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Francis Bell
A communications and public affairs professional focused on delivering policy recommendations, briefings and key findings to a political and industry-level audience. Formerly a Parliamentary Researcher for two Labour Members of Parliament with experience on the Defence Select Committee and International Development Committee.
There is always a price that comes with easy answers.
When I visited the Reform UK conference last week there were plenty of them. Some were answers to problems that the party had rightly identified as systemic roadblocks that prevent politics from improving the lives of UK citizens. Some were answers to deep-seated prejudices that have long haunted the right of UK politics.
The problems: a failure of delivery across multiple government departments, a perceived danger to freedom of speech in the UK, the much-discussed ‘dilution’ of British Culture. Issues that will appeal to a reasonably large section of the right and centre-right of politics, but at Conference answers were presented that ranged from the confused to the downright dangerous.
In a panel on statehood, Danny Kruger, who appeared to at least be sensible enough to make a very reasonable diagnosis of the issues in delivery that have beset successive governments, still managed to propose a sound-byte solution without considering the consequences of his actions. Scrapping the Cabinet Office is a radical and bold manoeuvre designed to put power back in the hands of elected officials, which at first glance is a noble goal, but within his proposal he also admitted that he doesn’t actually know what the Cabinet Secretary does and described the Office as a mish-mash of roles that should be delegated back down to political heads of department - essentially, Ministers. Ministers whose chopping and changing would see the progress of each department stall on a depressingly regular basis.
He bemoaned the blocking powers of the judicial review system, but neglected to mention that Reform have recently launched multiple judicial reviews in order to hold up local government reorganisation in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hampshire.
And whilst we have a clear problem with coordination across the machinery of state, removing the one office which generally performs a coordinating function is throwing a hand grenade into that machinery with little concern for what comes after aside from a general ‘unblocking’.
Matt Goodwin, on another panel, made the same mistake. He firstly defended Zia Yusuf’s tweet about the likely Labour Candidate in King’s Cross and Holborn, suggesting that people who were not born in the country should not be able to run for office (his fellow panellists disagree), but then also agreed with a member of the audience who posed the question, “only people who pay income tax should be able to vote”. Presumably after some chin scratching the policy heads at Reform would recognise that denying students, low-earners and many pensioners the right to vote may not prove all that popular.
One popular suggestion I hear over and over again is the shrinking of the Civil Service - which I’m sure has some merit when the headcount is approximately. 550,000 people - but this comes paired with the quite fun idea of being given a £30 tax rebate every time that you’re forced to wait more than 30 mins on the phone to HMRC. All very well until you realise that you’ve cut all of the staff that assumedly would be answering the phones and have a chunk of money to pay out to aggrieved callers.
I cannot help but recall the utter failure of the DOGE reforms led by Elon Musk in the USA, and the subsequent outbreak of contaminated food that the decimated FDA failed to spot. No-one wants the nanny state until you get food poisoning from a jar of pistachio butter and spend the weekend on the bathroom floor.
Shock tactics and generating a sense of both identity and common cause are what Reform excel at. No other political party has hit the heights of generating a clear sense of belonging that the attendees amongst the general Reform membership ooze throughout the conference. This is their rodeo.
Reform football shirts, union jack suits and the ubiquitous Richard the Lionheart costume belie a sense of place and community that is rarely felt so powerfully at other party conferences.
But where they fall down is where the rubber meets the road - political reality bites.
The disruptive energy of the Reform conference may have a legitimacy to it. The political system does need revolutionary and radical reform - but if it was easy then everyone would be doing it.
Reform just cannot square the circle of making bold and brash claims which may have some merit in principle, but present solutions that are potentially very unpalatable to the electorate when it comes down to it or at worst likely to create even worse conditions than the ones they are meant to fix.
What I’m taking away from the conference is that without a bolstering of policy development that elevates their platform from easy answers into serious reform - there’s a decent chance we have seen their high water mark.