Here’s my manifesto. Better schools. Houses in the right places. Sensible immigration. Smart policing. Efficient public services. Lower, fairer taxes. Who’s with me?
You can hardly be against a list like that, can you? Except, obviously, that I haven’t committed myself to anything. Using columnist’s privilege, I have listed a bunch of palpably desirable outcomes, thereby implying that others, whether from knavery or foolery, don’t want them.
Politics often works this way. A facile but effective way to criticise any government is to pretend that it could operate without trade-offs. It’s withholding money from a group you favour? Sheer meanness! It’s not preventing something that is outside its control? Pure cowardice! It has had a policy overturned by politicised judges? Get a grip!
Opposition parties with an eye on power exercise some self-restraint, knowing that they will face the same trade-offs. But parties with no prospect of office are free to behave like columnists, airily demanding whatever they like.
The programme of Reform UK bears a striking resemblance to the list with which I opened. The party wants zero NHS waiting lists, more police, civil service reform and an end to illegal immigration. I mean, of course it does. Who doesn’t?
It also promises to cut corporation tax, fuel duty and VAT while massively raising thresholds for income tax and inheritance tax. Again, great. How will it find the money? Its one identified saving is to scrap HS2 – a policy that this column urged for years, but whose time has sadly passed. Contracts have now been signed, meaning that the money will very likely be spent with or without getting the railway. Naturally, Reform also offers us that old favourite, cutting waste. Brilliant! Why has no one thought of it before?
One in eight voters backs Reform. Do they imagine that their party will form a government? No doubt some of them do. But politicians often miss the extent to which casting a ballot is therapeutic rather than functional. If you don’t think your vote will have any real impact (which, given the maths, is a reasonable thing to think) you might as well use it to feel better.
In other words, you are not voting Reform because you think that Richard Tice will enter Downing Street and miraculously deliver the cuts in immigration, taxation, wokery and waiting lists that have eluded everyone else. You are voting Reform as a statement. That statement, put into words, might read something like this: “I am sick of politicians missing their immigration targets, of taxes going up while public services deteriorate, of woke BBC presenters sneering at the rest of us, of energy bills rising while other countries open coal-fired power stations. Whether or not the mainstream parties pay attention to my vote, at least my hands will be clean.”
How fair is that sentiment? After four consecutive Tory terms, people inevitably have lists of complaints. The trouble is that no two lists are identical. My own list would include the failure to scrap the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, excessive zeal on net zero, not flattening tax rates and imposing lockdown.
But honesty compels me to admit that I was in the minority on all those issues, especially the last one. In March 2020, when this column was pursuing its lonely and unpopular campaign against lockdown, Nigel Farage stood with the majority, railing against the government for being too slack and demanding that Boris ban flights. By November of that year, he had U-turned, and Reform UK was launched as an explicitly anti-lockdown party. In other words, Farage followed the same trajectory as many voters.
Governments do not have that luxury. They must deal with the real-life consequences of their policies. It is no good saying, after the event, “The inflation and tax rises you are complaining about were caused by prohibitions that you demanded more of, so don’t blame Boris or Rishi, who were more anti-lockdown than 90 per cent of you.”
Neither is it any use saying, “If you want tax cuts, find spending cuts.” According to every opinion poll, large majorities want increases in public spending. Asked how to square the circle, people will respond, not unreasonably, “That’s your job, you’re supposed to be in charge.”
Nor is there any purpose in complaining that government policies are subordinated to the whims of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Climate Change Committee, the Bank of England, the European Court of Human Rights and a hundred other unaccountable bodies. Liz Truss’s new book is a devastating exposé of how far power has shifted from elected ministers to standing bureaucracies. But a politician who complains comes across as whining.
Nor, finally, can the Tories say “Vote Reform, get Labour” to people who believe that voting doesn’t change anything. After 14 years of Conservative-led administrations, most voters measure the governing party against their idealised alternative, not against the real-world one.
My own belief is that there are big differences between the two main parties – on tax and spend, on identity politics, on the EU, on competitiveness and, indeed, on immigration, where Starmer plans to scrap the Rwanda scheme and join a common European policy on returns.
Reform’s contention that the PM is wet and woke is hard to justify in policy terms. Rishi Sunak was an uncomplicated Leaver. He resigned as Chancellor in protest at excessive spending. He dropped the more extreme greenery he had inherited from his predecessors. He ordered schools to stop talking nonsense on gender.
On Friday, he announced plans to strip GPs of the power to sign people off work. On Monday, he will push through the Rwanda scheme against Labour and Lib Dem resistance. And at the same time, he is tightening the rules on family reunification and student visas. Those who claim that the Tories are weak on immigration should name any administration in our history that has been tougher.
The difference between the Tories and Reform has less to do with outlook than with practicality. Every Conservative believes in lower taxes, controlled borders and patriotism. It’s just that, unlike Reform, the Tories have to work with a hostile administrative state, an electorate that, since lockdown, has consistently demanded higher spending, and limits on government power.
Take, for example, the phenomenon of biologically male competitors in women’s sports. Ninety-nine per cent of Conservative MPs dislike the practice. Last week, the Culture Secretary, Lucy Frazer, urged sporting bodies to halt it. Do those who complain that “the Tories are doing nothing to stop wokery” really want them to nationalise independent sports federations?
Some Reform supporters, of course, are not just making a statement. Some dream of surpassing and then absorbing the Conservatives.
When we were in Brussels together, Farage often used to talk of the 1993 Canadian precedent, where Preston Manning’s prairies protest movement, significantly also called Reform, overtook and eventually merged with the Tories, providing the combined party with its first leader, Stephen Harper.
Harper is a hero of mine and a personal friend. He may be the greatest Canadian PM since Sir John A Macdonald. But Harper would be the first to confirm that he governed as a mainstream conservative. Not because he had forgotten his Reform roots or gone soft, but because he had to govern in the real world.
In the mean time, first-past-the-post brutally punished the split on Canada’s Right. If the same thing happened here, Labour would be in office until 2037. Then we would have ample time to test the bizarre claim that the two main parties are the same.
