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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, no-body 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 were about freedom and doors opening, today we have a revolution of doors closing and freedom being curtailed.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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 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 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.