Part 1 can be read here:-
The upcoming exam question for Reform (and anyone else who wants to solve the UK’s problems rather than merely secure power for its own sake) is how do you change a failing system from within? How do you ensure that the system, which almost by definition doesn’t want to change, does not obstruct you? While manifesto commitments would probably get through a hostile Lords due to the Salisbury convention, and one could pack the Lords anyway, the real challenges lie with some of the public servants within government, the civil service, local government and the quangocracy. That will require primary legislation, and passing such legislation will take time. In the meantime, the bond markets and the IMF would be watching very closely. Given the likely state of the British economy after another three years of Labour, they’re unlikely to be forgiving or tolerant. Avoiding a Truss / Kwarteng event will be crucial. That can only be delivered by cutting government expenditure and borrowing. In a state machine as monumentally incompetent as the British one, cutting expenditure need not have an adverse effect on service delivery; throwing money at the government machinery hasn’t improved services, it’s merely increased the payroll.
Rebuilding the British Government machine from the ground up would be disheartening, were it not for the historic precedents cited by Bregman in his Reith Lecture. Just a dozen men established the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787. Twenty years later the Slave Trade Act of 1807 finally received Royal Assent. The Royal Navy was set loose on the slave trade, which it effectively ended (the trade, not slavery) by 1860. The UK’s National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded in 1872. Some women got the vote in 1918 and women received the vote on the same terms as men in 1928.
Unless Eyeliner Burnham is going to immolate his Party by calling a snap General election, the next one scheduled is just over three years away. UKIP, the main forerunner of Reform UK, was set up over 30 years ago. In the Labour landslide of 1997, UKIP polled 0.3%. In 2024’s Labour landslide, UKIP’s successor, Reform, polled over 14% with the third largest popular vote. Now it’s polling over 30% and is routinely ahead of the once mainstream parties by over 10%. Perhaps one of the legacies of the 2016 Referendum is that the British people saw that it was possible to overturn the Establishment’s wish. Building on that success and the entirely justified frustration of the electorate, Reform today is surely the legacy of a few people with a clear purpose. Their wish remains to restore the accountability of the legislature and government machine to the public who pay for it and whom it is supposed to serve. Voting to Leave the EU was only the first step.
Rutger Bregman dismisses all this as “populism” – a word of great disdain among those of the western liberal democratic orthodoxy. Bregman has – of course – conveniently swerved past the idea of “Government of the people, for the people, by the people”. Abe Lincoln framed democracy thus in 1863 after the Battle of Gettysburg, the defining battle of the American Civil War, which was largely about ending slavery. One hundred & sixty something years after Gettysburg, our leaders believe that supranational government – organisations of supposed experts – should be appointed to manage the world. In Davos, the devotees of the World Economic Forum gather to chant their mission statement ” To improve the state of the world by public-private cooperation”. Conveniently (for them), it’s hard to measure that improvement globally. It’s hard for most to feel it locally too; outside the Washington/London/Brussels/Delhi/Beijing politico bubble, there are an awful lot of people for whom things are decidedly not getting better. Yet the acolytes of the WEF agenda meet annually in agreeable circumstances, to network whilst ensuring they are fenced off & comfortably insulated from the people they supposedly represent.
Macroeconomics may be global, but “all politics is local.” And like the good Marxists they are, the Labour Party has sought this year to cancel (they call it “delay due to reorganisation”) as many local elections as they could. Shamefully some Tories and Lib Dems supported that. In Wales and Scotland the socialists, Marxists and “progressives” can’t hide from the ballot box. Instead they’re seeking to stitch up the electorate with pacts like the ones so common between Labour and Plaid Cymru over the years. They have good reason to. Few young Britons are likely to be able to purchase their own home, yet the Home Office has license to give them out like sweets to recently arrived migrants. Many won’t even be able to pay off the usurious student debt they accrued pursuing a degree that probably hasn’t much increased their income, (if they can find a job). Meanwhile pensioners have their triple lock pensions, and public sector pensions are massively generous (and unfunded). In Scotland and Wales the devolved parliaments have given 16-year-olds the vote in the hope of boosting the “progressive” vote.; instead they’re facing an electoral kicking. This isn’t the populism that intellectuals so despise; it’s reality colliding with abstract economic and political theories.
That’s happened before and it’s messy. People forget that Gorbachev was a communist and that glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) projects were intended to improve the communist system. Unfortunately for the communists, the programmes revealed that communism was not working and never could, not least because there was no money for reconstruction. The USSR then collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The United Kingdom, having only had 30 or so years of lightweight Marxism, isn’t yet in as dire a state as the USSR. We’re on a similar track though. The government machine grows like Topsy………and less is delivered. Too few in the political establishment or media believe in anything beyond more centralisation, and the Treasury clings to the delusion that it can tax its way to growth. The dogs in the potholed streets can see it’s not working. In Reform the electorate have an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction and an opportunity to vote for change. Across the country, unnoticed by Bergman, small(ish) groups of people are working on how to adjust the country’s trajectory from its current, disastrous course. They’re called “the people” and they’re on the rise………
© DJM 2026
