It is a shocking, mind-boggling truth that the Reform Party is simultaneously more conservative than the Tories and more socialist than Labour.  

How on earth is that possible?

Both Labour and Conservative parties have been captured by big business and ideologues.  Neither party understands how badly they have been scammed.  From privatisation and PFI to covid and climate change it is always corporations, billionaires and bankers who make out like bandits.   Very, very like bandits.  And these malign forces know very well how to grease the palms of bureaucrats and ideologues to provide a virtuous gloss for their vices.

Before the world went mad there was a decent argument for voting Labour (protect the working class from exploitation and look after the poorest and weakest in our society) and a decent argument for voting Tory  (leave people alone to make up their own minds and make their own money).  Now there are no respectable reasons for voting for either of them.

I will not dwell on the Tories here.  They gave up being conservative years ago. Their understanding of free markets is to screw small businesses on behalf of monopolistic multi-nationals.  Their election promise amounts to this: if you vote for them now they really, really, really, really, pinky promise really, will be conservative now, just like they have promised and failed to do for the last fourteen years.  A wooden spoon would be more conservative than  the Tories:  it is not mendacious and has at least one useful function. 

Reform is more conservative than the Tories simply by being straightforward and committed to reducing wasteful Government expenditure.

So how does Reform also manage to be more socialist than the Labour Party?

The Labour party has abandoned the working class.  It is now the party of luxury beliefs and implausible ideology. Consider for a moment a few of Labour’s policies and contrast them with Reform.  

NOT ZERO

Reform policies are notably far closer to traditional working class concerns than those of the modern Labour party. Consider, for example, Unite, a proper old-fashioned trade union.  Last month Unite launched a campaign against the Labour Party’s plan to abolish oil and gas industry jobs without any viable replacement strategy for the jobs or the energy.

The Labour party is still peddling utterly unrealistic, unscientific fairytales about harnessing Britain’s sun, wind and wave energy to “save £93 billion” for UK households.

The Reform Party energy policy starts like this:

"Our energy market needs Reform.  We all care about the environment. Our air has never been cleaner. We want to use technology to do our bit. But Net Zero is the wrong bit, at the wrong price, in the wrong timeframe. Westminster’s obsession with Net Zero is damaging our livelihoods and the economy. It has sent energy bills soaring. Made it harder for businesses to compete. It is costing tens of thousands of jobs and increasing inflation.

Net zero means reducing man made CO2 emissions to stop climate change. It can’t. Climate change has happened for millions of years, before man made CO2 emissions, and will always change. We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it. Up to 10 times more people die of cold than warmth. In Roman Britain some 2,000 years ago, it was 2 degrees warmer than now. Grapes for wine were grown in Yorkshire.

CO2 is essential for photosynthesis to enable plant growth. CO2 only represents 0.04% of the atmosphere; the average garden greenhouse has 3 times more! The UK produces only 1% of global CO2 emissions, yet China produces 27%. China & India are building hundreds of coal fired power stations. Even the IPCC admits Net Zero would make no difference to sea level rise for 200-1,000 years; in other words they do not have a clue."

IMMIGRATION

Disguised by a woke-pleasing veneer of compassion, corporations use immigration ruthlessly  to suppress working class wages.  As former recruitment agency CEO Phillip Ullman admits, mass immigration hurts the working class hardest and benefits big corporates the most.

The Labour party, like the Tories, is talking tough about immigration, but it  has for decades consistently opposed reducing migration and closing our borders to illegal migrants.

The Reform party proposes to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and allow no illegal immigrants to be resettled in the UK. That will provoke palpitations amongst the woke and luvvies and solid approval from the old school working class.

HEALTH

Labour and Conservative politicians have both fallen for the bullshit of the management barons of the NHS.  The NHS has more administrators than front line staff.  That would be laughable if it did not result in thousands of premature deaths and aeons of physical suffering.

The people who really suffer from the collapse of the NHS are not the middle classes; like Westminster politicians they can afford to go private. The people who really suffer are the working class who don't have that option. And Labour is intent  on continuing their persecution by screwing frontline staff (largely working class again) to work weekends for nugatory benefit and leaving the bureaucrats to sun in their back gardens.

Reform would give everyone vouchers to go private if they can't get treatment in a reasonable time. Furthermore Reform is willing to name both of the elephants in the doctor’s waiting room:

#1  To quote their “Contract with you”

“This is not about funding. Per head of population, NHS spending is similar to other western countries. Sadly, the NHS is being let down by incompetent management, bureaucracy, waste, cover-ups and scandals. The NHS has a crisis in leadership. This will take time to fix. It is about structure and motivation.”

#2 They are willing to ask the multi-billion dollar question, 

“What is causing the excess deaths which are continuing long after the end of the Covid pandemic?”

ULEZ         

Labour continues to support ULEZ.  ULEZ zones, championed in London by the Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, whilst at best achieving a negligible reduction of vehicle emissions of 1.5% are mostly likely to have a negative impact on health overall by virtue of their penal financial impact.

ULEZ disproportionately penalises poor people, specifically the working poor who need their cars to get to work:  in other words tradesmen, nurses, postal workers, shift workers and care workers.  They cannot afford to go out and buy new, expensive, compliant vehicles.  They are exactly the working class people whom the Labour party was founded to protect. 

Reform would scrap all ULEZ zones.

PRIVATISATION

Reform recognises that privatisation has impaired service to the public and has above all else benefited bankers. From the water industry to the railways, savvy financiers always ensure that the operating companies are loaded with debt and make appalling losses – and hence benefit from endless subsidies –  whilst ensuring that massive dividends and interest payments go to the ultimate owners.  In the case of the railways massive lease costs are paid to the owners of the rolling stock where the profits are gathered, usually offshore and safely protected from the UK taxman.

Reform would bring utilities back under Government control.

You don’t need me to list any more contents  of the parties’ manifestos, you can check them out for yourself and make up your own mind here:

• Labour

• Conservative

• Reform

Sometimes Labour and Reform have similar policies - for example both plan to increase technical courses and apprenticeships - but mostly Labour is offering the same old simplistic, idealistic nonsense that they (and to be fair the Tories) have been offering for decades. What, for example, you might ask, is the difference between Labour's proposed Respect Orders: "a tough new order with criminal sanctions for antisocial behaviour" and Tony Blair's ASBOs which were such a resounding success twenty years ago?

Reform seems to have taken to heart the advice I offered in February. The writing and policies on their website have been improved, they have restored Nigel Farage as party leader and they have shifted their tone of voice from ‘we are the sensible people’ to ‘we need to get stuff done fast’.

Of course Reform is very far from perfect and its candidates are largely unknown.  I am myself surprised to have arrived at such a favourable opinion of them. The fact that Reform's candidates are not professional politicians counts in their favour. It is, ultimately, a matter of comparison. With very, very few exceptions  (such as the MP who  fought for justice for subpostmasters against the Post Office long before ITV, Andrew Bridgen)  the current Westminster politicians of all parties are wet, technocratic, arrogant, centrist midwits. They aren't socialist. They aren't conservative. They are useless.

 So if you are a metropolitan with luxury beliefs, vote Labour. If you are a real socialist, vote Reform.

Hugh Willbourn is the author of "The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it".  If thinking plays a part in your life you should read it.  It is available by clicking here, and internationally as a paperback, ebook and audiobook at Amazon.