Britain’s Complex Landscape of Public Bodies

The word “quango” is commonly used to describe a wide range of organisations operating at varying distances from ministers.

But the reality is more complicated.

UK quangos cost taxpayers nearly £400 billion annually, accounting for roughly one-third of total managed government spending.

Roughly £376 billion is directly funded by taxpayers, supplemented by tens of billions in non-governmental income and fees. Their spending represents close to 32% of all managed government expenditure. Around 444 recognized quangos employ nearly 500,000 staff across Whitehall departments. And 90% of day-to-day quango spending goes to the ten largest bodies, for example HM Revenue & Customs.

The list of quangos icncludes non-departmental public bodies, executive agencies, non-ministerial departments, regulators, statutory commissions and other arm’s-length organisations.

They perform dramatically different functions.

Some distribute public money.

Some regulate industries.

Some deliver public services.

Some provide technical expertise.

Some exercise statutory powers.

Others advise ministers.

Consequently, simply declaring that every quango should be abolished would make little practical sense.

The real question is what should happen to the function performed by each organisation.

Start With the Function, Not the Organisation

One of the most important principles of the Reform approach is remarkably simple. It does not receive a lot of attention in mainstream media, but it is a very important principle.

Imagine creating a complete inventory of Britain's public bodies.

For every organisation, government would ask: w hat does this body actually do?

Then: does government still need that function?

If the answer is no, the function could potentially be abolished.

If the answer is yes, another question follows: w ho should perform it?

That might be a government department.

It might be an independent regulator.

It could potentially be the private sector.

It might be a charity or community organisation.

Or, in certain industries, some functions could potentially operate through self-regulation.

This turns quango reform from a slogan into an institutional review.

The objective is not simply to reduce the number of organisations on a government spreadsheet.

It is to determine where particular responsibilities should sit and why.

Should Some Functions Simply Disappear?

The first category would be functions that an incoming government concludes are no longer necessary.

We can use regulation as an example.

In his analysis at the Reform Conference, the key question of whether every function currently exercised by bodies such as Ofcom necessarily requires a statutory regulator.

That does not mean all regulation would disappear.

Ofcom currently has significant responsibilities across broadcasting, telecommunications, online safety and postal services, and arguments for regulatory independence include technical expertise and protection from direct political interference.

But Reform’s broader question is legitimate within any programme of state reform: w hen was the function last justified from first principles?

Public organisations can accumulate responsibilities over time.

New duties are created.

Regulations expand.

Additional teams are established. The same principle can be applied to the jungle of all Britain's quangos: the College of Policing, the Environment Agency, Ofcom, Ofgen, Ofwat, the Crown Prosecution Service, Network Rail, there are 444 of them. All too often they are run by industry insiders with not enough emphasis on their public-facing role.

Governments hardly ever return to the original question of whether every activity remains necessary.

A serious review under the Reform government is going to examine the functions as well as organisations.

Bring Some Responsibilities Back Into Departments

The second aspect of reform in this area is potentially more significant.

Some functions of quangos should continue, but they should no longer be administered through a separate arm’s-length organisation.

Instead, they could be returned directly to the relevant government department. One important example is in the area of environmental administration and environmental protection.

A government does not have to abolish flood-defence policy merely because it changes the institutional structure responsible for delivering it. The function can continue while political and administrative responsibility is reorganised, and brought back under the orbit of parliamentary democracy.

For us at Reform, this is an important distinction. Abolishing an organisation does not necessarily mean abolishing what that organisation does. It can mean transferring responsibility somewhere else.

The Democratic Accountability Argument

Why bring functions back into government departments at all? The strongest argument is around accountability and performance.

Suppose responsibility for an important public service is divided between a government department, an arm’s-length body, regulators and other agencies.

When something goes wrong, responsibility can become difficult to establish.

The minister may say operational responsibility rests with an independent body.

The public body may point towards government policy or funding.

Officials may refer to statutory obligations.

And the voter is left asking a remarkably basic question: who is actually in charge?

At Reform we want the answer to become much, much clearer. It is what the public are demanding, and it is one of the most important challenges of our time.

Where government is responsible for an important public function, ministers should be more directly accountable for its performance.

That creates a straightforward democratic chain.

Officials administer.

Ministers decide.

Parliament scrutinises.

Then the voters judge.

NHS England Shows What Structural Reform Looks Like

There is already a major contemporary example of this approach. The Labour Government is in the process of abolishing NHS England and transferring functions either to the Department of Health and Social Care or elsewhere in the health system.

The stated rationale includes reducing duplication between NHS England and the department and restoring clearer ministerial accountability.

That is significant because it demonstrates that concerns about arm’s-length government are not confined to Reform UK.

Different parties may disagree profoundly about how far restructuring should go, but the question of whether Britain has accumulated excessive organisational complexity has entered mainstream government policy.

NHS England also illustrates why abolition is more complicated than announcing that an organisation will disappear.

Its functions still have to be performed.

Staffing arrangements must be resolved.

Legal responsibilities have to be transferred.

Data and technology systems must continue operating.

Contracts cannot simply disappear.

And the new departmental structure has to be capable of absorbing the responsibilities.

Abolishing a public body is therefore not the end of reform.

It is the beginning of an administrative process.

The Problem of Duplication

At Reform we see a lot of issues around duplication of functions, and too many dotted-line relationships. It is one of the most important things that has prevented previous ministers from delivering on their mandate.

If an arm’s-length organisation and its sponsoring department both maintain policy, communications, administrative and management functions, the taxpayer may effectively be supporting two bureaucratic structures concerned with the same broad area of government.

That does not mean every apparent overlap is unnecessary.

A government department may set policy while an agency provides specialist operational delivery.

Independence can sometimes be the entire reason for establishing a separate organisation.

But duplication should be capable of being justified.

Where two organisations are effectively performing substantially overlapping functions, consolidation may reduce costs and clarify responsibility.

The test should therefore be: d oes institutional separation create genuine public value, or merely another administrative layer?

The Prison System as a Case Study

Britain's prisons and probation system is another good example to look at.

HM Prison and Probation Service operates as an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice rather than as a conventional independent quango.

Nevertheless, Reform has been rightly questioning whether this degree of organisational separation produces the right accountability structure.

The broader argument is that prisons belong among the core functions of the state.

Defence, policing, domestic security and the incarceration of offenders all involve fundamental state responsibilities.

Reform is therefore arguing for clearer government control and accountability over the prison system.

But that does not necessarily mean government must directly operate every institution involved.

This leads to another important distinction.

Government Responsibility Does Not Require Government Delivery

At Reform we separate responsibility for a service from delivery of the service.

Government can remain ultimately accountable while commissioning other organisations to provide particular functions.

Private companies already operate some prisons.

Charities and voluntary organisations work extensively with offenders.

Community organisations can play roles in rehabilitation.

Businesses can provide specialist services.

Danny Kruger MP and other Reform leaders have been arguiing that this mixed model could potentially be expanded.

The principle would be: centralise accountability while decentralising delivery where doing so produces better outcomes.

That represents a different philosophy from simply expanding or contracting the public sector.

The question becomes who is best equipped to perform each function, while ministers retain responsibility for the overall system.

Outsourcing Is Not Automatically the Answer

There is, however, an important qualification. Moving a government function to the private sector does not automatically make it cheaper or better.

Poorly designed outsourcing can simply replace a public monopoly with a privately operated contract heavily dependent upon government.

Government still needs sufficient expertise to specify contracts, monitor performance and intervene when providers fail.

The same applies to charities and community organisations.

Institutional reform should therefore be driven by evidence about outcomes rather than an assumption that either public or private provision is inherently superior. This is the Reform ideology.

The relevant question is: which structure produces the best combination of effectiveness, accountability and value for money?

All of this is an area that has been left by previous governments to grow completely out of control, without any clear strategy or founding principles.

Why Quango Reform Is Harder Than It Sounds

These challenges of accountability and delivery are why Danny Kruger has been cautioning that restructuring Britain's public bodies could not necessarily be completed within the first 100 days of a new government. Make no doubt that the Reform government is going to deliver, but we need to be honest with the public.

Some organisations were established by Acts of Parliament.

Changing them may require new legislation.

Employees have contractual and legal rights.

Buildings and technology systems have to be transferred.

Existing contracts need to be reviewed.

Regulatory responsibilities must continue during any transition.

And some organisations perform highly specialised functions that departments may no longer possess the expertise to absorb immediately.

The political decision can be taken quickly. The administrative implementation may take years.

That distinction matters enormously for any government promising rapid structural change.

A Government Department Must Be Capable of Taking Control Back

There is another challenge here. Returning responsibility from an arm’s-length body to a department achieves little if the department itself lacks the capacity to perform the function.

Government cannot simply draw a new organisational chart.

If specialist expertise has migrated into agencies over several decades, departments may need to rebuild capabilities.

Senior officials may need recruiting.

Data systems may need integrating.

Reporting structures may need redesigning.

Ministers may suddenly become responsible for operational decisions previously handled elsewhere.

The real test is therefore not whether a government can abolish a body.

It is whether the resulting structure works better.

When Independence Is Valuable

There is also a strong argument for preserving independence in certain circumstances.

Not every public function should necessarily be directly controlled by ministers.

Statistical authorities, competition regulators, electoral bodies and other institutions may require varying degrees of independence precisely because their credibility depends upon decisions not being dictated by the government of the day.

Technical regulators can also develop specialist expertise that would be difficult to maintain within a department subject to frequent ministerial change.

The challenge for the Reform government will therefore be distinguishing between necessary independence and unnecessary insulation from democratic accountability.

That is a much more demanding exercise than simply counting quangos.

A New Test for Every Public Body

So, in summary, a serious programme of public-body reform will therefore subject each organisation to a series of questions.

Does this function still need to exist?

Does it need to be performed by government?

Does it require operational independence?

Could it be performed directly by a department?

Could some functions be delivered competitively?

Is the organisation duplicating work performed elsewhere?

Are ministers sufficiently accountable for its decisions?

And, most importantly: would the public notice an improvement if the structure changed?

Those questions are going to provide a more useful basis for reform than arbitrary numerical targets.

From the Administrative State to the Accountable State

The deeper argument behind Reform's plan in this area are about the nature of government itself.

Over many decades, Britain has developed an increasingly complicated network of organisations sitting between ministers and public services.

There are reasons why that happened and successive Conservative and Labour governments have tended to create new quangos for their own narrow purposes, in their own image so to speak.

Specialisation can improve expertise.

Independent regulation can protect important decisions from short-term political pressures.

Agencies can concentrate on operational delivery while departments concentrate on policy.

But complexity has costs.

It can duplicate administration.

It can obscure responsibility. And it can make it harder for voters to understand who ultimately controls important decisions.

The Reform direction is therefore towards a state with fewer layers between political authority and public administration.

Preparing Whitehall for Change: Reform Government Will Need to Act from Day One

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:21:36 GMT

Winning an election is just the beginning. The next government is going to have to create a new relationship with an impartial Civil Service.

What happens when a government arrives in Whitehall determined to make fundamental changes to the way Britain is governed? What happens when those changes conflict with some deeply entrenched views held by certain parts of the Civil Service, the trades unions, and other parts of civic society.

That is becoming much more than a theoretical question, as we get closer to the next Reform government.

If Reform UK is serious about preparing for government, we are going to have think not only about the policies we want to implement but about the machinery that would be required to implement them.

At the centre of that machinery sits the permanent Civil Service.

That creates responsibilities on both sides.

An incoming government needs detailed policies, ministers who understand their departments and a realistic plan for implementation.

But the Civil Service must also be capable of responding professionally to the priorities of whichever government the electorate returns.

The challenge is therefore not simply how to reform Whitehall.

It is how to create a relationship between political leadership and an impartial permanent Civil Service capable of turning an electoral mandate into effective government.

Winning an Election Is Only the Beginning

Opposition parties naturally concentrate on winning elections. But winning an election and successfully governing a country are very different things.

A party can develop attractive manifesto commitments, communicate them effectively and persuade millions of people to vote for them.

The morning after an election victory, however, those political promises come into contact with the complexity of government.

Departments have budgets, legislation, contracts, regulatory obligations and existing programmes.

International commitments have to be considered.

New legislation must be drafted. Policies have to survive legal scrutiny.

Ministers need accurate information.

And thousands of officials must understand what the new administration wants them to achieve.

That is why preparation for government matters.

The question is not simply: what does a party want to do?

It is: how will it actually do it?

Reform's Policy Machine to Become a Government Machine

Danny Kruger MP in his role leading Reform's preparedness for government operations, answered questions about this at a Reform Conference 2026 fringe meeting.

One of the questions raised during Kruger’s discussion concerned whether Reform was making sufficient use of people with previous experience of senior government and policymaking. The questioner suggested that significant expertise exists among people willing to contribute but that political parties can sometimes keep policy development within a relatively small circle.

This presents a genuine challenge for any rapidly growing political movement.

Maintaining message discipline can be valuable.

But preparing for government requires something different.

It requires specialists.

Economists, lawyers, former civil servants, business leaders, technology experts, public-service professionals and people with practical experience of implementing policy can all contribute.

The closer a party gets to government, the more important that expertise becomes.

Political instinct can identify what needs to change. Detailed policy preparation determines whether that change can actually happen.

The Difference Between Political Direction and Civil Service Delivery

This leads directly to the constitutional relationship between ministers and civil servants.

Ministers are political.

They are elected, or politically appointed, and are expected to pursue the programme of the government.

Permanent civil servants operate under a different principle.

The Civil Service Code requires them to maintain integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality.

Political impartiality does not mean preventing an elected government from pursuing policies with which individual officials may disagree.

It means serving the government of the day professionally while maintaining the standards required of a permanent public service.

That distinction becomes particularly important when a new administration intends to make significant changes.

A government is entitled to political leadership.

The Civil Service is expected to provide impartial implementation and advice. Neither can govern effectively without the other.

What Happens When the New Government Wants Radical Change?

The relationship becomes more difficult when an incoming government wants to change the institutions of government themselves.

Imagine a government entering office committed to reducing the number of public bodies, substantially changing regulation, restructuring departments or reducing the size of the Civil Service.

The officials responsible for advising ministers could find themselves working on reforms that affect their own organisations.

That does not automatically create institutional resistance.

Civil servants routinely implement policies introduced by governments of different political parties. But major structural reform inevitably creates organisational challenges.

Departments may defend existing programmes because officials believe they serve legitimate purposes.

Ministers may interpret that advice as bureaucratic resistance.

Officials may regard political timetables as unrealistic.

Ministers may believe officials are moving too slowly.

Managing that tension is one of the central skills of government. When we hear former Conservative ministers speaking about how they were held back by Civil Service delay-and-divert tactics, we can begin to understand the challenges the Reform approach is going to face.

The Civil Service Must Be Ready for the Government the Public Elects

There is nevertheless an important democratic principle involved.

The permanent Civil Service does not choose the government. The electorate does.

If voters elect a government committed to substantial reform, the Civil Service has a constitutional responsibility to serve that government within the law.

That does not require officials to become political supporters of the administration.

Nor does it remove their responsibility to provide ministers with candid advice about costs, risks, legality and practical consequences.

Indeed, effective government depends upon officials being willing to give ministers advice they may not want to hear.

But once lawful political decisions have been made, the machinery of government must be capable of implementing them.

That is the balance Britain needs to preserve: political authority without politicising the permanent Civil Service, and Civil Service impartiality without allowing impartiality to become institutional inertia.

Reforming Whitehall Without Politicising It

This distinction is particularly important in debates about Civil Service reform. There is a substantial difference between demanding a more responsive Civil Service and demanding a politically loyal Civil Service.

The first can be compatible with the British constitutional tradition.

The second would represent a much more fundamental change.

A permanent Civil Service provides continuity precisely because officials remain when governments change.

That institutional memory can be very valuable.

Officials understand previous policy failures, legislative constraints, international commitments and the practical operation of departments.

A new government that ignores that knowledge risks repeating mistakes.

But continuity can become a weakness if preserving existing systems becomes more important than implementing legitimate political change.

The objective should therefore be a Civil Service that is simultaneously impartial and adaptable.

Whitehall Is Already Facing Structural Reform

The significance of this debate extends even beyond the Reform UK programme.

The present Labour government has itself recognised that Whitehall requires substantial change.

Its review of the permanent Civil Service is examining the organisation's size, structure, performance, productivity, use of technology and ability to attract talented people.

That means the debate is no longer simply about whether the Civil Service should change.

The disagreement is increasingly about what kind of reform is required and how far it should go.

Some proposals concentrate on improving productivity, digital capability and management.

Others envisage much more fundamental reductions in the size and scope of the administrative state.

These approaches can overlap, but they are not identical.

A Smaller Civil Service Could Require a More Capable Civil Service

There is an apparent paradox at the centre of proposals to reduce Whitehall.

A smaller Civil Service, as being proposed by Reform, will actually require better civil servants.

If fewer people are employed, the remaining officials may need greater responsibility, stronger technical skills and better management capabilities.

That could mean recruiting more people with experience outside government.

It could mean rewarding high performers more effectively.

It could require greater movement between the private and public sectors. And artificial intelligence could automate significant amounts of administrative work while increasing the importance of officials capable of exercising judgement.

Kruger has previously made a similar argument about remuneration: reduce the overall Civil Service wage bill by reducing its size, while being prepared to pay sufficiently for people with the expertise government genuinely needs.

The objective would therefore not simply be a cheaper Whitehall.

It would be a smaller but more capable Whitehall.

AI Could Transform the Machinery of Government

The current technology trends make this discussion particularly important and urgent.

The traditional Civil Service developed around an administrative model requiring enormous numbers of people to process information, prepare documents and manage bureaucratic procedures.

Artificial intelligence and a more urgent movement towards e-government - a fairer and more responsive administration based around transparency and big data - could change that model profoundly.

Tasks that once required large administrative teams may increasingly be automated.

Officials may be able to analyse information, draft documents and identify patterns dramatically faster.

That creates an opportunity to redesign government rather than simply digitise existing bureaucracy.

Reform has constantly argued that Britain needs to become substantially more ambitious about AI, while the Government's own Civil Service review explicitly includes the impact of AI and technology.

The next generation of Whitehall reform may therefore be technological as much as organisational.

Government Needs People Who Understand Delivery

Another emerging discussion being led by Reform is the distinction between policymaking and delivery.

Government can become very good at producing strategies, consultations and announcements without necessarily becoming equally good at implementation. We have seen this with a succession of Conservative and Labour ministers annoucing reviews, consultations, writing letters, issuing press releases, but without delivering very much.

That problem is not unique to Britain.

But it creates a strong argument for bringing more practical delivery experience into government.

Senior officials responsible for major programmes may benefit from experience in technology, infrastructure, business, procurement or frontline public services.

The current Government has itself moved in this direction, placing greater emphasis on frontline delivery, innovation and private-sector experience when recruiting senior civil servants.

The broader principle is straightforward: G overnment should value people who know how to make things happen, not merely how to administer existing processes.

Ministers Will Need to Change Too

Civil Service reform cannot succeed if politicians assume every problem originates with officials. Ministers also have responsibilities.

They need clear objectives.

They need to understand their departments.

They need to distinguish between political priorities and administrative detail.

They need to make decisions rather than continually requesting further reviews.

And they need to accept responsibility when their decisions fail.

A dysfunctional relationship between ministers and officials can arise from either side.

Civil servants can become excessively cautious.

But ministers can also produce contradictory priorities, unrealistic deadlines or poorly developed policies.

Successful reform therefore requires improvements in political leadership as well as administrative capability. Reform UK and Danny Kruger's team are doing a lot of work in this area, down to the level of writing legislation in advance.

The First Months of Government Will Matter Enormously

For a party seeking substantial structural change, the early months of government are going to be particularly important.

Political authority is usually strongest immediately after an election victory. That means an incoming administration needs to know in advance what it wants to do.

Which legislation needs to be introduced first?

Which public bodies need reform?

Which departmental structures need changing?

Which regulations should be reviewed?

Which senior appointments matter?

Which policies can be implemented administratively and which require Acts of Parliament?

Those questions cannot sensibly be answered after entering Downing Street. The work has to begin before the election, and indeed it is already going on at Reform headquarters.

Building a serious preparation-for-government operation matters enormously.

Drawing on Expertise Outside Westminster

The deeper questions raised in the Reform approach to working with the Civil Service threfore deserve more of a public debate. This is an area in which Conservative and Labour ministers have all failed: in the area of delivery.

A party preparing for government should make use of expertise wherever it can find it. An important aspect of the Reform platform for government involves bringing in external expertise from other countries and from the world of business. A Reform government is going to look quite different from the governments of the past, with more transparency to the public, more targets and more urgency.

Former civil servants can explain how departments actually operate.

Business leaders can identify regulatory obstacles.

Lawyers can identify legislative and constitutional problems.

Local government leaders understand implementation at community level.

Technology specialists can identify opportunities for automation.

Academics and think tanks can contribute research.

Frontline public-sector workers can explain where systems fail in practice.

The challenge is combining this expertise without allowing policymaking to become captured by any particular professional or institutional interest.

An effective policy operation needs to be open enough to absorb expertise while disciplined enough to make decisions.

The Equality Act and Public Sector Equality Duty

The discussion during the Reform Conference 2026 also touched on diversity and inclusion policies and their relationship with the Equality Act and the Public Sector Equality Duty.

This is another example of why detailed preparation matters.

Reform may wish to change the way public bodies approach DEI policies.

But government cannot simply instruct public authorities to ignore existing statutory obligations.

If ministers believe the legislation itself should change, Parliament must change it.

Until then, public bodies remain bound by the law as it stands.

This illustrates the difference between political rhetoric and government.

A governing party needs to understand precisely which practices are discretionary, which originate in departmental guidance, which come from regulatory interpretation and which are required by primary legislation.

Only then can it determine what needs to change. Reform is looking at all of these aspects when it comes to abolishing the DEI objectives in the public sector.

From Opposition Movement to Governing Institution

Ultimately, this is the transition every successful political movement must make.

Opposition rewards criticism.

Government demands implementation.

Opposition asks what is wrong.

Government has to decide what replaces it.

Opposition can operate around a relatively small number of political messages.

Government requires thousands of decisions across hundreds of policy areas.

For Reform UK as a new political pary that transformation is substantial, and all the preparation work is happening now.

It will need political radicalism alongside institutional knowledge.

It will need outside expertise alongside democratic accountability.

And it will need ministers capable of working with a permanent Civil Service even while asking that Civil Service to undergo significant reform.

A New Relationship Between Ministers and Whitehall

The ultimate objective should not be a war between politicians and civil servants. Britain needs something more constructive.

Ministers should determine political priorities and accept responsibility for them.

Civil servants should provide rigorous advice and implement lawful government policy professionally.

Officials should be prepared to challenge ministers privately when proposals are impractical or legally problematic.

But government departments must ultimately be capable of responding when elected ministers decide on a lawful course of action.

That relationship becomes particularly important during periods of major political change.

The next government may inherit a Civil Service already undergoing substantial structural reform.

It may also arrive with its own very different ideas about Whitehall's size, purpose and culture.

The test will therefore be whether Britain can reform the machinery of government without destroying the impartiality and institutional knowledge that make effective government possible.

Because whatever party forms the next government, one principle remains fundamental: the Civil Service does not exist to govern instead of elected politicians. But elected politicians cannot govern effectively without a Civil Service capable of delivering.

Let us remember also, that it is only the Reform Party that is truly committed to this essential change process in the ability of governments to deliver and to adapt, while stating that impartiality and the Civil Service’s core values should be safeguarded.

Britain Must Get Back to Economic Growth and Better Tools for Fighting Poverty

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:17:32 GMT

Britain must grow again. The next government is going to have to make reforms to make it happen.

Britain’s economic challenge is no longer simply about managing the public finances.

It is about getting the country growing again.

After years of weak productivity, pressure on living standards and disappointing growth in GDP per person, Shanker Singham, Chairman of the Growth Commission, is in agreement with Reform when he argues for Britain to adopt something considerably more ambitious than another round of short-term tax adjustments or government spending initiatives.

It needs a fundamental change in the economic environment in which businesses invest, compete and grow.

Speaking about Britain's economic prospects in a fringe meeting at the Reform Conference 2026 Singham set out a framework based around three major drivers of prosperity: domestic competition and regulation, international trade, and an economic environment capable of encouraging investment, innovation and technological development.

His argument is ultimately optimistic.

Britain's economic problems, he says, can be fixed.

But doing so will require the next government to make some difficult choices.

The Real Measure of Growth: GDP Per Person

There is an important distinction between GDP - the measure that Labour and Conservatives say can be improved by pushing higher immigration - and the measure of GDP per person.

Headline GDP tells us whether the economy as a whole is becoming larger.

But that does not necessarily tell us whether individual citizens are becoming more prosperous.

If GDP increases partly because the population is increasing, the economy can technically be growing without producing a comparable improvement in average living standards.

That is why we at Reform, in agreement with the policy papers from the Growth Commission- place much greater emphasis on real GDP per capita.

This distinction matters.

The fundamental objective of economic policy should not simply be to produce a larger economy.

It should be to increase the productive capacity of the country so that people become more prosperous.

Britain therefore needs to ask a more demanding question than: i s GDP growing?

It needs to ask: i s the economy producing substantially more wealth for each person?

That is the growth challenge facing the next government.

Britain’s Long Economic Stagnation

The immediate economic picture is not one of continuous recession.

Britain is growing.

But the longer-term concern is the weakness of the underlying growth rate.

At Reform we say, that distinction is crucial.

A country can continue producing modest positive GDP figures while gradually falling behind economies that are becoming more productive, innovative and investment-friendly.

The consequences accumulate over time.

Weak productivity means weaker wage growth.

Weak investment limits the creation of productive businesses.

Weak economic growth makes public spending commitments increasingly difficult to finance.

And when government spending continues rising faster than the productive economy supporting it, pressure increases on taxation and borrowing.

Growth therefore sits underneath many of the political arguments Britain is currently having about tax, debt and public services.

Without a more productive economy, governments are continually forced to divide an economic pie that is not expanding quickly enough.

The Three Pillars of Economic Growth

The framework for growth being put forward by Reform identifies three broad areas that determine whether an economy is capable of sustained growth.

The first is the domestic competitive environment.

How easy is it for businesses to enter markets, challenge established companies, invest and expand?

The second is international competition and trade.

How open is Britain to the global economy, and how effectively can British businesses participate in growing international markets?

The third concerns the environment surrounding investment, innovation, technology and property rights.

Together, these determine whether entrepreneurs and investors have sufficient incentives to take risks.

This is important because dynamic economies depend upon experimentation.

Some businesses fail.

Others succeed.

New companies challenge established ones.

Investment moves towards more productive activities.

Technology replaces inefficient processes.Capital and labour are reallocated.

The Growth Commission also argues that governments should create an institutional environment in which this process can occur rather than attempting to protect the existing structure of the economy.

Regulation Should Encourage Competition, Not Protect Incumbents

One of the strongest arguments for growth concerns regulation.

The question is not simply whether Britain has too much or too little regulation.

The more important question is: w hat does the regulation actually do to competition?

Good regulation can establish clear rules, protect property rights and enable markets to function.

Bad regulation can raise barriers to entry, increase costs and unintentionally protect established businesses from new competitors.

The Growth Commission argues that Britain has allowed too many regulatory barriers to accumulate, over the years of both Conservative and Labour governments.

The result can be an economy in which large incumbent companies are better equipped to absorb compliance costs while smaller businesses and potential competitors struggle to enter markets.

That is precisely the opposite of what a growth strategy should achieve.

A dynamic economy needs new businesses constantly challenging established ones.

The next government should therefore examine regulation through a simple economic test: d oes this rule improve competition and economic efficiency, or does it make it harder for productive businesses to emerge?

Britain Needs to Rediscover Economic Risk

There is another philosophical argument behind this de-regulation approach. economic growth requires risk.

Entrepreneurs have to invest without knowing whether their businesses will succeed.

Investors provide capital without knowing precisely what return they will receive.

Companies develop products without knowing whether consumers will buy them.

New technologies disrupt established industries.

That uncertainty is not an unfortunate side effect of capitalism.

It is part of the mechanism through which economic progress occurs.

The Growth Commission therefore warns against regulatory systems that attempt to eliminate too much economic risk.

An economy organised primarily around preventing failure can also prevent experimentation.

And without experimentation, productivity growth eventually slows.

The objective should not be recklessness.

It should be a regulatory environment in which productive risk-taking is possible and failure does not become prohibitively expensive.

The UK-US Productivity and Prosperity Gap

In his talk at the Reform Conference, Shanker Singham repeatedly contrasts Britain's economic performance with that of the United States.

His broader point is more important than any individual statistic.

The United States has proved considerably more successful at creating and scaling many of the companies that dominate the modern technological economy.

Look at some of the world's most valuable technology businesses and a striking pattern emerges.

Many are American.

Some barely existed a generation ago. This demonstrates the importance of economic dynamism.

The most productive economy is not necessarily the one that best protects today's largest companies.

It is often the economy that makes it easiest for tomorrow's companies to displace them.

For Britain, that means asking whether its tax, regulatory and investment environment encourages the next generation of businesses to emerge — or inadvertently protects yesterday's economic structure.

Why Technology Matters So Much

Technology makes this debate increasingly urgent. Artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing and digital services could dramatically increase productivity during the coming decades.

Countries that successfully attract investment in these sectors could experience significant increases in productive capacity.

Countries that regulate them poorly risk watching investment and entrepreneurs move elsewhere.

That does not mean abandoning safeguards.

It means recognising that regulation itself has economic consequences.

The recent UK economic data makes the timing of this argument particularly relevant. ONS estimates show real GDP rose by only 0.4% in Q2 2026, while real GDP per head also rose 0.4% in the quarter and was 1.0% above a year earlier. Productivity remains the deeper issue: the ONS's preferred RTI-based measure estimated output per hour was only 0.7% higher year-on-year in Q2.

There is also an important distinction worth preserving. For example, the ONS published modelling estimates that a 10% improvement in UK regulatory competitiveness could eventually raise GDP per capita by about 6.6%.

The question should therefore be how Britain can protect consumers and legitimate public interests without preventing innovation from occurring in the first place.

That balance could become one of the defining economic questions of the next decade.

The European Regulatory Question

One of the most politically contentious parts of this growth argument concerns Britain's relationship with European Union regulation.

The concern is not primarily about Europe as a trading partner. The EU will remain an enormously important market for British businesses.

But there is a major concern about regulatory alignment, in the direction taken by the present Labour government, and indeed supported by the Conservatives.

Reform are making the case that Britain's ability to design its own regulatory system represents an economic opportunity only if governments are prepared to use it.

From our perspective, automatically following EU rules would constrain Britain's ability to create a more competition-oriented regulatory model.

Supporters of closer alignment point to the potential advantages of reducing trade friction with Britain's largest neighbouring market.

Businesses trading extensively with Europe can benefit from common standards because complying with multiple regulatory systems can itself create costs.

But the important counterargument is that this trade-off must be measured against the economic cost of adopting regulations that are going to be less conducive to competition and innovation on the global scale. You only have to look at the relative economic decline of the EU nations over the last decade to see evidence of this over-regulation model.

The question is therefore not simply: should Britain align with Europe?

It is: w hat are the economic costs and benefits of alignment in each particular area?

Brexit Was a Decision: Why has Britain Not Done Enough With its Economic Freedom?

This leads to one of the most important distinctions in the pro-growth argument.

Brexit itself does not generate economic growth. Leaving the European Union changed Britain's legal and regulatory options.

What matters economically is what governments subsequently do with those options.

Regulatory independence that is never used produces little economic benefit.

Independent trade policy that does not open new markets achieves little.

The ability to reform domestic competition policy matters only if governments actually reform it.

In that sense, Brexit was not an economic growth programme.

It created a different set of policy choices.

Reform's criticism is that successive governments have not exploited those choices sufficiently.

The Case Against Automatic Dynamic Alignment With the EU

That is why the Growth Commission and other pro-growth economists are particularly concerned about dynamic alignment with EU regulations.

Under arrangements of this kind, Britain could agree to remain aligned with European rules in specified sectors as those rules change. Supporters argue that this can reduce barriers to UK-EU trade.

But there is also a significant potential cost.

If Britain automatically adopts rules developed elsewhere, it potentially restricts its ability to construct a distinct regulatory environment designed around domestic competition and economic growth.

The concern is therefore strategic.

Once regulatory autonomy has been surrendered in a particular area, future British governments are going to find it much harder to pursue a different economic model.

At Reform, we say this would close off precisely the supply-side reforms Britain needs. Our country would go back to the tied to a low-growth, sclerotic economic zone in the European Union.

Britain Must Remain Open to the World

The second major pillar is international trade.

Britain is not large enough to generate maximum prosperity by concentrating predominantly on its domestic market.

British companies need access to global consumers, investment and supply chains.

That means continuing to reduce unnecessary barriers to international commerce.

At Reform we say that Britain should deepen relationships with the world's faster-growing markets while retaining the freedom to pursue an independent trade policy.

That includes making greater use of Britain's participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and pursuing commercial opportunities with countries outside Europe.

The strategic objective should not be choosing between Europe and the rest of the world.

It should be maintaining strong European trade while simultaneously expanding Britain's ability to participate in global growth.

Competition Policy Must Protect Competition, Not Competitors

There is another subtle distinction running through this pro-growth economic philosophy.

Government should protect competition , not individual competitors.

Those are not the same thing.

Protecting a particular company can reduce competition.

Protecting the competitive process allows successful companies to emerge while unsuccessful ones decline.

This matters particularly when governments become closely involved with major businesses through procurement, subsidies or regulation.

If established companies derive substantial revenues from government contracts or operate in markets shaped heavily by regulation, the relationship between the state and large incumbents can become increasingly close.

The danger is that new entrants find it harder to compete.

A serious growth strategy should therefore highlight whether public policy is creating open markets or unintentionally reinforcing existing market structures. As the public sector has grown and grown, government procurement has grown, and the British economy is now seen as largely a state-run economy, when seen from the outside world.

The dire ecomomic growth statistics for the last 20 years speak for themselves. Britain is becoming slowly poorer relative to the rest of the world. A change of direction is now critical if we are to seriously deal with rising poverty, if we're to create new jobs, investment and better life chances.

Growth Is Also the Answer to Britain’s Fiscal Problem

Britain's growth problem cannot be separated from its debt and public-spending problem.

Governments can increase taxes.

They can reduce spending.

They can borrow.

But over the long term, the least painful way of improving the sustainability of the public finances is to increase the productive capacity of the economy as a whole.

A faster-growing economy generates a larger tax base. This is the reverse of the current economic direction under the Labour government.

A growing economy also makes existing debt smaller relative to national income.

It provides more resources for public services.

And it creates more space for future governments to reduce taxation without destabilising the public finances.

This is why growth should not be regarded as simply another government department's objective.

It is central to almost every other political priority.

How Much Difference Could Reform Make?

The Growth Commission's modelling attempts to quantify the potential gains from structural reform.

Its estimates show that relatively modest improvements in the competitiveness of regulation, international competition and the institutional environment could produce substantial long-run increases in GDP per capita.

Economic models depend upon assumptions, and other economists may disagree about the magnitude of the effects.

But the broader proposition deserves attention.

Small improvements in annual productivity growth compound.

An economy growing slightly faster every year eventually becomes dramatically larger than one that remains stagnant.

That is why structural reform can matter more than short-term fiscal interventions.

The objective is not to manufacture a temporary burst of activity.

It is to increase Britain's long-term trend rate of growth in a stable manner, based on many incremental improvements over years. That is the Reform model of governance.

What the Next Government Would Need to Do

The case bging made by the Growth Commission points towards a fairly clear economic programme.

The next government would need to reduce regulatory barriers to competition and business formation.

It would need to scrutinise regulations according to their impact on economic efficiency rather than assuming regulation is economically neutral.

It would need to encourage investment and productive risk-taking.

It would need to make Britain an attractive environment for technology companies and new industries.

It would need to pursue international trade opportunities while retaining sufficient regulatory autonomy to implement domestic reforms.

And it would need to recognise that excessive taxation, spending and debt ultimately become harder to sustain when the underlying economy is growing too slowly.

None of these reforms is individually a magic solution.

Together, however, they represent a fundamentally different approach to the economic policy of the last 20 years.

Stop Managing Stagnation

Perhaps the most important message from the pro-growth argument is that Britain should stop treating weak growth as inevitable.

Economic stagnation can become self-reinforcing.

Low growth creates pressure for higher taxation.

Higher taxation can weaken incentives to invest.

Weak investment suppresses productivity.

Poor productivity restrains wages.

Governments then attempt to compensate through higher spending, subsidies or borrowing.

Eventually the political debate becomes almost entirely about how to distribute limited resources rather than how to create more of them.

At Reform we are seeking to reverse that logic.

The central question should become: what would make Britain a better place to invest, innovate, build businesses and create wealth?

The Next Government's Economic Test

Britain does not lack entrepreneurs.

It does not lack world-class universities, financial expertise, scientific research or technological capability.

What it has lacked is sufficiently strong productivity and sustained growth in prosperity per person.

The next government will therefore face a choice.

It can continue managing an economy growing at historically disappointing rates while arguing over how the proceeds are distributed.

Or it can attempt the more difficult task of changing the underlying conditions that determine how much wealth Britain creates.

For us at Reform and the Growth Commission, that means putting competition, regulatory reform, international trade, investment and innovation at the centre of economic policy.

There are legitimate arguments about precisely how those reforms should be designed and about the trade-offs involved.

But the fundamental challenge is increasingly difficult to avoid.

Britain needs higher productivity.

It needs more investment.

It needs businesses capable of scaling.

And above all, Britain needs to grow again.

The Overton Window and Consensus in British Right Wing Politics

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:00:03 GMT

There's a growing consensus on the right wing of UK politics on the treatment needed for the British state and the British economy. But only Reform UK - and the wider Reform movement which has been pushing these remedies for years - has the credibility to deliver.

Something significant is happening on the right wing of British politics.

Ideas that only a few years ago occupied the political margins are increasingly being discussed within mainstream politics: leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, abolishing Net Zero targets, restructuring the machinery of government, strengthening parliamentary sovereignty and reconsidering the power exercised by unelected institutions.

For Danny Kruger MP speaking at the Reform Conference 2026, this represents more than a collection of individual policy changes.

It suggests that the Overton window of British politics is moving.

Speaking during a Conference session on constitutional reform, Kruger welcomed what he sees as an emerging consensus across parts of the political right about the need for deeper institutional change.

But he also posed a more difficult question.

If politicians increasingly agree about the diagnosis, who can we turn to to actually deliver the treatment?

What Is the Overton Window?

The Overton window describes the range of political ideas considered acceptable or realistic within mainstream public debate at a particular moment.

That window is not fixed.

Ideas can move from politically unacceptable to controversial, from controversial to debatable, and eventually from debatable to mainstream policy.

British politics provides numerous examples.

Privatisation, Scottish devolution, same-sex marriage, Brexit and nationalisation have all occupied very different positions within mainstream political debate at different points in recent history.

We have every reason to believe another shift in the window, rather like Brexit in the early years, is now occurring.

This time, it concerns the institutions of the British state itself.

An Emerging Consensus on the Right?

During one Reform Conference discussion, attention turned to an interesting development within Conservative politics.

Senior Conservative politicians have increasingly adopted positions on constitutional and institutional questions that overlap with arguments previously associated with Reform UK and other parts of the political right.

The clearest example is the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Conservative Party has done an about-turn and now - like Reform - supports Britain leaving the ECHR.

But the discussion is becoming broader than the Convention itself.

It increasingly encompasses questions about judicial power, regulation, quangos, the Civil Service, government bureaucracy and the ability of elected governments to implement their programmes.

At Reform we welcome that development, and it is not really of much consequence if the Conservative Party agrees, five years down the line. You can apply the same principle to the Tory position today on Net Zero and its own Climate Change Act. Or on Inheritance Tax reform.

“It’s a very good thing that there is a growing consensus on the right of what the challenge is,” said Danny Kruger at the Conference.

That does not mean Reform and the Conservatives have become interchangeable.

Far from it.

Agreement about individual policies is different from agreement about the scale of institutional reform required.

From Individual Policies to the Machinery of Government

The central argument emerging from this discussion is that changing policies may not be sufficient if the institutions implementing those policies remain unchanged.

A government might promise lower taxation, reduced regulation, lower public spending or tighter immigration controls.

But what happens if the machinery of government is poorly aligned with those objectives?

For Danny Kruger MP, in his role in the engine room of Reform policymaking and preparations for government, that is where constitutional reform becomes important.

The argument is essentially that politicians on the right have traditionally concentrated too heavily on what government should do and insufficiently on whether government institutions are capable of doing it.

That changes the political question, and it is a challenge that only Reform is taking seriously.

Instead of simply asking:

What policies should the next government introduce?

Reform policymakers are going to be seeking the right to ask:

What kind of state would be required to implement these policies?

The ECHR as a Case Study

The debate over the European Convention on Human Rights illustrates how dramatically political boundaries can change.

Leaving the ECHR was once outside the mainstream position of Britain's major governing parties.

It is now official Conservative Party policy as well as a position that was first advocated by Reform UK.

That does not mean the political argument is settled.

Supporters of withdrawal argue that it would strengthen parliamentary sovereignty and give elected governments greater freedom in areas such as immigration. It would enable Britain to once again deport foreign national criminals, visa overstayers and once again act with national sovereign control over borders and immigration policy.

Opponents argue that remaining within the Convention provides important protections for individual rights and maintains Britain's participation in a human-rights framework that the UK helped establish in Europe after the Second World War.

The Labour Government currently supports remaining within the ECHR while claiming that its interpretation can be reformed in response to contemporary challenges.

What has clearly changed is the range of positions being debated within mainstream politics.

That is precisely what a shift in the Overton window looks like.

Reform and the Conservatives: Similar Diagnosis, Different Argument

Danny Kruger is particularly interesting in this debate because he has experienced both parties from inside Parliament.

He represented the Conservatives before joining Reform UK.

His criticism of his former party is therefore not primarily that no Conservatives understand the institutional argument.

Indeed, he explicitly acknowledges that many do.

His criticism is that he doubts whether the Conservative Party as an institution is sufficiently united around the programme required to implement it.

Kruger argues that sections of the Conservative Party remain divided over questions such as the ECHR and the extent of constitutional reform. Indeed large parts of the Conservative parliamentary party continue to push views that would be more at home in the Liberal Democrats, on broad issues from Brexit to tax cuts to immigration.

The Conservatives attempt to reject that characterisation and they present their current programme as a detailed plan for changing the operation of government: still representing a broad church, without any real political consensus within the parliamentary party. It is known that Conservative Central Office for example, continues to prioritise prospective parliamentary candidates with anti-Brexit views, over those PPCs with pro-Brexit views.

Essentially the debate on the right wing of politics is increasingly about credibility and implementation, rather than simply identifying the problem.

Radicalism Versus Responsibility

Speaking at the Reform Conference fringe event Danny Kruger repeatedly returned to two concepts: radicalism and responsibility.

He argues that successful political reform requires both.

Radicalism without responsibility can produce disruption without effective government.

Responsibility without radicalism can preserve institutions that a government was elected to change.

For Reform UK, the challenge is therefore continuing to convince voters that it can combine the two.

The challenge of this is about translating a radical political spirit into a programme capable of governing a complicated modern state.

That is harder than campaigning.

Reforming institutions means understanding legislation, departmental structures, international obligations, administrative law and the practical consequences of changing organisations that may have existed for decades.

The political challenge is to demonstrate that radical intentions can coexist with administrative competence.

Revolution or Restoration?

One of the most important distinctions about Reform's arguments is that we continue to lead the political thought process and the language of political change. More of Reform's policies over time are being taken up by the Conservatives, and to some extent by Labour.

It is going to be increasingly necessary to talk about the concept of restoration over revolution. What Reform is essentially proposing is a restoration of Britain's core principles for government, and not a revolution.

That distinction matters.

Our Reform objectives are not about constructing an entirely new British constitutional system.

Instead, we are arguing for restoring principles that have clearly weakened over time: parliamentary sovereignty, democratic accountability and clearer responsibility for political decisions.

In that interpretation, institutional reform is not supposed to overturn the British constitutional tradition.

It is intended to recover parts of it.

Critics might question that interpretation and argue that significant changes to judicial, regulatory or human-rights institutions could themselves represent a substantial constitutional transformation.

The disagreement therefore extends beyond individual policies to competing understandings of what Britain's constitutional traditions actually require.

Brexit and the Politics of Institutional Change

If we return to Brexit for a moment, we can see that as an important precedent for restoration - or at least the partial restoration - of Britain's ability to freely govern itself.

Whatever view is taken of Brexit, the process demonstrated how disruptive major constitutional change can become.

Leaving the European Union required legislation, negotiations, administrative restructuring and prolonged political conflict.

For us Reformers, and for anyone who understands Brexit as a constitutional event, that period in history is very instructive.

Major institutional change inevitably creates resistance because institutions develop established procedures, interests and expectations.

For supporters of Brexit, the ongoing resistance can appear to demonstrate why change was necessary.

For opponents of Brexit, the same resistance may indicate that safeguards are preventing governments from acting too hastily, or we should say really, replacing one type of underperforming government with another.

The lesson is therefore not simply that institutional change is difficult.

It is that constitutional reform requires substantially more preparation than an ordinary manifesto commitment.

Competition on the Right Can Move Political Debate

There is another important dimension to how Reform wants to frame constitutional reform.

The rise of Reform UK has created electoral competition on the political right. That competition is clear evidence that democracy is functioning, even though it only happens after a protracted period of time.

A new political party can challenge an established party, introduce different ideas into public debate and force competitors to respond. Reform UK is now Britain's largest political party in the current opinion polls and in terms of membership, so this is evidence in that sense that the British system is working.

It is a process that can shift the Overton window.

A position initially advocated by a smaller party can become more politically significant as its support grows.

Established parties may then adopt, modify or explicitly reject it.

The result is not necessarily political consensus.

But the boundaries of political debate have changed.

The Battle Is Increasingly About Who Can Deliver

This creates an interesting situation in British politics.

If different parties begin adopting similar language about sovereignty, accountability and institutional reform, political competition moves to another level.

The argument is no longer simply: w ho believes in reform?

It becomes: what exactly would they reform, how far would they go and could they actually implement it?

On this score, the analysis strongly favours Reform UK.

Danny Kruger argues that his former party lacks the institutional appetite for sufficiently radical change, while presenting Reform as the political movement capable of carrying it through. It is a powerful argument that the Conservatives will probably never recover from.

In this sense the broader development is more significant than the dispute between the two parties.

Both are now engaging with questions about the structure and authority of the British state that occupied a much smaller part of mainstream political debate a decade ago.

These important policies are finally coming into the Overton window for mainstream discussion, and it is the Reform Party that is making it happen.

What Would a New Consensus Actually Include?

It is too early to describe the entire British right as sharing a settled constitutional programme. There remain substantial disagreements over both policy and implementation.

Nevertheless, several recurring themes can now be identified in the debate, all of which have been driven by Reform:

greater emphasis on parliamentary sovereignty
reconsideration of Britain's relationship with the ECHR
stronger democratic accountability for public institutions
reform of quangos and arm's-length bodies
concern about the capacity of the Civil Service and wider state to implement elected governments' programmes
and a broader debate about the appropriate limits of judicial, regulatory and executive power.

Agreement on the existence of these questions does not amount to agreement on their answers.

But it does demonstrate how the political conversation is changing.

Has the Overton Window Already Shifted?

On some issues, the answer appears to be yes.

Withdrawal from the ECHR provides the clearest example.

A proposal once associated with the outer edges of mainstream debate, led by Reform, is now official Conservative policy and an established subject of national political argument.

Meanwhile the wider transformation Reform envisages — involving Whitehall, regulators, quangos, courts and other institutions — continues to move gradually more into mainstream acceptance.

The Next Battle on the British Right

All of this reveals to us something important about the next phase of politics on the British right.

The argument may increasingly be less about whether Britain's institutions need reform and more about the scale, direction and constitutional limits of that reform.

For Reform UK, the proposition is that changing individual policies without changing the machinery of government will prove insufficient.

For the Conservatives, they claim to have their own proposals for sovereignty and institutional reform.

And for Labour and others who defend many of the existing constitutional arrangements, the challenge will be explaining why institutional independence and legal constraints remain valuable components of democratic government.

That creates a much larger debate than the fortunes of any single political party.

It is a debate about the nature of the British state itself. And it is a debate that goes to the core of Reform's DNA.

Who should exercise power?

What limits should be placed upon that power?

How directly should public institutions respond to election results?

And perhaps most importantly:

When voters elect a government promising fundamental change, how much power should that government have to deliver it?

Those questions are moving from the margins towards the centre of British political debate.

And that may ultimately prove more consequential than the competition between the parties currently arguing over them.

Taking Back Democratic Control: Do the British Public Really Care about Constitutional Reform?

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:48:53 GMT

Such is the scale of Britain's decline and the loss of confidence amongst ordinary voters, that even when important policies for better government can be demonstrated, people doubt whether the country's institutions can really deliver.

Why should constitutional reform matter to someone who simply wants to get a doctor’s appointment, see the potholes repaired or keep more of their earnings?

That question goes to the heart of Reform UK’s argument about the way Britain is governed. It is an important principle behind Reform's plan for government and it hardly ever gets discussed in the mainstream media.

Speaking during a discussion at the 2026 Reform Conference about constitutional and institutional reform, Danny Kruger MP argued that many of the problems people encounter in everyday life cannot be separated from a deeper question: where does power actually reside in modern Britain, and how effectively can voters hold those exercising it to account?

The argument is that strengthening British democracy requires more than changing individual policies. It requires examining the institutions through which political decisions are made and restoring clearer democratic accountability.

Does the Public Really Care About Constitutional Reform?

Danny Kruger MP is currently entrusted with Reform's backroom department preparing for the nitty gritty business of government.

One of the most important questions put to Kruger at the Reform Conference concerned whether constitutional reform is simply too remote from everyday life to resonate with voters. Anyone involved with political canvassing or talking with the public on the doorstep will know this.

People rarely answer the door and complain about the influence of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the constitutional position of the judiciary or the relationship between ministers and unelected public bodies.

Their concerns are usually much more immediate.

Why can’t I get a GP appointment?

Why are my taxes so high?

Why haven't the roads been repaired?

Why isn't my local school performing better?

Why does government appear unable to fix things?

The challenge for advocates of institutional reform is therefore explaining why apparently technical questions about government structures have any relevance to those everyday problems.

Kruger believes the connection is stronger than it first appears.

The Question of "They Won’t Let You"

My own recent experience of speaking to voters has convincedme that public understanding of the problem goes considerably deeper than Westminster or the media sometimes assumes.

I am constantly encountering voters who respond to Reform’s policy proposals by asking:

“How are you going to do it?”

Or, more revealingly, a lot of voters on the doorstep say something like:

“They won’t let you.”

I interpret that reaction as evidence of a broader public suspicion that changing the government does not necessarily change the machinery through which Britain is governed.

That is an important distinction.

Voters may not necessarily discuss the constitutional relationship between Parliament, regulators, courts, government departments and arm’s-length bodies.

But they may nevertheless feel that elected governments struggle to deliver the changes they promise.

Our clear Reform argument is that these apparently separate frustrations are connected.

From Public-Service Failure to Institutional Reform

People experience government primarily through outcomes.

They experience it when they use the NHS, send their children to school, pay their taxes, drive on local roads or deal with public authorities.

Consequently, constitutional reform matters politically only if it can be connected to those experiences.

That dissatisfaction with individual services can sometimes reflect a deeper frustration with the capacity of government itself.

Again, my recent experience on the doorstep is that people almost universally complain that:

“Nothing works anymore.”

Then the interesting part of the Reform argument concerning the root cause comes into play.

Britain has developed institutional structures that can make it difficult for elected governments to exercise the authority voters believe they have given them.

Critics might dispute that diagnosis, arguing that independent institutions can provide expertise, continuity, legal safeguards and important checks on executive power.

That disagreement goes directly to one of the central constitutional questions facing Britain: how should democratic control be balanced against institutional independence? But one thing is certain, only Reform is willing to challenge the status quo in this way, and deliver better outcomes for ordinary people.

What Does Democratic Control Actually Mean?

Reform’s answer to the question of governments taking more control begins with strengthening the connection between elections and government action.

When voters elect a government on a manifesto, they reasonably expect that government to have sufficient authority to attempt to implement it.

But modern government operates through a complicated network of institutions.

There is Parliament and the Civil Service, but also regulators, independent agencies, public bodies, courts, local government and organisations operating at arm’s length from ministers.

Many exist for legitimate reasons.

Independent institutions can prevent arbitrary decision-making. Regulators can provide specialist expertise. Courts uphold the law and protect legal rights. Independent fiscal institutions can provide scrutiny of government assumptions.

The constitutional question is therefore not whether these institutions should exist.

It is where their authority should begin and end, and how they themselves should be held accountable.

Our argument at Reform is that the balance has shifted too far away from elected political authority.

Why "Take Back Control” Resonated and Still Resonates

We can look to the Brexit-era phrase " Take Back Control" as evidence that constitutional arguments can resonate with the electorate.

Whatever view people take of Brexit itself, the slogan was fundamentally about political authority.

Who makes the rules?

Who can change them?

And who can voters remove if they disagree with those decisions?

For us at Reform, the political power of that message demonstrated that voters can engage with constitutional questions when those questions are expressed in terms of democratic control.

The lesson we draw is that constitutional reform does not need to be presented as an academic debate about institutional architecture.

It can instead be framed around a straightforward democratic principle:

The people who exercise political power should ultimately be accountable to the electorate.

The Challenge of Unelected Institutions

This principle inevitably raises difficult questions.

Modern democracies deliberately place some responsibilities beyond immediate political control.

Central banks, regulators, courts, electoral authorities and other independent institutions may be given autonomy precisely because governments should not necessarily control every decision.

The debate is therefore not simply about elected versus unelected institutions.

It is about establishing the appropriate boundaries between them.

Too little independence can allow governments to accumulate excessive power.

Too little democratic accountability can create institutions that voters feel unable to influence.

A serious programme of constitutional reform would therefore have to determine which institutions genuinely require independence, what limits should apply to their powers and how Parliament should scrutinise them.

Strengthening Parliament

There is another important implication of this Reform argument.

Restoring democratic control should not simply mean transferring more authority to ministers.

Britain is a parliamentary democracy, whether or not those seeking to undo Brexit are willing to understand.

If power is brought back from external or arm’s-length institutions, UK Parliament itself would need to play a stronger role in scrutinising how that power is exercised.

That could mean more effective parliamentary oversight of public bodies, clearer ministerial responsibility and greater transparency about where important decisions are actually being made. These are all things that we are starting to see, and which we will see more of, in Reform's policy pledges.

The objective will be to make the chain of accountability easier for citizens to understand:

voters elect MPs, Parliament holds government to account, ministers take responsibility for government decisions, and public institutions operate within clearly defined democratic mandates.

If we take a step back and really think about it, the constant weakening of UK Parliament and clousding the lines of responsibility for ministers, have been the common denominator for the last 20 years of Conservative and Labour governments.

Reforming the System Without Removing Safeguards

This is where constitutional reform becomes more difficult than political rhetoric sometimes suggests.

Britain's institutions do not merely constrain governments. They can also protect citizens from governments.

Judicial independence, parliamentary scrutiny, regulatory safeguards and an impartial Civil Service all perform constitutional functions.

Any attempt to strengthen democratic control therefore has to answer an equally important question: w ho constrains the government itself?

A system in which elected politicians cannot implement legitimate policies risks democratic frustration.

But a system in which winning an election gives the executive virtually unrestricted authority creates a different constitutional danger.

The challenge is finding the appropriate balance. To put more power back in the hands of Parliament and in this way, back to the people.

From Radicalism to Responsible Government

This area is going to be one of the major challenges facing the Reform UK government. It is a challenge that is taken very seriously.

An opposition party can promise radical change. A governing party must demonstrate that it understands how to implement that change responsibly.

It has been described as Reform’s major task, translating its “radical spirit” into responsible government.

For sure, that requires more than identifying institutions the party wants to change.

It requires bringing in more people capable of governing, detailed plans for reforming institutions and a clear understanding of the consequences.

Establishing that credibility is crucial.

Reform can campaign on tax reductions, improving local communities, supporting families and improving public services.

But behind those policies sits a more fundamental proposition: the people are seeking a new type of government that is really capable of delivering what voters elect it to do.

A Government That Can Be Held Accountable

Ultimately, the Reform argument in this area of constitutional change is about responsibility.

If a government promises something and fails to deliver it, voters should be able to identify who was responsible.

If ministers possess the necessary powers but make poor decisions, they should be held accountable.

If Parliament passes legislation, voters should be able to see how that legislation is implemented.

And where independent institutions exercise significant public power, their responsibilities and limits should be clearly understood. If a minister becomes unable to deliver a specific policy objective, let us put the institution responsbile clearly under the spotlight.

None of this eliminates the need for constitutional checks and balances.

It makes defining those checks and balances even more important.

Can Britain Reconnect Power and Responsibility?

The deeper question raised by the work of Danny Kruger and Reform's current preparations for government is therefore not simply whether Britain needs constitutional reform.

It is whether political power and political responsibility have become too disconnected.

For Reform UK, strengthening Britain's democratic institutions means attempting to reconnect them: clearer ministerial responsibility, stronger parliamentary accountability and greater democratic oversight of institutions exercising public power.

Supporters of that approach argue that it could make government more responsive to elections.

Critics are likely to ask whether weakening independent institutions could concentrate too much authority in the executive.

That debate matters because constitutional arrangements ultimately determine something very practical: who has the power to make decisions, who can challenge those decisions and who the public can hold responsible when things go wrong.

Our central argument at Reform is that constitutional reform should therefore not be regarded as an obscure Westminster concern.

It is connected to a much more familiar public question: when people vote for change, how capable is the government they elect of delivering it?

Reforming Whitehall and DEI: Towards a Smaller, More Responsive Civil Service

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:09:00 GMT

Declining public sector productivity has emerged as one of the UK’s most critical economic challenges, costing the economy an estimated £80 billion a year.

While the private sector has rebounded and outpaced its pre-pandemic performance, the public sector has experienced a severe productivity imbalance. ONS data shows that total public service productivity remains 2.5% to 3.4% lower than in 2019. The bloated state has become an immovable obstacle to Britain's progress.

Reforming Britain’s Civil Service is not simply a question of cutting its size. For Danny Kruger MP, who is leading Reform UK’s preparation for government operation behind the scenes, it is more a question of radically engineering how it functions, driving greater efficiency and responsiveness to ministerial direction.

Reform UK believes Britain needs a fairly fundamental change in how government works: a smaller Civil Service, better rewards for high-performing officials, greater accountability for results and a reassessment of the influence of quangos and diversity, equity and inclusion policies across public institutions.

Speaking during a question-and-answer session at the Reform Conference 2026, Kruger set out some of the principles that he believes should underpin reform of the British state.

A Smaller but Better-Paid Civil Service

The Reform vision for Whitehall is for a “smaller and more strategic Civil Service,” while also expanding AI and digital capability.

One of the questions put to Danny Kruger at the Reform Conference concerned senior public-sector pay.

The questioner pointed to an approach he had encountered in the Netherlands, where senior officials in certain public bodies were subject to limits linked to ministerial pay, and the questioner asked whether Britain should consider something similar.

The view of Reform though, is that rather than focusing primarily on imposing a ceiling on salaries, Britain should be prepared to pay talented civil servants well — particularly if government wants to attract experienced people from business and other sectors.

“I'd like to see civil servants paid properly. I want high-quality people,” said Danny Kruger at the Reform Conference.

The crucial distinction, in the Reform argument, is between the salary paid to an individual civil servant and the total cost of the Civil Service.

The overall policy objective will be to reduce the overall wage bill by reducing the size of the organisation, while potentially paying some of the people who remain more competitively.

In other words, the model would be:

fewer civil servants, higher expectations and stronger rewards for performance. There will be more effective use of technology, with organisation re-engineering and a cultural change with a major training element.

There is a strong argument, accepted by Reform, that senior Civil Service salaries have already declined substantially in real terms and the next government needs to think carefully about whether existing salary structures are capable of attracting the skills Whitehall needs.

Bringing Private-Sector Expertise into Government

A central challenge for any government attempting major reform is attracting people with the necessary technical, commercial and managerial expertise.

Reform is arguing that Civil Service remuneration should make it easier to recruit experienced people from the private sector.

That becomes particularly important as government becomes increasingly dependent on expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence, technology, procurement, infrastructure and large-scale project management.

The question, therefore, should not simply be: h ow much are civil servants paid?

It should also be: what capabilities is the taxpayer receiving in return?

Reform's proposed direction is towards a Civil Service in which remuneration is more closely connected to responsibility, expertise and measurable performance.

Moving Towards Performance-Related Pay

At the Reform Conference, Danny Kruger was particularly critical of what he characterised as a traditional Civil Service employment model based on relatively predictable salaries, long careers and valuable pension arrangements.

He argued instead for greater performance-related remuneration.

His preferred system would pay talented officials competitively while holding them much more directly accountable for outcomes.

As he put it: “I want to be paying people well now and reward them properly, but hold them properly to account for outcomes as well.”

This represents an important distinction in Reform’s emerging approach to Whitehall reform.

The Reform objective would not necessarily be a low-pay Civil Service. It would be a smaller, more performance-oriented Civil Service.

That also raises some practical questions.

How should performance be measured in government departments? How can ministers distinguish between individual performance and failures caused by wider government policy? And how can performance incentives be introduced without undermining the political impartiality traditionally expected of permanent civil servants?

Those questions would have to be addressed in the design of any future reform programme.

The Core Problem for the Public Secor: Inputs versus Outputs

The decline in Civil Service productivity and wider public sector productivity is stark and it is being driven by a mismatch between the resources funnelled into the state and the services delivered. Between 2019 and late 2024, inputs into UK public services (staffing, infrastructure maintenance, and labour hours) swelled by nearly 25%. However, the actual output delivered to taxpayers only grew by 14%.

This has triggered warnings from institutions like the Bank of England, noting that hundreds of thousands of public workers have been added to payrolls without a corresponding rise in measurable output.

The productivity crisis varies significantly across different government services:

in healthcare, as the largest public sector component, the NHS is the biggest contributor to the slump. Healthcare productivity was 7.9% lower in 2024 than in 2019, weighed down by immense input pressures, rising backlogs, and staffing crises.

in the justice system, the courts system has witnessed the sharpest individual decline, dropping by roughly 12% since 2019, which has left criminal court backlogs exceeding 65,000 cases. Hundreds of court buildings are left idle without court hearings every day.

Elevated sickness absence rates and the prevalence of working-from-home arrangements across the public sector—contrasted with aggressive return-to-office mandates in the private sector—are frequently cited by analysts as barriers to efficiency gains.

Reforming the Quango State

The discussion at the Reform Conference also hinged around how to deal with Britain’s network of arm’s-length bodies and quangos.

Reform UK is arguing for reducing the number, the cost and influence of such organisations, sweeping them up so they come under minsterial portfolio. This is part of a broader attempt to restore clearer lines of democratic accountability.

The argument is straightforward: when important decisions are delegated to organisations operating at arm’s length from elected ministers, responsibility can become difficult for voters to identify.

If a policy fails, who is accountable?

Is it the minister? The department? The regulator? An independent agency? A statutory commission?

The Reform argument points towards a system in which ministers and elected governments will carry greater direct responsibility for policy, and greater tools to be able to deliver it.

Nothwithstanding that, abolishing or restructuring arm’s-length organisations also presents trade-offs. Such bodies can provide specialist expertise, regulatory continuity and a degree of independence from day-to-day political pressure.

The central debate is therefore not simply whether Britain should have quangos, but which functions genuinely require institutional independence and which should be returned to direct democratic control.

The DEI Question

To some people, the most contentious part of Reform's plans for the public sector are the bold plans for diversity, equity and inclusion policies, to remove these goals, together with all the distractions, the training requirements, the drag on resources and the division, that they bring to public bodies. Reform is essentially arguing that local councils, schools and government departments should not have responsibilities to deliver what are essentially political programmes such as critical race theory or other teachings designed to denigrate British values or British history.

At the Reform Conference Danny Kruger was asked how Reform UK would implement proposals to restrict DEI programmes across public institutions and whether political appointees could be used to enforce such policies.

The question is particularly relevant to DEI in schools and colleges.

We have to acknowledge there is a certain tension at the heart of this issue.

On one hand, Reform wants to challenge ideas and practices that it regards as ideological or politically partisan.

On the other, government itself could become more prescriptive overall if ministers were to somehow dictate precisely what teachers were permitted to say in classrooms.

Kruger explicitly recognised this problem: “We need free speech. We don't want government interfering precisely in exactly what is said in the classroom.”

The preferred long-term solution for Reform is therefore partly structural: making schools more accountable to parents and local communities, a movement for free speech that will naturally remove DEI, the tick-boxing and the prescrpitive way that community values are being taught.

Should Schools Be More Accountable to Parents?

Reform is arguing that greater parental and community accountability will naturally reduce the need for detailed central government intervention.

In our view, schools have become too heavily influenced by central government institutions, education bureaucracies and teaching unions.

Shifting accountability towards parents and communities will produce what most of us would regard as more balanced classroom practice, more freedom for pupils to think and learn, without the constant political pressure of DEI.

But Reform will probably still introduce clearer national rules in some areas.

These could include guidance concerning political advocacy in schools, critical race theory, teaching about biological sex and transgender issues, and the distinction between education and political campaigning.

The challenge will be defining those boundaries precisely.

A government seeking to prevent political indoctrination would simultaneously have to ensure that its own rules did not become a different form of political control over education.

That balance between political neutrality and academic freedom would therefore be one of the most important questions facing any such programme.

From Rules to Institutional Culture

There is a broader theme running through what Reform wants to achieve in this area.

Reforming government cannot be achieved simply by changing individual policies. It also requires changing the incentives and culture of institutions.

That applies to the Civil Service, public bodies and education.

For the Civil Service, Kruger envisages stronger performance incentives and greater accountability.

For quangos, the emphasis is on restoring clearer responsibility to elected politicians.

For schools, the emphasis is on strengthening accountability to parents and communities while defining boundaries around political advocacy.

Taken together, these proposals amount to an argument for shifting power away from permanent institutions and towards more directly accountable structures.

The Challenge of Reforming Whitehall

Civil Service reform has been attempted by governments of different political persuasions for decades.

The difficulty is that modern government is enormously complex.

Departments oversee huge budgets, sophisticated technology systems, international obligations, public procurement programmes and services affecting millions of people.

Reducing bureaucracy without losing institutional knowledge is therefore difficult.

Likewise, introducing private-sector expertise into Whitehall may improve commercial and technical capability, but government cannot operate exactly like a private company. Ministers and officials are constrained by Parliament, administrative law, public accountability and obligations that businesses do not face.

Any serious reform programme therefore has to distinguish between bureaucracy that genuinely obstructs government and institutional safeguards that exist for good reasons.

A Different Model for the British State

As Reform's politices are becoming clearer, all of this points towards a recognisable model of government that Reform UK is developing.

The Reform government will seek a smaller central bureaucracy, greater ministerial accountability, fewer arm’s-length institutions, stronger performance incentives and greater local and parental influence over public services.

Importantly, Reform's argument on Civil Service pay is much more nuanced than a straightforward programme of salary reductions or what trades unions might crudely call "cuts".

Reform is arguing that Britain could simultaneously reduce the total cost of Whitehall while paying some individual civil servants more.

That would mean reducing headcount, recruiting people with stronger specialist capabilities, rewarding high performance and expecting officials to accept greater accountability for results.

Whether such reforms could produce the improvements is going to depend heavily on implementation.

Reducing the size of government is relatively easy to announce. Redesigning institutions so that a smaller state actually works better is considerably harder. It is the really important and most difficult aspect of government that has not been approached in any sense by either Labour or the Conservatives.

The devil, of course, is going to be in the detail. But Reform is up to the task.

It is ultimately the challenge facing Reform UK — and any government serious about reforming Whitehall.

The question is not simply how to make the British state smaller.

It is how to make it more capable, more accountable and more responsive to the people it exists to serve.

Who Really Runs Britain? The Battle Between Democracy and the Permanent State

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:00:07 GMT

Considering Brexit and the ongoing 'Brexit betrayal', the expanding reach of domestic and international courts, Labour's push for more complex layers of local government, the quangos and non-governmental agencies, Britain has a growing democratic deficit. Reform UK is making the case to restore power back to where it belongs, directly to the British people through Parliament and other democratic institutions.

Who governs Britain?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious.

The people elect Parliament.

A government emerges from Parliament.

Ministers make decisions.

Civil servants implement them.

And voters eventually decide whether those politicians deserve to remain in office.

That's the theory.

But Danny Kruger's contribution at the Reform UK Conference 2026 raised a much more uncomfortable question:

Where does power actually reside in modern Britain?

The answer that Kruger and other Reformers have been making is that too much political authority has gradually moved away from institutions directly accountable to voters.

The Reform UK proposed solution is nothing less than a restructuring of the relationship between Parliament, ministers, the Civil Service, regulators, quangos and the courts.

Whatever your politics, the argument raises one of the most important democratic questions of our time.

Should institutions constrain politicians — or should elected politicians ultimately control the institutions?

The Problem of Power Without Accountability

Democracy contains a remarkably simple bargain.

We give politicians power.

In return, we can remove them.

That second part is crucial.

Power becomes democratically legitimate because it is temporary and conditional.

If a government raises taxes, changes immigration policy, mismanages the economy or damages public services, voters can punish it.

But what happens when important decisions are increasingly made by institutions that voters cannot remove?

This is the philosophical problem at the centre of our Reform argument.

Modern governments have to operate through an extraordinary ecosystem of regulators, agencies, quangos, courts and administrative bodies.

Many were deliberately designed to possess some element of continuity and independence from ministers. Often for good reasons.

But collectively they have grown to create something unusual, and frankly something anti-democratic:

power without direct electoral accountability.

Why Independent Institutions Exist

There is, however, an extremely strong argument for institutional independence.

Politicians aren't automatically wise simply because they have won an election.

Governments can make terrible decisions.

They can become corrupt.

They can abuse power.

They can prioritise short-term popularity over long-term stability.

Independent institutions provide friction.

Central banks can protect monetary policy from electoral opportunism.

Courts can protect individuals against unlawful government action.

Regulators can enforce standards.

Civil servants can provide continuity and expertise.

These aren't trivial advantages.

Indeed, much of modern constitutional government has been built around the idea that power should be constrained precisely because power can be abused.

But there is another side to the argument.

What Happens When the Constraints Have Become the Government?

Imagine that voters repeatedly elect politicians promising a particular change.

Yet that change repeatedly fails to happen, exactly as repeated Conservative and Labour governments have failed to deliver on economic growth, or on immigration.

Perhaps ministers encounter legal restrictions.

Perhaps regulators object.

Perhaps administrative structures make implementation extraordinarily difficult.

Perhaps international obligations limit available options.

Perhaps departments simply move too slowly.

Eventually voters may begin to ask a dangerous question:

What exactly is the point of voting?

This is where institutional restraint can begin to create its own democratic problem.

A system designed to prevent governments doing bad things can gradually make governments incapable of doing almost anything significant.

Our argument at Reform UK is essentially that Britain has moved too far in this direction, creating a system where it is near-impossible for ministers to govern. Former Conservative ministers defected to the Reform Party, have expressed precisely this view.

The Return of the Crown in Parliament

The constitutional concept underlying Reform's thinking is an old one:

the Crown in Parliament.

In simplified terms, sovereignty and democratic accountability ultimately resides in Parliament. It is a fundamental constitutional principle that as a nation we have collectively forgotten.

The executive governs through authority derived from Parliament, whose members ultimately derive their legitimacy from voters.

Reform's recently published programme, written by Danny Kruger MP and the Reform policy team argues that Reform would seek to restore this conception of sovereignty and place the Civil Service more firmly under the authority of elected government.

This represents a very different philosophy from the gradual movement towards independent institutions, judicial oversight and arm's-length administration that has characterised recent decades.

It asks a fundamental question:

Who should have the final word?

The Civil Service: Servant or Guardian?

Perhaps nowhere is this tension clearer than in the Civil Service.

The traditional ideal is admirable.

Civil servants are supposed to serve governments of any political persuasion impartially.

They provide expertise.

They warn ministers when policies may fail.

They preserve institutional memory.

And once ministers make lawful decisions, officials implement them.

But our concern at Reform is that this relationship has evolved.

The permanent administrative state, in our analysis, increasingly sees itself not merely as the servant of government but as one of the guardians of the political system. In the post-Brexit era we have an administrative body that has forgotten how to govern, either it chooses not to govern or it prefers to simply follow the line of international judges, international courts, even the EU institutions we are meant to have left behind.

Our proposed Reform solution would be to restore a much clearer hierarchy:

Voters → Parliament → Ministers → Civil Service.

Responsibility would flow upwards.

Authority would flow downwards.

It is intellectually coherent.

The Politicisation Problem

Suppose ministers receive significantly greater power to appoint and dismiss senior officials.

Government may become more responsive.

But what happens when another government takes power?

Does it replace those officials again?

And again four years later?

Britain could gradually move towards a more American model in which thousands of government positions become politically contested.

That could increase democratic control.

It could also destroy institutional continuity.

There is therefore no perfect answer.

A permanent bureaucracy can become too powerful.

A politicised bureaucracy can become too partisan, for any given period in time.

The challenge is certainly in finding the equilibrium. But who could argue that change isn't massively overdue? Change is essential if any UK elected government is ever to deliver on its mandate again.

Quangos and the Accountability Gap

Quangos illustrate the problem particularly well.

When governments create independent agencies, ministers can sometimes achieve an attractive political arrangement.

They retain some influence while avoiding complete responsibility.

If something succeeds, government can claim credit.

If something fails, responsibility can be redirected towards the independent organisation.

Our Reform solution is much simpler:

return substantially more authority back to ministers.

If ministers have the power, ministers carry the responsibility. The Reform plan is bring Britain's 400-plus quangos under the minsterial portfolio of the relevant minsters within the first 100 days of the Reform government.

And if voters dislike the outcome, they can remove them.

There is a compelling democratic logic to this.

Power should follow accountability.

But once again there is a counterargument.

Some decisions genuinely benefit from insulation from politics.

The difficult question isn't whether all quangos are good or bad.

It is: which decisions genuinely require independence — and which have merely been outsourced from democratic accountability?

That is a debate Britain nneds to have institution by institution. And it is going to happen.

The Bank of England Question

Kruger went further at the 2026 Reform Conference by raising questions about the independence of the Bank of England's monetary-policy function, describing its position as something that should be reviewed.

That takes the debate into sensitive territory.

Central-bank independence is based on the idea that interest-rate decisions should be protected from politicians tempted to stimulate the economy immediately before elections. It has been only partially successful: yes in terms of maintaining low inflation, but not in terms of delivering an economic platform for growth and wealth creation.

The counterargument is getting stronger, and it is around democracy.

Interest rates affect mortgages, employment, investment, house prices and economic growth.

These are enormously consequential political outcomes.

So why should such important decisions be insulated from democratic government?

Again, there is no black and white answer.

But the tension illustrates the broader theme perfectly.

Expert independence versus democratic control. It is only Reform who are prepared to have this debate in public and to make the Bank of England work better for ordinary British workers, and not just for financial institutions.

The Next Government Will Need to Move Quickly, but Carefully

If Reform UK enters government committed to major reform of quangos and restoring democracy by way of constitutional reform, the early decisions could be relatively straightforward.

Create the inventory of the current institutions.

Then identify the functions.

Determine which should disappear.

Determine which should return to departments.

Identify which require genuine independence.

And then examine which services could be delivered differently. A lot of this work is already being done and progressing on to creating draft legislation. Specific plans for the Cabinet Office and the immigration functions of the Home Office have already been confirmed by Reform and announced.

Implementation is no doubt going to be harder, at least that is the popular view being proposed in mainstream media.

This is going to require legislation, but also a cultural repositioning, significant training resources, departmental restructuring, workforce reform and detailed transition plans.

The greatest danger is going to be abolishing institutions faster than government could replace the functions that genuinely matter.

The greatest opportunity will be using structural reform to remove duplication and reconnect authority with responsibility.

Who Should the Public Hold Responsible?

Ultimately, the quango debate returns to the same question running through Reform's wider arguments about constitutional reform, the Civil Service and democratic institutions.

Who really governs Britain?

An advanced modern state will always require specialist agencies, regulators and expert institutions.

The issue is where their authority comes from, what limits apply to it and who answers when something goes wrong.

Our answer at Reform is that Britain needs fewer layers of government whose responsibilities are difficult for the electorate to trace.

Some organisations could disappear.

Some functions could move back into departments.

Some services could be delivered outside government.

And some independent bodies would remain where independence can be clearly justified.

The objective would not simply be a smaller organisational chart.

It would be a clearer relationship between power, responsibility and democratic accountability.

Because when a public institution exercises significant power, voters should be able to answer one fundamental question:

Who is ultimately responsible for what it does?

Britain Doesn't Just Need a New Government: It Needs a New Way of Governing

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:32:38 GMT

Tackling the Quangocracy, Britain's 444 unelected quasi-government bodies will be one of the hardest tasks for the next government.

Every election presents voters with a familiar proposition.

Change the politicians and you change the country.

Different ministers. Different policies. Different priorities. Different promises.

But what if changing the people at the top is no longer enough?

That was one of the most important questions raised by Danny Kruger MP at the Reform UK Conference 2026.

Kruger, who heads Reform UK's preparations for government, is concentrating on an issue that receives far less public attention than immigration, taxation, the NHS or economic growth:

the machinery of government itself.

His argument is potentially more consequential than any individual policy announcement.

Because there is little point winning an election with an ambitious programme if the machinery responsible for implementing that programme cannot deliver it.

The question therefore becomes:

Does Britain simply need a different government —or does Britain need a different way of governing?

The Difference Between Government and the State

We tend to use the words government and state interchangeably.

They aren't the same thing.

Governments come and go.

The state remains.

Behind ministers sits an enormous permanent infrastructure of government departments, civil servants, regulators, agencies, public bodies and arm's-length organisations.

Much of this machinery is essential.

Modern Britain could not function without permanent institutions staffed by people with expertise and experience.

But Reform's argument is that the relationship between elected government and the permanent state has become badly distorted.

Over several decades, increasing amounts of authority have migrated away from directly accountable ministers towards organisations operating at arm's length from them.

The result is a strange democratic contradiction.

Ministers remain responsible for outcomes while sometimes lacking sufficient control over the institutions producing those outcomes.

The Rise of the Quango State

One of Reform UK's principal targets is rightly Britain's vast network of quangos and arm's-length bodies.

Governments originally created many of these organisations for understandable reasons.

Some decisions benefit from specialist expertise.

Others benefit from independence from day-to-day political interference.

But every layer of institutional independence creates another question:

Who is ultimately accountable when something goes wrong?

The minister?

The regulator?

The agency?

The civil servants?

The board?

Parliament?

Eventually accountability can become so dispersed that nobody appears fully responsible.

Kruger's proposed answer is radical.

Bring substantially more authority back inside government and restore direct ministerial responsibility.

His May 2026 proposals explicitly called for scrapping quangos and returning their powers to government.

That would represent a significant reversal of the direction British administration has travelled over recent decades.

Abolish the Cabinet Office

Perhaps the most striking proposal is the abolition of the Cabinet Office itself.

This isn't simply administrative tinkering.

The Cabinet Office sits at the heart of British government.

Reform proposes replacing the current arrangement with a powerful Office of the Prime Minister , led by a political chief of staff.

Alongside it would sit a new organisation responsible for managing the Civil Service.

The idea is to create a clearer distinction.

Political leadership would come from the elected government.

Administrative support would exist to execute its programme.

Departments would regain greater responsibility for policy and delivery.

And ministers would once again become unmistakably accountable for what their departments actually do.

Whether such a structure would work is open to debate.

But the underlying question is difficult to dismiss:

If nobody can clearly identify who has the authority to make something happen, how can anyone be held accountable when it doesn't?

The Civil Service Question

Reform's proposals become controversial to some people, when they reach the Civil Service.

Britain's permanent Civil Service is based on an important principle: governments change, but an impartial administrative system remains.

There are obvious advantages.

Institutional knowledge survives elections.

Professional expertise remains available.

The machinery of government doesn't have to be reconstructed whenever voters change the governing party.

At Reform, of course we're not arguing that Britain should abandon a professional Civil Service altogether.

The argument is instead that political neutrality has gradually evolved into excessive institutional independence.

These proposals would therefore give ministers considerably greater power over senior appointments.

Ministers could recruit more people from outside government, reward high performers and remove officials who were failing to deliver.

At the 2026 Reform conference, Kruger suggested that many senior officials and agency leaders could ultimately be replaced, while also making clear that not everybody would need to go.

This raises an important democratic dilemma.

How do you preserve an impartial Civil Service without creating a permanent administrative class capable of frustrating elected governments?

But the opposite question matters equally:

How do you strengthen democratic control without politicising the Civil Service to the point where expertise and independence disappear?

Any serious reform would have to answer both.

The AI Revolution Could Positively Transform Whitehall

There is another dimension to the Reform programme that may prove even more significant over the long term.

Artificial intelligence.

The British administrative state was largely designed for a world of paper files, large clerical workforces and human information processing.

That world is disappearing.

AI can increasingly analyse documents, summarise evidence, process applications, identify patterns, prepare correspondence and perform administrative tasks that once required large teams.

The Reform proposals explicitly envisage major Civil Service headcount reductions alongside rapid AI adoption.

The proposed scale of reductions is realistic, when considered with the massive rises in headcount, and falling productivity, under both the last Conservative and Labour governments.

But the underlying technological question is still unavoidable.

If AI radically increases administrative productivity, should government continue operating with organisational structures designed for the twentieth century?

Probably not.

And this isn't fundamentally a left-versus-right issue.

Every future government will eventually have to confront it.

Government Must Be Able to Govern

There is a deeper principle behind all of this.

Democracy isn't simply about voting.

Voting matters only if the people who win elections possess the practical authority to implement what voters elected them to do.

Imagine a company where the chief executive is publicly responsible for performance but cannot select senior managers, restructure departments or substantially change how the organisation operates.

We would immediately recognise the contradiction.

Yet something similar can happen in government.

Political leaders can become simultaneously responsible for everything and in control of surprisingly little.

That isn't healthy for democracy. Considering the post-Brexit era, the massive rise in quangos such as Ofcom, Ofgen, the College of Policing, the Environment Agency (there's an estimated 450 of these pseudo-government bodies) our system of governance is long overdue for reform.

But There Is Risk In Politically-Appointed Bureaucrats

None of this means Reform's prescriptions are yet fully detailed. All of this is going to take a lot of public consultation, and further debate.

A powerful political centre carries risks.

An independent Civil Service exists partly to provide continuity, expertise and institutional restraint.

Independent regulators exist partly because some decisions should not be manipulated for short-term political advantage.

Arm's-length institutions can protect important functions from arbitrary government.

And giving ministers extensive hiring and firing powers could create a different problem:

replacing bureaucratic government with patronage government.

The challenge is therefore not simply to destroy institutional independence.

It is to find the correct boundary between independence and accountability.

That distinction will determine whether reform strengthens democracy or merely concentrates power.

Reform Versus Revolution

One of Reform's especially interesting descriptions of Danny Kruger's project came at the conference.

Let us remember that Reform is not attempting a revolution but a restoration of good government. It means a return to the days when the voice of parliament and parliamentary debate carried more weight, when our system of first-past-the-post voting and direct democracy had a clearer trajectory.

That distinction matters.

The case we're making at Reform is essentially that elected ministers once possessed clearer authority, Parliament could more effectively hold those ministers responsible, and the Civil Service existed primarily to execute the programme of the government of the day.

Whether Britain's past was ever quite that straightforward is debatable.

But the objective is clear:

authority and accountability should exist in the same place.

That is a powerful principle of organisational design whether we're discussing governments, companies or institutions.

Britain's Next Political Revolution May Be Administrative

Political debate naturally gravitates towards visible issues.

Taxes.

Immigration.

Housing.

Energy.

Healthcare.

Crime.

But underneath every one of those issues lies the same machine.

The state.

If that machine cannot implement decisions effectively, political promises eventually become irrelevant.

Britain may therefore be approaching a much larger debate than simply which party should form the next government.

The real question may be:

What should government itself look like in the twenty-first century?

Our Reform proposals provide one answer.

Critics will try to provide others.

But whichever party ultimately governs Britain, the problem of state capacity and our current massive democratic deficit isn't going away.

Because changing the politicians is only useful if the machinery beneath them is capable of turning political decisions into reality.

Britain doesn't simply need governments with better ideas.

It needs a state capable of delivering them.

Reform UK Taking Back Brexit From the Incompetent Conservatives

tlloydjones@yahoo.co.uk (Trevor Lloyd-Jones) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 17:32:07 GMT

Who cannot have watched the Conservative Party Conference recently and not been struck by what a lost tribe they are.

Writing for Conservative Home, even Emily Carver suggested it might be time for the Conservatives to go into opposition. For the Conservative loyalists and the grassroots it was a frustrating affair.

Judging by the social media commentary from numerous members, activists and Tory MPs, there was little in the way of enthusiasm for the party’s record nor for their prospects at the next election. Indeed, the overwhelming impression was of a Conservative party in the midst of an identity crisis.

Rishi Sunak’s keynote speech gave little for members to get overly excited or feel pride about. It was really rather a nerdy speech from a PM who seems not a very good team player, determined to make the HS2 cancellation the highlight of his speech for his own ends. He even tried to spin it into a ‘change’ message. Then we remember that parliament spent over 1,300 hours of time on legislation and scrutiny for HS2. So it was pretty un-parliamentary for the lone PM to just sweep it away himself at the party conference.

After days of chaotic messaging, we received confirmation that HS2 is officially derailed. The Northern leg is scrapped, and the money “saved” is supposed to be spent on hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the Midlands. The PM listed a whole of host of projects related to northern rail and then they were quietly removed from the Department for Transport website; apparently they were only ‘examples from the PM and not ‘pledges’.

Many Conservatives have long thought the case for this infrastructure was weak and, with ballooning costs (it costs ten-times more per kilometre than equivalent high speed rail in Europe), and the constant delays, the change in direction is pragmatic but certainly overdue. How many millions of pounds could have been saved, not to mention the new problem of unravelling land holdings, if the Conservative government had listened to our Reform UK arguments three years ago? The first loss is always the best loss, as Reform Party leader Richard Tice has been continually saying on his television appearances.

Conservative Party braced for a reckoning

So Tory members and activists know they’re headed inevitably towards a very big defeat at the next General Election. There was a big debate about the financial vision of Lizz Truss and the idea that she might be correct in warning of taxes being too high for too long. There was a big debate about immigration and on stage we had Suella Braverman talking about invasions, hurricanes, and how our national fabric is being changed by multiculturalism. She talks about invasions, and warnings and hurricanes of migrants. But as in all things with this government, she didn’t offer any solutions.

As Allison Pearson, so correctly pointed out in her Telegraph column: “If you'd asked people for their top 25 priorities for this government, pretty much nobody would have said banning smoking or rejigging A-level exams. These things from our nerdy Prime Minister probably wouldn’t even be in the top 50 priorities.

While the British do tend to like banning things for other people, to many small state Conservatives the smoking ban came across as absurdly illiberal, at the same time as being unenforceable and largely unneeded (very few teenagers now actually smoke). Surely it will just become another aspect of anti-social behaviour and borderline social work that our police forces do not have the time or resources to police?

Nigel Farage address to the Reform UK Conference

So what are we to conclude? The Conservative Party even invited the Reform UK honorary chairman Nigel Farage back into the party. Nigel drew some the biggest crowds and the most passionate followers at the Conservative Conference even though he was only there as a media representative for GB News. The Conservative Party is a broad church, said Sir Nicholas Chope. And then Nigel very vocally rejected these olive branches in his speech at the Reform UK Conference 2023.

“The very thought that I would rejoin a party,” said Nigel Fararge, “who we as the Brexit Party helped in the most astonishing way in 2019. And we did it. We did it within six weeks of launching the Brexit Party, by winning that European Election in 2019 and by getting rid of one of the worst prime ministers in British history, Theresa May. The very thought of it,” he said.

Nigel is right of course and there’s no doubt, that without the Brexit Party and all those supporters now involved in Reform UK, history in that summer of 2019 could have been completely different.

And we did it as a country collectively by pushing the importance of the Brexit agenda. Boris Johnson would never have become Prime Minister had it not been for the efforts of this movement and this party that is now Reform UK Maybe Rishi Sunak thought that Nigel Farage had been kind to the Conservatives back in 2019. A second referendum would certainly have divided the country even more, and we would not have been in a good place. So the deal for the Brexit Party to stand down candidates, like myself, in Tory seats, takes its place in history at an important turning point for Britain.

Brexit values and Brexit benefits are still unfulfilled

But what we’ve seen since 2019 is more divergence again from what the Brexit Party stood for, and what Reform UK now stands for. We have a Conservative Party that has seen legal, let alone illegal immigration, reach record levels. They’ve just put up Corporation Tax on our small businesses by 30% and refused to review the IR 35 rules for contractors, killing off 20% of the economic contribution of Britain’s smallest and most dynamic businesses. We have a Conservative Party with a bloated government and a bloated tax take, higher than anything under the last Labour government and the highest tax burden as a percentage of GDP for 70 years. We have the economy heading into a fiscal doom spiral of high inflation, high national debt, high debt servicing costs, low growth and low productivity. We have stubbornly high inflation and doubling of mortgage costs for many people.

We have the United Nations-ordained Net Zero agenda adding something like £1,600 additional energy costs per year, per household, and more for the next 30 years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. We have record numbers of jobless and people of working age who are economically inactive. Most of these do not even figure into the official unemployment data because they are ‘not looking for work’.

We have a Conservative Party that locked down the country unnecessarily three times, at great economic cost and cost to the welfare of children in particular. We have a Conservative Party that refuses to learn the lessons from lockdown and the vaccine roll out. We have a government which, at a time of great national danger, panicked and lurched from one response to the next based on the latest bickering in Number 10 Downing Street or the latest amateurish spreadsheet.

We have a Conservative Party that is now a social democrat liberalist party in all but name, defined by the big state, big control, nannying rules, high tax control over virtually every aspect of your life. They are indistinguishable in almost all respects from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party; like Labour only with fewer rainbow flags and fewer anti-semites.

Bye-bye Metro Bank

At the Reform UK Conference, Nigel Farage reminded everyone about the de-banking scandal. It’s good news that Lloyds Banking Group recently offered to get banking facilities up and running for Nigel. We all know about the establishment failure and cover up by Coutts/Nat West Banking Group. We know how regulation can work for vested interests and the hidden guiding hand that drives these things. But what about Metro Bank, the bank that suddenly foreclosed on the Brexit Party three years ago putting the party finances in a perilous position. Well, Metro Bank’s share price is currently down 99% from its peak, at the time of writing this.

Maybe Metro Bank won’t make it. Maybe that'll teach them that political de-banking is not a very good idea, particularly when still a majority of this country actually are good common sense people.

Former Metro Bank Chairman Anthony Thomsen said recently the bank has a flawed strategy and a limted future with its focus on branches.

So now we come to the legacy of the Brexit Party and what Reform UK means to people right now. As Nigel Farage said himself in his conference, he is good at spotting gaps. And there is an enormous, almighty gap in British politics right now. Reform UK is a party that has been quietly bubbling away, growing organically and spreading its national organisation, and quietly recruiting good quality candidates and good quality regional organisers. A bit like UKIP back in 2012 or 2013 some people might say, Reform UK has been growing steadily under the radar, sticking to its principles, to the point today of standing 8% to 10% in the polls. Even reaching the status of the third party above the Lib Dems in some polls and some regions.

At Reform UK we're actually making good, solid, steady progress. So when I get asked sometimes, so tell us honestly, what is the plan of the party? To attack the Conservatives? To attack Labour? I can only reply that Reform UK is going to carry on growing to become a positive political force for change in Britain. We’re not going to stop until we reach the point of achieving that. And it’s what we're about: national reform and renewal. We are party that is entering into new space because of what we are going to do, not because of what we say.

Conservatives right on diagnosis, wrong on action

The Conservative Party are making the right diagnoses on so many things, on tax on reducing the size of this big state and reducing immigration. And we see backbench Tory MPs talking about it all the time. But the public don’t see any action any more.

The Brexit Party supporters, and those voters who lent their votes to Brexit in the summer of 2019, can stand tall knowing that we helped Boris Johnson secure his 80-seat majority. Now you might have noticed that Reform UK has started putting the Brexit Party name back on the Reform UK logo. There’s a reason for that, as more and more people are starting to realise the amount of work left undone by the Conservatives following Brexit.

Whether it was dissatisfaction with Theresa May’s ‘surrender agreement (and all the issues it created for the later negotiations that followed), the lack of leadership, whether or not you agree with the Conservatives’ later decisions on Ukraine or the Covid response, domestically it was the Brexit Party that won the vote for the Conservatives in 2019.

Seven in ten 'leave' voters say there is more work to be done

Domestically the reason we won the vote, the reason the turn out was higher than the pundits expected, was because people fundamentally wanted us to take back our country and our borders. People wanted to secure the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement and not risk what might have followed from a Jeremy Corbyn government or a Lab-Lib coalition government.

That’s still true today, even if the Conservatives have completely failed the people on taking back control. When asked their main reason for voting for Brexit in a Guardian survey recently in October 2023, 68% of leave voters cited “having more control over our own laws”, and 67% said “stopping EU officials having control over the UK” continue to be the main concerns. For most leavers it was never about the details of the UK budget contribution, flag waving, or how much the NHS may or may not have benefited from leaving the EU.

When we look at strong and broad UK export growth, the new trade agreements, the growing financial fractures in the EU, the fractures on immigration, the rise of the EU army and non-consensual voting, Brussels waste and corruption, and the way EU-level politics gets even more disconnected from the people, there is hardly a single leave voter who wants to turn back the clock.

Only 45% of EU residents even know there are EU Parliament elections coming up in June 2024. These are the elections that in a fuzzy pseudo-democratic manner are supposed to influence the appointment of EU Commissioners and the President of the EU Commission. The European Parliament is the only such assembly in the world that has no powers to make laws, only to rubber stamp those it is told to. Democracy and nation states are dying across the EU. Government by faceless committees in Brussels and Strasbourg can only be something the most die-hard remainers and rejoiners could contemplate.

So we come back to what people fundamentally voted for in the 2019 elections, which was to take back control of our country, our courts, our institutions, our borders. It was about reinforcing our parliament and our democratic institutions. Only a vote for Reform UK is going to secure these things once again. So come on Britain, we need to dare to dream. We need to stop giving second chances to the old Lib-Lab-Con parties.

Brexit, Freedom and Real Functioning Democracy Should Be The Default Setting for the UK

tlloydjones@yahoo.co.uk (Trevor Lloyd-Jones) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 16:25:39 GMT

What we all agree about, from all sides of the political spectrum, is that UK has been badly managed in so many ways. But that's really got nothing to do with Brexit.

Even for viewers of BBC’s Question Time and Guardian readers, we all know that the issue of Brexit raises tensions and Britain has still yet to make the most of the opportunities of Brexit.

In a recent Guardian survey, 40% of leavers say the UK economy is significantly weaker after leaving the EU. However, it’s also true: they realise it is complex, and that Covid and the war in Ukraine, the way the government left us with poor energy security and high energy bills, these all have had their part to play.

The interesting stuff happens when you talk to people individually. Even loyal Tory supporters and a large chunk of Tory MPs like John Redwood, Mark Francois and Iain Duncan Smith admit that the government has not made the most of the UK’s independence. Some 70% of leave voters think there is a way Brexit could benefit the economy in a way that politicians have not yet materialised.

When asked their main reason for voting for Brexit in a Guardian survey recently, 68% of leavers cited “having more control over our own laws”, and 67% said “stopping EU officials having control over the UK” continue to be the main concerns.

Back in October 2019 a lot of us thought this matter would be closed, with the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, the free trade agreement and swathes of new laws on transitioning fishing, agriculture, product standards and other matters. Now in 2023 we’re still talking about Brexit fatigue. Aren't people sick of Brexit? Are there really new arguments to be made? Do you remember? Everyone was accusing the Brexit Party at that time of over-talking the Brexit question.

Well, the people may have been exhausted, but what a price we paid for that exhaustion, because we gave an 80-seat majority to someone who promised to deliver Brexit. A lot of Brexit Party candidates like myself stood down to give a free pass to Boris Johnson’s Brexit mandate in 2019.

So at its heart, what is Brexit and how did we get to where we are today? Brexit is the United Kingdom taking its rightful place amongst 168 other countries in the world that are not a member of the EU. It is not a remarkable situation. It is the default position, that a country has autonomy over its own courts, its laws, trade agreements, working practices, foreign policy and so on. But we're constantly told to the contrary, that the United Kingdom can't survive outside the European Union.

The Conservatives have failed on ambition and on national renewal

Ben Habib, Deputy Leader of Reform UK spoke very eloquently about all of this at the Reform UK Conference 2023, and I’m going to paraphrase some his statements here.

Somehow we’re constantly being told that we must be in a dire state because of Brexit, not being members of the EU, even though non-EU exports and EU exports from Britain are at record highs, there are three major new trade agreements, trade negotiations with US states, India, and there are many other positive signals. As Brexiteers our mistake has been to let rejoiners take the default position.

Rejoiners have somehow forced us to justify Brexit. But really we don't have to justify Brexit. Brexit is what it means to be the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was the settled decision of voters in the referendum, despite the onslaught of contrary messages from the globalist blob all around the world, IMF, World Bank, President Obama, the Tory government’s own advice leaflet.

What remainers and rejoiners have to prove is that we should go back into that arrangement, but they always make no case for the EU itself. They just threaten us and bully us and tell us, weren't we stupid for voting for an independent country!

What we all agree about is that the country has been badly managed, but that's got absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. That's got everything to do with the Conservative parliamentary party, which has an 80-seat majority. So instead of jettisoning the bloated, socialist malign entity that is the EU, the Conservatives continue to slide closer back towards it.

The Conservative Party didn't inculcate aspiration and renewal, it inculcated dependency. It didn't deregulate and cut taxes for growth. It has just perpetrated wealth redistribution from the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown era. The Conservatives even gave up part of our country, by carving out Northern Ireland in the Windsor Protocol, which is perhaps the biggest act of constitutional self harm any of us have experienced in our lifetimes.

Brexit is simply the default setting

So Brexit is blameless. Brexit cannot fail. Brexit is simply about us governing ourselves. Yes the Conservative Party has failed, and they are going to reap the electoral impact of that. In areas like fishing and agriculture and the Northern Ireland situation, we still need to take back control. Reform UK are going to continue to fight to put right those wrongs, to restore the economies of our coastal towns and fishing fleets. And we are going to do it, and we're going to take back control. It’s not right that we pay millions of pounds to France for cooperation on migrant boats crossing the Channel, but French, Spanish, Dutch factory ships and others continue to scrape up our fishing grounds, dredging up the seabed, destroying our marine eco-environment. It is not right that this is the accepted orthodoxy. Our British waters are one of the most important resources we have.

The accepted orthodoxy says we're not even allowed to take France’s illegal migrants, that they send us through their waters, back to their shores. They can send their boats to scoop up our fish. But we can't send back the illegal migrants.

There’s a sense of despair for poor little Britain, that we’ve given up on this country. But let’s be clear that’s just a Conservative view, and a Labour view, of Britain. On immigration, we’ve reached the point where the Conservatives (mostly) and Suella Braverman are correct in diagnosing the migrant problem. That in itself is a good start. But we now need a solution. What is the solution to border control? It is the Reform UK policy of reforming our ECHR association, or if necessary leaving the ECHR altogether, and picking up migrant boats and returning them back to their last safe country, which is France.

What we must not do is wait for them to come here so that we have all the legal difficulties in deporting them. Border control is a physical process. Remember when we used to have a Royal Navy that protected the United Kingdom?

As Suella Braverman rightly said, the current wave of uncontrolled migration is an assault on our nationhood. But we haven't even deployed our resources in the way we should. Border Force is a glorified taxi service. They should all be sacked and replaced with a new Department for Immigration with a new culture and a new focus. Border Force and the RNLI are going into French waters, taking people who are perfectly safe on a dinghy, putting them on their boats. Our government then gives them instant protection under our law, bringing them back to our shores, where we promptly pay £50,000 a year to accommodate them and process their cases.

The problem is only going to get worse. And what about getting back to a real asylum system where we can focus our help on women, orphans, people in real war zones and people really fleeing persecution?

The Conservatives are right on the diagnosis, wrong on actions

The ECHR has morphed from the admirable organisation that was set up to keep the French and the Germans in harmony in the post-war years. It was set up for a particular set of circumstances but it has become anti-human rights and it has become a political court. It now delivers judgements that prevent nation states from being nation states. And that's what's at stake here. It amounts to an assault on the United Kingdom, both legal migration and illegal migration. It is an attack on our nation state by a foreign court. It's nothing short of that and Suella Braverman was right to describe it like that.

Our nation state and our history are being assaulted on a daily basis We're told that our heritage is defined by our national guilt as slave traders. But those kind of commentators never mention the fact that we were the first country in history ever - at the peak of our power - to abolish the slave trade and then spend the rest of the 19th century policing the high seas to stop other countries from taking part in the vile slave trade.

Between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy, the West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 foreign ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard these vessels. There are the attacks on Winston Churchill and even attacks from the Archbishop of Woke, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. In the real world, Winston Churchill hasn’t suddenly become a white supremacist? But it’s important to state where these attacks from the politically-correct cultural revolution are coming from.

They’re designed to destroy our aspiration and create dependency. The war of woke is meant to destroy our self confidence. It's another attack on the nation states, to make us fold back into the globalist super-structures. They don't want you proud. They don't want you self confident. They want an EU morass, and a blob of frightened and dependent people.

So yes, we need a parliament and a civil service that really wants to govern and not sub-contract our country to committees in Belgium and Switzerland. This agenda is why we have 6.2 million people now (twice as many as before the pandemic) on Universal Credit and we have a government that doesn’t care about ordinary people.

Britons are increasingly jobless, directionless and concerned about immigration

There were 1.0 million people on Universal Credit in 2018. There are now 6.2 million and we have record-high taxes at levels not seen for 70 years and we have dysfunctional labour force dynamics. Some 2.5 million of those working age people on UC aren't even looking for a job. So when Rishi Sunak gets up in the House of Commons and says unemployment is at a record low, he's lying. Unemployment is only technically at a record low because the government doesn’t measure the people who aren't looking for a job. We need to fix this.

We need to reduce taxes for low-paid workers by raising the personal allowance to £20,000 per year. We need to make really rewarding jobs pay again. It comes back to the question, what is a nation state? What are the important values that we all need to gather around?

It's about a shared culture. It's a shared language. But if you take on lots of immigrants into the system, without even jobs and homes for them, you begin to undermine the nation state and you undermine the hopes and aspirations of people. We've had more net immigration in the last 25 years than we had in all of history up until the current point in time.

And that is what the EU wants, and it’s what the Conservatives have been doing. If you look at the political debate currently in Italy, in France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, it’s all about looking to the European Commission for a solution to the migrant problem. The EU has Frontex, its dysfunctional border agency, but in the EU the control of immigration is chaotic and nation states have almost given up.

The EU is an entity which has allowed freedom of movement, which has literally removed borders from within Europe. So when thousands of migrants land in Italy from Africa, to the Western Balkans, or Greece (with the help of European charities and shady billionaire-backed NGOs), they can just make their way to Calais. They get on a dinghy, apparently with French assistance and British money and then they come here to take advantage of our generosity. This is all an attack on the nation state. And we see that playing out in our economics. We see that playing out in the media and in the culture wars, with for example the shutting down of certain commentators and certain opinions. There’s a common factor that is playing out across our national life

There's an all out economic attack on the United Kingdom, and we're perpetrating it ourselves. Yet another dimension of this is the inexorable rmarch towards Net Zero and the punishing plans to deliver on the UN-driven climate obsession and man-made CO2 obsession. It is an unscientific and arbitrary timetable, at a time when people want to return to genuine environmentalism and energy technology that works in the real world. If the Conservatives were genuine in wanting to deliver environmentalism and a managed energy plan, they would have done a lot more to foster development of nuclear and to foster careful development of domestic British shale gas, offshore gas, the new coal and gas technologies that are available.

This is very important because the most inflationary government policy of them all is is Net Zero and it has had a massive impact on the cost of living crisis. It has reached ridiculous proportions, with the Office for Budget Responsibilty estimating the cost of Net Zero at £46.7 billion per year for all of the next 30 years. This equates to the average annual cost per household of £1,660 or £50,400 over 30 years. The Conservatives are only playing with the margins, looking at the coming combustion engine vehicle ban for 2035, and the punishing rules on gas boilers and domestic heat pump systems. It is deeply, deeply damaging and based on questionable climate science at best.

Britons are increasingly socially liberal but not in all aspects

The findings from the British Social Attitudes survey published last month looking at British social trends over the last 40 years found that attitudes towards people who are transgender have become markedly less liberal over the past three years. Some 64% describe themselves as not prejudiced at all against people who are transgender, a decline of 18 percentage points since 2019 (82%). Just 30% of people think someone should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate altered if they want, down from 53% in 2019.

While women, younger people, and the less religious express more liberal views towards people who are transgender, these views have declined across all demographic groups in Britain. Looking at benefits dependency, 19% agree that most people who get social security don’t really deserve any help, down from a high of 40% in 2005. Responses in 2019-2022 are the lowest since the question was first asked in 1987.

Britons are more concerned about poverty

Some 22% of people think that unemployment claimants are ‘fiddling in one way or another’, down from a high of 41% in 2004. People are increasingly likely to perceive poverty in Britain and their definitions of what constitutes poverty have become more generous. 69% of people think there is quite a lot of poverty in Britain, compared with 52% in 2006.

People are now more likely to think that poverty has risen in the past decade, compared with any point since the survey began: 78% say this, compared with 32% in 2006 (a massive increase of 46 percentage points). 39% think someone is in poverty if they have enough to buy the things they need, but not the things most people take for granted. This figure stood at 29% in 2019 and 19% in 2013.

Britons are concerned about social class and opportunities

77% of Brits now say that social class affects someone’s opportunities ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite lot’, up from 70% in 1983.

Over the past four decades, there have been two periods of dramatic change in our attitudes to welfare; negative attitudes increased in the late 1990s and 2000s, while attitudes have softened since 2010. While the first period of change is well understood, being largely driven by changes in the views of Labour Party voters, there is another period of change happening now in the ‘caring middle’ of politics.

So Brits have never before been so concerned about poverty, and a lot of social attitudes are changing. There’s a new nebulous blob of stakeholders now, this other entity at the table, which we're all nodding our heads towards. But all of this is damaging the economy and it is coming from the EU. This is another aspect of life where we are still in the tentacles of the EU. And in the Conservative Party they’ve cancelled the promised ‘bonfire’ of EU regulations, fearing what they call a legislative vacuum. But really that’s just an example of their smoke and mirrors.

As a sovereign country and under the common law system of the UK there's no such thing as a legislative vacuum. We live in a country under common law, where everything is permitted unless it's expressly prohibited. The reason the EU is such a basket case of an economy and why it will never succeed as an economy, is because nothing is permitted unless it's expressly permitted or written down in a Directive somewhere. It needs the laws. It needs legislation because they're not allowed to do anything without it.

Let's take back Brexit and make it work for people

In the United Kingdom, we have a different history. We have never needed a bill of rights or a constitution to state our rights, because our citizens are able to do anything unless it is expressly prohibited or expressly regulated. Our history is about being a nimble independent trading nation and it’s about our tradition of innovation and risk-taking, our businesses, and as a country. And this legislative weight we still carry from the EU is another massive, damaging impact on the economy.

So when the remainers continue to talk about the ‘damage’ done by Brexit, to them it’s all about promoting the EU view of the world. To them it’s necessary to promote us to the EU, to promote EU values. To them everything contrary to that is against their view of the world. But really it is deeply anti-democratic and it is deeply damaging to our economic ecosystem. It is deeply damaging to our cultural makeup, our language. And ultimately, it's deeply damaging to our own self confidence, and that's what we must never allow to happen.

So when it comes to voting and the looking ahead to the 2024 General Election, the public should remember the place we’ve come from as a nation, the journey before and after the Brexit vote. It’s not the Liberal Democrats who are going to rise to the challenge of the globalist orthodoxy and the two main legacy parties. Frankly speaking, when you look at Labour and the Conservatives, on tax, on the economy, on immigration, on energy, and on almost any policy platform, there is really only one party now. And if you keep voting for the same thing, you'll get the same result. The only vote for change is Reform UK.

It is Reform UK that is going to make the British Lion take it’s place again, to return our country to being a force for good in the world. Only Reform UK is going to take Northern Ireland back into the union with Great Britain. Reform UK will stop the boats and return to a genuine asylum system. Reform UK will make you proud of our country, whatever life journey has brought you here.

Matt Goodwin: On Britain’s Cultural Revolution and Combatting the Stifling Politically Correct Culture

tlloydjones@yahoo.co.uk (Trevor Lloyd-Jones) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 18:08:59 GMT

Matt Goodwin was 100% right in his address to the Reform UK Conference 2023. There's a massive new centre ground of British politics being formed.

Matt Goodwin, writer and professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, expressed it perfectly in his speech to the Reform UK Conference 2023. “We’ve allowed an extremely insidious form of socialism to take root in Britain. An extreme form of socialism called ‘woke’ has grown like a cancer at the heart of Britain. Nobody asked for it, nobody voted for it, yet it dictates our every move.”

Sometimes it feels a bit like a steel fist in a satin glove, or the velvet revolution that overturned the East European former Communist states in 1989: transfer of power and major political change without so much riots and protests, but with communication tactics and ideas as the catalysts. The only difference is that whereas the symbolic jangling of keys in the then Czech Republic was about freedom and doors opening, today we have a revolution of doors closing and freedom being shut dowm.

Indeed what’s happening in the UK today is very much about the founding principles of Reform UK, and going back before that, the Brexit Party. If the ruling class in this country had really understood what Brexit was really all about - lowering immigration, levelling up the country, controlling the borders, pushing back on tax and regulation, reforming the institutions, giving people a voice – then there wouldn't be need for a party like Reform UK. That's the reality of the situation. And there’s a reason why all of those things did not happen.

They didn't happen because Britain now is in the grip of a new political and cultural class that doesn't really have much of an interest in the rest of the country. If anyone has engaged with any of Matt Goodwin’s research and work, you will know that most of our institutions today are disproportionately dominated by people from the same backgrounds, who hold the same values. These people look at other ordinary people and ordinary voters in the country with bewilderment and confusion. These elites are re the most politically intolerant of all, as we saw with the de-banking scandal brought to light by Nigel Farage and others. These are the people in society the most likely to say they would feel uncomfortable if their son or daughter married somebody who held different political views to their own.

What’s more this new elite that is dominating our institutions has lost touch with the rest of the country. And we can see that in a whole array of issues from immigration, to the national borders, to what we're teaching our kids in school.

There's a massive new centre ground in British politics

Matt Goodwin’s latest book is ‘Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics’. He is also the co-author of ‘National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy’ and author of other books on politics at the margins and the phenomenon of Brexit. Since 2008 he has been co-editor of the Routledge book series on Extremism and Democracy. Between 2011 and 2015 he served as a member of the UK government’s working group on anti-Muslim hatred. Between 2013 and 2016 he was a trustee and member of the executive committee of the Political Studies Association.

Matt is 100% right when he says there is a new centre ground of British politics being formed, even if both the main legacy political parties have yet to fully comprehend it.

What worries a lot of people more than anything is what we see in the universities, the cancel culture and the erosion of freedom of speech and freedom of thought. We’ve seen university campuses and student societies banning spokespeople from the right of the political spectrum when they don’t conform to approved types of speech. It’s what anyone will see looking at the public sector institutions and what we see when looking at the governing Conservative Party and the Labour Party.

Saying a woman is a woman and a man is a man is fine. But if you're not rooting out radical gender identity theory from the schools and the institutions, it's meaningless. Saying that Britain is not a racist country and is a multi-cultural success story is fine. But if you're not rooting out a divisive, un-British, critical race theory from our schools, universities, and public sector institutions, it's meaningless.

It would be a huge error to think the Coutts Bank/Nat West Group cancellation of Nigel Farage was a one-off. It would be equally wrong to think the problem only infects banks.

Prejudice through the institutionalisation of woke, has embedded itself in every part of our economy and our lives. We are culturally and materially much the poorer for it.

Coutts took a dislike to Nigel Farage and the system encouraged it to do so. Its actions had real life consequences for him, as they have done for all the other account holders and businesses cancelled. Their sort of behaviour is more impetuous, vindictive and immature than that of a playground bully.

They nearly got away with it too. Even after their scorn was published, they would have been able to brazen it out but for Dame Alison Rose breaking her duty of confidentiality and briefing the BBC against Nigel.

The real question here is how a bastion of British business, one of our renowned private banks, famous for its professionalism, could have been allowed to act like this? The answer, is because the system is not there to police such behaviour, it encourages it.

Indeed, the regulations demand it. The regulatory culprit goes by the name of Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG). It is the policy mechanism by which governments across the developed world are requiring public bodies, institutions and businesses to drive towards Net Zero and eliminate what they call “social injustice”. It’s a classic example of the inversion of speech.

What have we learnt from ESG and the de-banking scamdal?

ESG has now firmly taken its place alongside the traditional drivers of the economy, and in many cases trumped them, including the vitally important profit motive. The UK’s ESG regime consists of domestic and EU-derived laws and regulations.

The sources of legislation are many fold. To name a few, there is the directors’ duties in the Companies Act 2006, the UK Corporate Governance Code 2018, the UK Stewardship Code 2020, Stock Exchange Listing Rules, the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules, the Large and Medium-sized Companies and Groups (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2008, the Climate Change Act 2008 and the Bribery Act and many more.

All regulated entities, banks being but one, are required to adopt and report on ESG. Crucially, they are also required to ensure that those entities with which they trade similarly adopt such principles.

What the Conservative Party today has failed to understand is we are no longer living in the 1980s. People today are not just asking for economic freedom from a big state and regulation, they're asking for cultural freedom from an oppressive stifling orthodoxy, from a political correctness which has gone way too far.

People are asking for freedom from a radical woke progressivism, which is politicizing, sexualizing and racializing our children. We need to stand up. We need to stand up and take it on. Because this Cultural Revolution is not going to stop.

It's going to accelerate because it's embedded in the institutions. 60% of all voters in this country now say that people like me cannot say what we really think because we're scared of the consequences. We're scared of what will happen if we really speak our minds. More than half the country say the left and right, the old legacy political parties don't represent people like me anymore. And 90% say it's time for a change in Westminster. The appetite for something different is enormous. The space for something different is enormous. The question is now, how and in what form are Reform UK going to be the people to fill it.

People are asking for freedom and an end to restrictions

Brexit and the erosion of the power of our parliament is another example. Sir Tony Blair disclosed again recently that he wants to get us to rejoin the European Union. He was the champion of the second referendum back in 2017 through 2019. And now he wants Keir Starmer in power. Once he gets Starmer in power, he's going to give the vote to six and a half million EU settled members, safe citizens in the UK. Starmer and Blair are going to give them the vote, alongside 16 year olds, alongside prisoners, alongside all the boat people arriving from France over the Channel. And pretty soon, one institution at a time, we’ll be back in the European Union. So Tony Blair, this Draculesque character who pulls the global strings, and who is having his own global strings pulled by big money, is going to be running the United Kingdom again. And that’s a very important reason to turn back to the power of the people, to the sovereignty of our parliament, to question how our institutions are working in our best interests.

One of Matt Goodwin’s polls looked at the 2019 Conservatives, all those people who took a punt on Boris Johnson to deliver Brexit and let’s remember it was the standing down of Brexit Party candidates like myself that helped to deliver Boris Johnson’s mandate. The poll looked at what were the issues that they felt most strongly concerned about, that they felt they weren't represented on, and there were three. These issues are super important for our county as we head towards the 2024 general election campaign.

Brits are not being heard on immigration

The number one issue for the 2019 Conservatives is immigration, and indeed this is the hot issue of population growth and pressure on our housing, our NHS, and public services that concerns a lot of people. The vast majority of people out there think immigration has been too high, that it needs to be reduced. It’s damaging the country and is no longer helping the national economy. People are sick of an alliance between big business and political elites that, like a drug addict, has become completely addicted to importing cheap migrant workers in order to keep consumption high, keep costs low, and to keep feeding this broken political economy.

This is not a fringe view. Some 75% of Brits want immigration reduced. 85% think it's been badly managed. 66% agree with Suella Braverman in her recent speech that immigration represents an existential challenge to Western societies and Western Values. The new elite that dominates our media and our institutions would have you believe that these are fringe views. That these are views of a 10% minority. But they're not and pretty much everyone I know is concerned in some way about immigration and the impacts on health services and security in the inner cities.

Brits are not being heard on political correctness and basic freedoms

The second big issue which people feel really concerned about, and not represented on, is the political correctness or woke ideology.

We're not like the Americans. Only half of Brits know what ‘woke’ means, but 90% know what political correctness means. So if we're going to talk about it, it’s better for all of us to use the term political correctness. But we all know what we're talking about. It's a stifling, overwhelming ideology. It is trickling out of the universities and the elite class and it’s something which is hardwired to push us apart, not pull us together. But as I say in my book ‘Human Consciousness and Our World Order’ that divisive agenda – between black and white, young and old, rich and poor, conservatives and liberal – the agenda that is driving fear and anger, is something we can start to fight against when we recognise it, we bring it into our conscious mind and we call it out.

Looking further at what’s happening, one quarter of Britain's schools are now teaching critical race theory, which says the only interesting thing about our children is not their character, but the colour of their skin.

Schools in London are now offering lessons to black children that are not offered to their white counterparts. Private schools are teaching white British children that they should apologize for their white privilege, and they should reflect on their white guilt. This is the opposite of what civil rights campaigners in the 1950s and the 1960s wanted, what they advocated.

Well, what they advocated was colour-blind anti-racism. They said, we have absolutely no toleration for racism. But we also think there are so many more interesting things about human beings than the colour of their skin. And that's not what's happening in the schools and universities today.

What we see is quite the opposite. It’s pushing anger and division and fear. So it's not enough, as some commentators say, to do simply announce a review of what's happening in schools. What we need to do is get the third party providers who are teaching children these divisive and un-British ideas out of British schools.

In all of the educational institutions, there is a cultural war underway to revise and reframe our national history, our identity and our culture. The elite class today derives its status of esteem and honour by denigrating the things that have always held us together. This has been a long time coming from the 1970s, then with the Tony Blair years, but it's now going mainstream.

Brits are not being heard on identity and culture

Then we come to the third area of our national life which concerns people the most, which they feel unrepresented about. Most people from all backgrounds want to protect, preserve and promote Britain's distinctive identity, history and culture. It’s what they feel is being swept away by globalization, by the push for a universal liberalism and by an elite class, which is no longer interested in the things that make Britain and England distinct.

What we need to do is push back against a predominant view among the elite class, which is called asymmetrical multiculturalism, which says it's fine to celebrate the identities and the culture and the history of minorities. But it says you cannot do the same for the majority.

And what the majority group is supposed o do is reframe its identity, reframe its Britishness, reframe its Englishness around the celebration of diversity around the celebration of multiculturalism. It’s about the celebration of globalization and it’s been slowly trying to rewrite history and traditional views about family and gender and relationships. Sometimes it feels like we’re supposed to sexless, mindless, wired up and addicted to technology, under moral control and under financial control, and permitted only to use speech that is accepted.

But here's the thing. To say that the only interesting or unique thing about your identity is a celebration of diversity is like saying you have no identity of your own. Many Brits out there can sense this. They watch the adverts on television. They watch the Netflix portrayals of history.

Brits look at revisions they see to the books on the bestseller list, they look at the revisions of how British heroes are shown on television. They look at what their kids are being taught in history, in English teaching, they can see the books that are being taken off the list or being edited to meet the political correct ideology.

People can look at how we talk about who we are, and they can all now sense that they are being exposed to a political and cultural project which is repackaging and redefining their identity around global themes. The vast majority of people in this country do not want this to happen.

Just like the vast majority of people in this country, who do not agree with radical gender identity theory, with gender transitioning of children, or critical race theory. Like the vast majority of people in this country do not agree with mass migration. Like the vast majority of people in this country do not want to live in a politically correct stifling culture.

One very famous defence of free speech in Western philosophical thought is, undoubtedly, the argument from John Stuart Mill’s ‘Essay On Liberty’. In recent debates about freedom of expression on university campuses, his words ring true for the opponents of campus speech codes, trigger warnings, no-platforming, de-platforming and other ‘speech regulations’.

Anyone who wants to read will not fail to get swept up in Mill’s enthusiasm for liberty, and his impatience with censors and oppressors. What’s more, many of the issues and arguments he raised still feel relevant today. The basic thrust of John Stuart Mill’s argument is set out in this often-quoted passage: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race….It is robbing posterity as well as the existing generation, those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If the opinion is wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."

In short, it is from freedom of speech and freedom of human thought of the individual, from which all our other freedoms are derived. Freedom of speech allows people to arrive at a clear and lively understanding of truths about the world. Therefore, we must promote and defend freedom of speech (and prevent the silencing or censorship of expression). These freedoms we’re talking about are a truth-and-understanding generating mechanism that have served mankind for hundreds of years.

So when we look at the origins of Reform UK and what our party stands for, the public demand is on our side. The space that exists in politics is currently enormous and it is there for us to take it.

Practical Plans For NHS Reform: Reform UK Pledges for Our Top-Heavy Health System

tlloydjones@yahoo.co.uk (Trevor Lloyd-Jones) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 10:32:49 GMT

Reform UK Deputy Leader Dr David Bull recently spelled out the three problems that we need to solve in the NHS. They are Staff, Systems and Technology.

The NHS waiting lists stand at 7.8 million people. That, by the way, is a fiddle, due to the way NHS Trusts invite people off the lists and for other reasons. Almost everyone has experience themselves, or through a family member of the NHS failings recently. It’s a very large and complex problem.

And now recently the British Medical Association, which is the trade union of doctors, has morphed from a benign body representing doctors’ best interests into a politicised left wing group, seemingly determined to topple the government at all costs.

That’s the personal feeling of many people. But doctors like Rob Lawrence, and Emma Runswick, who, by the way, is a former Momentum activist, should be ashamed. They are making patients suffer in pain and distress. There’s hardly been any weeks during 2023 when the NHS functioned without industrial action. It’s not that we can’t have sympathy with the pay and conditions of the nurses and junior doctors in particular, but there’s no doubt the NHS has become highly politicised and it needs to change.

Make no mistake, people will die as a result of this action. Now consultants and junior doctors are bragging of their camaraderie. They're doing so openly on the British Medical Association website.

At the same time while saying this, they're profiteering. They're commanding as much as £7,900 to cover a single shift during the strikes. And what's worse is they're doing it in tandem. So one doctor covers for a colleague, receives that vast payment. The next day they swap roles. And then that doctor gets the same payment. That cannot be right.

The cost of providing locum cover up to August of 2023 has been in excess of £1 billion. That is our money. It's taxpayers’ money, which should be going into patient care. It should not be going into a political movement. At the Reform UK Conference 2023, deputy leader Dr David Bull spoke passionately about the need for NHS reform. It was truly refreshing to hear detailed policy proposals from a medical doctor, rather than the platitudes and waffle that we’re used to hearing from health ministers. If we really care about the NHS, then it has to reformed and made fit for the future, in the interests of both patients and healthcare workers.

Now, Phil Banfield, the Chair of the BMA Council, has said recently that if this government was serious about patient safety, it would not have deliberately run down the health service over the last ten years, with a terrible adverse effects that austerity has had on the health of the nation every day. There’s a kind of conspiracy theory that the Conservatives want to run down the NHS to make way for privatised services run by their political friends. But let’s be clear about that.

That is really nothing more than propaganda, lobbying for an even bigger pot of NHS funding, and it's simply not true. When you look at the management of the NHS, the NHS has never had so much money. We spend 11.7% of GDP, roughly the European average on the NHS, and our outcomes are dreadful.

A million patients in England have experienced a delay in their cancer care since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister just ten months ago. Our survival cancer rates for nine out of the ten most common types of cancer are lower than European countries. And because we're missing all of our targets instead of dealing with the problem, can you guess what the government's done? The government, in its infinite wisdom, has now decided to scrap two thirds of the targets. So ten targets are now reduced to three.

We should never have been locked down in Covid and there’s ample evidence for that from Sweden and elsewhere. You see the lack of political leadership, chaos and the infighting in the release of the Covid transcripts of government communications. The government panicked. They believed the modelling that simply wasn't true. And now it transpires it's worse than that. They actually cherry picked their evidence to reinforce their insane draconian rules. The government presided over a catastrophic policy of discharging patients from hospital into care homes. And they didn't test them for Covid. And all of us now know the devastating results that occurred as a result.

They consigned elderly people to death and this is the best description we can put on it. This government is presiding over a system of mediocrity. At worst, it's catastrophic failure. And between the Government and these militant unions, if they continue, at this rate, there will not be an NHS left to save. It has gone from a National Health Service to a National Health Shambles.

Reform's staffing reforms

In the conference Dr David Bull spelled out the three problems that we need to solve. They are Staff, Systems and Technology. Staffing and all the issues around training and the every day problems on hospital wards are important, because underpinning all of this industrial action is really deep, unhappiness. And we need to understand that. It is true we should pay doctors more, especially junior doctors. But it's more than that. It's not just money. It's about how they feel. They need to feel appreciated. They need to feel love. They need to feel supported.

They don't get that at the moment. We need to provide simple things like hot food in hospitals, on-call accommodation, training opportunities and really good prospects. And fundamentally we need to train more doctors and stop ‘stealing them’ from abroad.

And guess what? The government is now listening to Reform UK because that is now Rishi Sunak’s pledge came about to increase the numbers of doctors in training. On top of that we need to make sure we're training the right people to be doctors. We want it to be a meritocracy, and in fact our whole country could do with a strong dose of meritocracy. We want medicine to be a career for everyone from all social classes, not just because mummy and daddy are able to support Tarquin or Fifi through medical school. The NHS culture will benefit a lot from recruitment from the inner cities, from those people who really know what it's like to struggle to fight, who understand poverty, who understand deprivation. And we need to empower them. And this is how we want to do it.

What we need to do is to remove the insane amount of debt the training causes. So at Reform UK we believe passionately that the government should enter into a contract with the students where on qualifying they are then bound to serve ten years in the NHS.

And in return for this contract, when a newly-qualified doctor pledge ten years of their life, what we will do is underwrite the cost of their training. We will pay down their debt as they then serve in the NHS. And the same isn't just for doctors. The same will go for nurses, for radiographers, for physiotherapists, and so on. What we as do will make their lives and their prospects better. And what that will also do is engender loyalty and create better patient outcomes.

What's more, Reform wants to solve the staffing crisis and we will stem the exodus of trained staff leaving for foreign countries so early in their careers. We need to rid the NHS of the insane amount of managers, the 48% of the staffing budget, including those diversity and inclusion managers and directors, some of whom are paid even more than NHS trust bosses.

Yes it’s a whopping 48% of the staffing budget that is non clinical. That is wrong. It's immoral. It’s a pattern of waste that we see across government by the way, throughout the civil service and the Ministry of Defence for example, where numbers of civilian workers are almost equal to the entire British Army regular forces. We have the equivalent of one Rear Admiral, salary £105,000, for every single fighting ship in the Royal Navy.

Reform's system reforms

This waste must stop. We also need to cut out the NHS bureaucracy and bring services closer to the people, in the chain from primary care to care in the community to A&E. We also need to cut out the inefficiency. We need to let doctors exercise clinical judgment and let them take the decisions. We also at the same time need to allow nurses, allied healthcare professionals to make clinical decisions, not managers. We know this from talking with frontline NHS workers, often managers get in the way of good medical decisions, and often slowing down processes.

We don't need to exagerrate this, but the NHS is like a giant oil tanker and it's very, very slow to turn it around. It's actually worse than that. It's not one ship. It's many vessels or with different destinations or with different navigation systems. It’s not that long ago, in the 1980s, that the NHS was one organization.

It was then split into self governing trusts, each with their own boards and management. They then grew as they grew. They took over each other. They created bigger and bigger trusts. And they created monoliths as they've done that. We're now in the insane situation where we’re almost back to where we started. We have actually replicated the picture of the original monolith organization. But in so doing we have added far more managerial structures and far less efficiency. Some bright spark thought it was a great idea to cut hospital beds whilst the population increases.

We had over 240,000 hospital beds in this country in 2000. We have 140,000 now in 2023. And as any hospital doctor will tell you, if you haven't got a bed, you can't admit anyone. So you can't admit anyone from A&E because obviously you haven't got any capacity. That means you can't actually operate on anyone because you haven't got any beds. So the whole bed crisis is exacerbating what is actually going on in the frontline A&E. It's a very simple game. If you haven't got capacity, you can't move anyone. So no beds. That means everyone's stuck in A&E, which means the ambulances are on the ramp. That means that no one comes in. That's why the ambulance response times are so long.

So what do we need to do in this country is to invest in social care because there are lots of people stuck in hospital who don't need to be there. If we don't have social care places and a joined up system we simply can't discharge the elderly. If you can't discharge the elderly, you have no beds. And so you can understand, the picture continues.

As well as doing that we also need to invest in primary care. We need to get away from small GP style of organizations. We need to see big diagnostic and treatment centres and more shared infrastructure in areas so that primary care can take some of the load of minor surgeries and treatments like dermatology and mental health. We need to open these, let’s call them super practices and local clinics every day of the week. We need to revisit the GP contracts with the issues that were left from the time of PM Tony Blair onwards. And we need to relieve pressure on A&E. And what we need to do is we need people to remember this maxim of ‘pharmacy first, GP second, and A&E last’.

What we need to do at the same time is to remove a lot of the vested interests and the sheer political conflicts from the system. Fundamentally, and Dr David Bull talks about this all the time on his TV show, we need to stop being so short term in our NHS planning. What we need to see is a 20-year cross-party strategic plan.

We can go a step further and state that we need to depoliticize the NHS entirely. And whist we’re at it, can we stop being so politically correct, with things like rainbows across NHS car parks and hospital buildings. Can we protect single sex wards and women’s spaces? Can we see an end to being obsessed with NHS training courses for pronouns and virtue signalling? None of these things are actually helping patients.

And what on earth is an NHS ambulance trust doing giving men a year off for believing they have symptoms of the andropause? In case you don't know what that is, it is the male version of menopause. Many doctors can't agree whether it really exists. But some men sure have a reduction in male hormones later in life. All men have a reduction in testosterone from the age of about 18. The problem here is, if you have clinically a reduction in testosterone, it's really simple. If you're symptomatic, you treat the symptoms and you get back to work.

Can we also stick to biology? Can we talk about breastfeeding, not chest feeding? The NHS is not plaything for woke ideas or the alphabet mafia. Let’s not pretend there are 50 sexes. There aren't there are two. They're male and female. It’s just the biological facts.

Reform's technology reforms

Now, in regard to technology in the NHS we’re playing catch up. Compared to many other health systems in Europe our systems are harder to interconnect and in France for example, the way they used electronic health records and exchange data between different public and private health providers is something we can learn a lot from.

When we want to do things well, though, in this country, we really are world leaders. But what we need to do in the NHS is work which are the keystone IT projects that are truly transformational, and stop wasting money on spurious IT projects. We need to work with world-leading companies to ensure that patient data is safe and secure. There are no real health data challenges that are just unique to the UK. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

As a country, we seem to have such an ostrich mentality about adopting health technology. In fact we have such an excellent track record in messing everything up. The NHS has spent more than £1 billion on storing paper medical records just in the past five years. £1 billion on paper records, equal to around £30 for every single taxpayer. That's money that should be spent on frontline patient care.

Amidst the enthusiasm for these cutting-edge solutions, there is always the risk that the health service will be forking out huge sums to run before it can walk. For context, the NHS an institution which has had to set targets to eliminate the use of fax machines , and see one in seven trusts still relying on paper-based record keeping . What good are AI-powered patient care planning tools if that patient’s records are stored on paper? Are ‘virtual wards’ feasible when smart monitoring systems are rendered useless due to network failures ?

At Reform UK we stress a lot about making the NHS more efficient for everyone and sorting out the NHS ‘data layer’ and i t’s an important point. Advanced technological structures like the one envisaged for the health service must be built from the ground up, with clean, universal, standardised data forming the foundation. Without this, otherwise worthwhile investments will be rendered useless.

It’s clear that NHSX , the unit created in 2019 to accelerate the digital transformation of health service and social care, has a monumental task ahead of them. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) means that the entire fabric of society is on the cusp of seismic disruption, and no one is quite sure whether this will really lead to a digitised paradise or the ‘golden age or productivity’.

What we do know is that the genie is out of the bottle, and the NHS, like most large institutions, is already devoting hundreds of millions of pounds to put AI tools to work. They have to be made to work.

So let's move on to Reform UK and what we believe in, because we believe passionately in patient choice, breaking down inconvenience and creating flexibility. You should be able to see a doctor of your choice when and where you want. Reform UK believes that waiting lists must be abolished and to do that, the NHS has to work with private providers. The money then follows the patient. Reform UK will unleash the power of the private sector to dramatically increase the capacity and waiting list.

And here's our pledge. If you can't see a GP within three days. You are then entitled to use a private GP paid for by the NHS. If you can't see a specialist within three weeks, you can then go to a private specialist again, the NHS providing the funding.

And. If you have to wait more than nine weeks for your operation, not two years, not three years, not four years, nine months. Then again, you can go privately and that bill will be picked up by the NHS.

So just think about it. What does this actually do? What it means is great service provision will be rewarded, allowing great operators to grow. Improved competition and improved choice for you, and for me, and for the public.

We also believe that tax breaks should be given to encourage people to take out private health care. It is absurd that currently you cannot offset that cost against tax so that holders of private medical insurance are effectively paying twice. Now, if you made that change, more people would take our private medical care. That reduces the burden on the NHS as well.

We also need to empower the public to use technology and health apps. We want to see rewards for good positive behaviour, rewarding healthy eating and drinking. Stop telling people what to do, encourage them what to do. And we need to encourage exercise and discourage a sedentary lifestyle.

Reform UK has its Health Committee led by Dr David Bull, and they’ve been coming forward with a lot of excellent policies, many of which have been copied by the Conservative Party. In many ways we should be flattered. And here's the telling point though, when they do adopt our Reform UK policies, the Conservatives go up in the poll ratings. And what does that mean? Well, it means that we are right.

But here's the really salutary lesson. The Conservatives are all talk, and they are all bluster. Nothing will change under the Tories. If we truly, truly believe in the concept of the NHS, if we want the NHS to stay free for everyone, if we need the NHS, then the whole system must be reformed. The time for idle talk is over, it is now time for delivery and it's time for reform.

Real Change for Britain and Protecting Free Speech Will Take Courage to Vote For Something Different

tlloydjones@yahoo.co.uk (Trevor Lloyd-Jones) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 10:32:49 GMT

Have you had enough of this government? Have you had enough of all talk and no action? Have you had enough of an opposition which changes its mind every two seconds?

Now if you really have had enough of the way we're governed, if you really want change, more and more people are going to have to be thinking about changing outdated voting patterns. Some comments I hear a lot: surely Reform UK is a wasted vote because it will let Labour (or insert Conservative) in? Surely our first past the post voting system doesn’t help the small parties to get a voice. Well together the Conservatives and Labour have governed disastrously for over 20 years, so surely they are the wasted vote? A vote for real change is never a wasted vote. Reform UK stands for real positive change for our country, and regardless of the electoral mathematics in your own constituency, we are not going away until we have achieved it.

There is only one way of going about that change our country needs, to send a message to the old Lib-Lab-Con, effectively destroying the once-mighty Conservative Party. We have to reject comprehensively what we have now. At the Reform UK Conference 2023, Ann Widdecome put it like this: “Ben Habib has said that his simple goal is to obliterate the Tories. Well, I want to add to that, we have to obliterate Labour as well. We have to obliterate the threat they represent and what they want to take us back into….Of course Labour don’t say that they don’t want to directly rejoin the EU, but it’s what can happen. They want to do it, one institution and one cooperation agreement after another.”

We’ve seen Sir Keir Starmer say that we will simply begin to realign with the EU. David Lammie, shadow foreign secretary has said how he plans to start ‘dating’ or courting the European Commission again. Laws to control our borders to be dictated to by them. Gradually, in the name of working closely together, under Labour we will find that we are still tied to the EU, even more than today.

It is a situation of servitude to committees, commissioners and civil servants sitting in Belgium that our country comprehensively rejected. So let's not forget the danger posed by Labour. If we are to effect change, if we are to truly take back our democracy in the way the people voted for, we have to understand that both of the main parties are the enemies.

The message we have to take out to the people is a really very simple one, that if you want change if you want things done differently if you want to get our country back again, if you want Britain to be run by Britain, you simply have to vote Reform UK and leverage the power of the political ‘middle’.

Still questions for Brexit and our democratic institutions

If those are the things that you want. If you want to get rid of the scourge of political correctness, if you want to control immigration, if you want our children to be given opportunities, a strong education, the ‘three Rs’, a path to great jobs and careers, without Critical Race Theory, without transgender ideology, we are going to have to fundamentally change the way we vote.

If you want the NHS to actually do the job that it was designed to do, if you want all those things, then there is no earthly point in voting for more of the same. As Einstein said, the very definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. This is the whole raison d’etre of the Reform Party, it’s about real compassionate that change, and that is the message we want our country to understand. It is about change. It is to stop the direction that we're going in at the moment and create an entirely new direction.

At the centre of all of this is freedom for the individual and freedom of speech, freedom of thought. It might take a lot of individual courage, on the part of all us, to vote differently or to put ourselves forward for public office. It takes courage to vote for something different, even if you are a bit afraid that they may just let the other side in, it’s about the courage to vote for something different. Vote for what you want, not what you are afraid of.

We have virtually lost free speech in this country because people are afraid to exercise free speech, and that’s wrong. Well, we need to encourage all of us individually and morally to have the courage, to defy what is going on. And we should put parents in charge of what their children are taught. We should not in any circumstances allow four year olds to be told that they can become man or woman, depending on what they feel like. And that they can change their mind on Wednesday afternoon. That is not what we send our children to school for. We need good teaching and we need to support good teachers. We need to make it easier for our schools to plan and deliver for our children, without dithering and political correctness coming down from government. The same goes for opening up freedom of speech and eradicating bias in the university sector. You can read separately more about Reform UK plans for higher education and giving a new deal for young people with lower debt and a more efficient university sector. We mustn’t keep diluting the core elements of the curriculum, the parts that young people really need.

Judicial reforms

As spokesperson for justice, Anne Widdecombe talked a lot in the Reform UK Conference about reform of the justice system, getting back the essential principles of British justice, reform of the Legal Aid service, reform of the Child Maintenance Service, deportation of foreign criminals, getting back to more visible policing and more effect policing on the streets. We have to get back to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, It shouldn’t take up to four years for some criminal cases to go to trial, as is the case at the moment. Where has that gone? We should all be equal under the law, black and white, male and female. It is is quite wrong that somebody can be accused of something and have their name across the press. The accuser is protected these days, even when he or she is later shown to be a liar and convicted of perjury.

Justice must be done and it must be seen to be done, not just at the whim of politicians worried about statistics. And certainly we should not allow politicians to interfere in the justice system just because they are courting popularity. Courts must operate at arm's length from government. There are many anomalies and very complex rules, opaque rules at the moment in how our justice system works, for example in the processing of Legal Aid cases, and Child Maintenance cases. These areas need to be opened up more to the scrutiny of our underlying common law system. There are ill informed or sloppy decisions going on. The fundamental rights of the individual in our nation must be protected.

We can’t have our courts making rulings that are incompatible with the laws of natural justice. Another example are the rights of grandparents. When there is familial breakup, they have virtually no rights at all. But they should have rights unless there is a very good reason to exclude a grandparent from a child's life. Then when there is break up, we can reinfoce the ability of the grandparents to see their grandchildren.

Rights of all individuals should be respected. And if court access orders are deliberately flouted in the family courts, then action should be taken against the person floating those access orders. And it shouldn't be the case that the non-resident parent has to go back to court time and time again, usually at his own expense, just in order to get a reiteration of an access order, which is then again flouted.

Labour Party represents dangers for our democracy

There’s a great deal of work to be done in our public services, in education and the courts. In Reform UK we say that we want to act. We want to give more choices and more rights back to individuals and individual family units. There is a very great deal to be done. At the next General Election people have a choice: vote for more of the same, get more of the same. You have a choice to see more of your freedom being whittled even further away. Being corrupted by ever more political correctness, with our country’s principles and freedoms being trashed. Watch its history being trashed, watch the EU becoming dominant in our law making again.

If you read carefully into Sir Keir Starmer’s policy statements, however vague, he wants to further weaken the powers of our parliament and he wants to give more power to international quangos such as the UN, the WEF and the WHO, rather than to British judges and British institutions. Then on the other hand he wants to give more powers to low-qualified, tinpot dictators and climate fanatics in local council authorities.

You have a choice. You either have all of that or you vote Reform. It’s not enough to talk about holding the balance of power, or talking about what a Conservative-Reform coalition government might look like. In Reform UK, we’re not just firing a warning, we’re talking about becoming the government. And yes, that is ambitious. But without ambition nothing will get achieved.

If you’re reading this, the chances are that you’re interested in what Reform Party has to say and our agenda for change. Please try not to let a day go by without telling a few people about Reform, or about the policies we’ve been talking about. The polls clearly show that people are fed up. The level of trust and engagement in politics and politicians is at an all time low, which is such a warning call for our entire system, and in particular for young people who may be voting for the first time.

A lot of people remember the Brexit Party, the movement that gave birth to Reform UK, and the way voters registered their massive support for Brexit in the European Parliament Elections in 2019. So we know that big, tidal changes in our voting patterns can happen.

Labour and Conservative leaders are both cozying up to the EU, for example with Rishi Sunak making Brussels his the first state visit. What's the matter with reinforcing our relationships with the Commonwealth? We’re paying France millions to shepherd the migrant boats towards our waters.

And now Rishi Sunak is talking about cooperation with Spain over Gibraltar and other matters like the R&D fund Horizon Europe and signing us back up to the EU defence organisation and annual levies. Let’s give him his due, when he sets on a daft course of action, he never gives up

He just never gives up! So we need change badly. The only way to get change is to vote for it. Let’s reflect over what the Conservatives have achieved, the near tripling of the national debt, high inflation, energy insecurity, the highest taxes for a generation and about to jump even higher in the fiscal year 2024-2025. Take immigration and the recent speech by Suella Braverman in New York. There was hardly a word anyone could disagree with, about the need to reform and modernise international institutions and the ECHR for the modern era. It's just that she never does anything. We at Reform UK are the party that is going to take action. The only way we’re going to do it, is to offer an alternative that speaks to what the people want.

We do that at the Reform Party. We must do. We must do it more frequently we must do it more. We must do it day in and day out. But if we manage to do it, we will save our country.

Student Debt and Rip Off Britain: It Falls On Reform UK to Tackle Our Injustices

tlloydjones@yahoo.co.uk (Trevor Lloyd-Jones) — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 10:32:50 GMT

According to the OECD, England has the most expensive publicly-funded university system in the world. Despite this, the ‘graduate dividend’ for students in England – the additional lifetime earnings they can expect – is shockingly small.

A degree in the UK leads to extra earnings of £153,000 for men and £140,000 for women – less than the international average of £209,000 and below the likes of France, Germany and Ireland (where tuition is free). While college debt in the US is far higher, graduates can expect an equally massive shift in projected earnings: a typical male graduate in the US will earn £426,000 more over his career, while a woman will earn an extra £308,000.

Whether it is the sheer size of student debt, the thresholds and recent interest rate rises from the government, young people in the UK are getting a bad deal and they deserve so much better. On the other hand we have the two major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives who do nothing for the young generation, in the economy, in taxation, in the rental housing sector, from the level of primary education onwards. Going back four years in the Brexit Party, when we started talking about the needs of young people, how an independent United Kingdom could bring about reform of the education sector, a lot of people were surprised.

Young people need a new political voice

Education, the future of our country, and students. There is almost nothing more important. We have wokeness and discrimination and the death of free speech in our universities and the silence from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition is shocking. It’s indicative of the crisis of leadership that we have right now.

So while Rishi Sunak meddles with technical changes to A Levels that would only affect five year-olds and under, more meddling that the schools sector doesn’t want and doesn’t need, on the other hand we have the socialist envy from Sir Keir Starmer, putting VAT on private schools.

These new measures on private schools will affect those families with the aspiration to want to choose where they send their children. The government just wants to meddle at a time when school heads want stability and they just want the government to offer reliable funding so that they can plan over their three-year planning cycle. This meddling is one of the real crises in education. That is being felt by young people at the moment, the worry and burden of student loans and what's going on with student debt and our universities.

Reform UK leader Richard Tice talked about this a lot in his address to the 2023 Reform UK Conference.

How government loads the current student finance system

Four years ago, the total quantity at the national level of all the student loans issued was an estimated £120 billion. It’s almost impossible to know what that number is really.

The face value now of all that student debt is an estimated £205 billion. In twelve years time it'll be £400 billion. Every year, it's going up by well over £20 billion. These numbers are so large that they’re almost impossible to understand. But here's the scam.

The base value of the stock of student loans is £200 billion. The Conservatives have written off £100 billion in the national accounts as ‘non recoverable’. So in the accounts it's down at £100 billion. But guess what they're charging interest on, guess what they’re loading onto our young people? The government is charging interest now at 7.3%. On the whole £205 billion.

It's an absolute scandal and any student, any family should rightly be angry about this. Our students have a mountain of debt and a mountain of worry before they’ve even started out in life. And with that rate of interest, we've got the highest student debt per head of any major nation in the world.

Most students are leaving now with £40,000 worth of debt. And no one talks about okay, how much of that is being repaid? How do the young people get on top of this, even if you are managing to earn £60,000 a year, which is double the average national salary.

The answer is: you will not be able to pay. The interest on your loan, let alone pay back any of the capital. How demoralizing? How demotivating? How de-energizing is that to our young people? It's not surprising that they’re getting fed up with politics and politicians.

How can they try and save for a deposit when they're being charged so much interest. Here’s an example that Richard Tice talked about in the conference. Let’s take a typical student who left uni three years ago with a total £40,000 debt. Let’s say they earn £60,000, they’re a high flyer and they have a good job. He's doing well. He's flying along. He's now earning almost double he average salary in the country. His student loan statement today will show a balance of £47,000, three years later. It’s almost impossible for young people to service that level of debt.

You see what's happening. You see the impact that has on our young people. It’s utterly devastating.

Thanks to Tony Blair, the original architect of the student finance system, somewhere between 40% and 50% now of young people are still going to university thinking that it's going to mean greater opportunity. In fact its piling them up with a load of debt that it's almost impossible to get on top of. The sheer irony is that Euan Blair, Tony Blair’s son has made tens and tens and tens of millions of pounds of profit with his apprenticeship company, telling people to do exactly the opposite.

This is a really serious situation for our young people. It's also incredibly serious for us taxpayers. The truth is we're all being ripped off!!! Students, taxpayers, the lot of us.

Our country are being ripped off and demoralized in far too many aspects of life. A lot of the degree courses being offered are next to useless, and there was a new one showcased on TV recently, an undergraduate degree in ‘Magic’.

So this is what's going on. Our young people are being completely and utterly ripped off.

Student visas: the taxpayer foots the bill

It's an outrage and it’s the same situation that we, as the Brexit Party and Reform UK, have been fighting against for more than four years. Our specific proposals have been outlined by Richard Tice. The first thing we've got to do is you've got to scrap the interest on these loans.

The second thing is that we can streamline a lot of these degrees and create better deals for students. A lot of degrees could be done in two years. Many students are getting eight or nine hours lectures a week if they're lucky, over 23 weeks a year. A lot of it now is remote learning. Why can't they have the choice to say, let me finish in two years and save myself £12,000 or £15,000.

That should be their right. It’s absolutely essential and an example of our reformist approach. The third thing we've got to do, is just say no, we're not going to have a lot of these useless degrees. There's got to be a freeze and a reduction in the university student numbers. The only people benefiting are the lefty academics, and the universities themselves.

Everybody else is being conned and it's an outrage. How do you pay not just for the interest, for the extra capital repayment when you’re a 21 year old or 22 year old? Reducing the university numbers by 15% to 20% is what we've got to do. That will help pay for slimming down of the university sector and having two year degrees as an option.

We have to do this because otherwise, our young people will feel increasingly ripped off and left without a future. Not a word from Starmer, not a word from Sunak. They just don't seem to care.

Now, the other crisis in universities is what's going on with student visas. For international students the numbers are absolutely extraordinary and we need to have a national conversation about this. Four or five years ago there were about 200,000 International Student Visas granted. That number now is 650,000, including the number of associated family members and other dependents. It involves a sevenfold increase in the number of student dependents. And this is a backdoor route to be able to come and live in the UK forever.

And surprise, surprise. Everybody's worked it out from all over the world. Who knows what the number will be next year? The universities love the status quo as it means more income. They charge them even more. But the extra pressure on our services, on our housing, on our NHS, it’s not surprising that demand is through the roof. We've got half a million more students coming to live here. International students can stay for two years, and then they can convert it into a five year skilled worker visa. We know what skills and academic skills that means, and then the international students with their dependents can stay forever.

Surprise, surprise more student dependents are coming. How much more can our public services and our housing sector take? 24 months? 36 months? We the taxpayer are being ripped off. And our young people are being ripped off.

It's a huge crisis. No one else is talking about it. It's got to be spoken about as a national issue and once again, it’s one of those issues where Reform UK is the only political force to tell it as it is. Protecting our children in the schools sector is also important, dealing with the woke psychology around gender, transgender and critical race theory, trying to rewrite British history and British values. These are some other areas where only Reform UK is willing to speak up. But that’s a promise from Reform UK. We’re going to deal with these issues and create a better future, our children's and young people's future.