In response to a question about where the problem in British politics lies, I agreed with the questioner it’s “the system” as currently configured that’s the crux of the matter.
Britain faces a series of systemic institutional structural problems, not a problem of leadership or competence. The Civil Service doesn’t serve, it has its own agendas, and the QUANGO-ocracy is where the real power lies, not with Parliament and the elected government.
Reform understands they have to smash the blob rather than try to work with it. And even if for the sake of argument nanny statist Kemi Badenoch also understand that (just as Liz Truss now does), Badenoch’s party is riddled with people who either don’t understand that, or do understand but are actually on the side of the rotten institutions. That means the Tories are a key part of the problem, not the solution.
Reform on the other hand have much less baggage in that respect. Their ‘inexperience’ is a plus because much of the rapidly forming Reform apparatus are outsiders with no attachment to the status quo, or are former Tories who got their illusions beaten out of them when they tried to be, you know, conservatives when in power, only to get crushed by the blob.
That’s why I support Reform. It’s not the quality of the people that attracts me, it’s the fact Reform-as-an-institution isn’t just a wing of the Uniparty filled with people saturated with establishment assumptions.
Quite so. Although in seventy years or so Reform will have been colonised by the (newer) Blob themselves.
I would liken Reform trying to fight “The Blob” to the Germans attacking the Kursk Salient. But instead of Reform being like Germany with the biggest collection of tanks committed to the biggest tank battle ever fought, Reform have a balloon on a piece of stick among the lot of them as their armament.
In other words, The Blob is extremely deeply entrenched, has had multiple decades of experience and training fighting the political will (where it existed) and like any cornered animal fighting for its life, the fight will be vicious and fierce.
If (and it is a very BIG IF) Reform manages to gain sufficient seats and/or partners to impose its will on Parliament, they will need to get the House of Lords to agree (unlikely and at best any legislation will be so watered down as to be useless)and then The Blob.
I wish them well but I genuinely can’t see them succeeding.
Phil B is correct that the destruction of the Blob is a hard task, which has to begin with legislation.
The HoL as currently constituted is of course a major constituent of the Blob. But it only gets to delay Bills for a year (Money Bills for a month.) So a Reform majority in Parliament can pass a Big Beautiful Repeals Bill within the first twenty minutes and then pass it again a year later. It can also pass a HoL Reform Bill twenty minutes after the HoL has rejected the first go at the Big Beautiful Repeals Bill, and then pass that again a year later. In the meantime it can pass lotsa public spending cut bills.
Resiling from treaties is a little more complicated with the precedent from Brexit that the “Supreme Court” can prevent the Crown from giving notice to withdraw from a treaty unless explicitly permitted by statute, so that’s another first 20 minute Bill.
The good thing about this is that Reform can justly claim not to be the actual government for its first year, so that it can continue to get the political benefit of being the opposition-in-fact while it gets its ducks in as row.
The main point – which is I think consistent with Mr Fairfax’s point above – is that it is entirely pointless to attempt negotiations with the Blob. The Blob needs to be legislatively disarmed first, before being actually dismantled and being replaced with something MUCH MUCH SMALLER and less autonomous.
PS I’d be thinking about some swingeing taxes on final salary pensions which these days are, to the nearest decimal point, public sector only
As to the Batttle of Kursk, even the Fuhrer thought it was a bad idea – ahead of time. He told Guderian that the whole idea gave him the willies, and Guderian said “me too, so why are we doing it ?” As it turned out it started off pretty well. Notwithstanding ex post facto Soviet propaganda, the Battle of Prokhorovka was a crushing victory for the Germans. And essentially the whole Kursk campaign was abandoned almost as soon as it started by the Allied landing in Sicily and the consequent hurried withdrawal of armoured units from Kursk to be sent to Italy.
If the history of the last 60 years has told us anything, its that heavily armed behemoths struggle to defend themselves against lightly armed but mobile forces that don’t play by ‘the rules’ and who never attempt a pitched battle against superior forces. If Reform attempt to destroy the Blob in a frontal attack it will end badly, for Reform.
Instead they need to fight asymmetrically. Don’t try to abolish the Blob directly, remove its powers instead. Abolish laws, don’t replace them. Then cut budgets. If you have to pass laws, pass ones that individuals can enforce themselves via the courts. For example, to break the power of the university system, don’t take them on directly, legislate to make it illegal to discriminate when hiring against non degree holders. As soon as companies start getting taken to court for not hiring well qualified candidates just because they haven’t a 2:2 in basket weaving, the message will get through. Never leave it to the bureaucracy to enact and enforce your new law. Pass enabling type legislation that restricts the power of the State – make it illegal to take more than 50% of a person’s income in taxes in any given year for example. Allow people to petition HMRC direct for refunds if they have been so treated. At all points empower the individual against the Blob, allow them to take the Blob on directly. The no-win no fee brigade will do the rest. That way a large proportion of the public become your shock troops, including many who would never vote for you, but who will happily sue the State if it means they can get something they want.
Yes Thomas Fairfax – all of the institutions are ideologically captured.
All of them – Church, Crown, Courts, Civil Service, Bank of England, Police, even the Armed Forces.
There is a similar tendency in other Western nations – most certainly including the United States.
But I think it is worse in Britain – the world view of leftism is more all pervasive.
Interesting post and interesting comments.
A lot to think about.
How many politicians from other parties, seeing more votes going to Reform than Labour, Tories, or even the Lib Dems, jump ship to Reform, not because they agree with their policies (does Reform have any policies?), but because they want to remain on the political gravy train. That so many Muslims either have, or will have, in any Reform government, ministerial responsibilities, gives cause for concern. The majority of the small boat invaders are muslims, and muslims tend to vote religiously rather than politically, so there may be conflicts of interest by Muslim Reform politicians. We really do live in interesting times.
Jim,
Take away their “gongs”. You want a medal, you can jump into a freezing river to rescue a drowning toddler like anyone else.
Giving civil servants honors for furthering the interests of the bureaucracy against the interests of the nation makes those honors worthless.
Penseivat – the Reform Party admit that the present Conservative Party policies, established by Kemi Badenoch, are generally CORRECT – their argument is that if elected, we would not put these policies into practice.
Kemi Badenoch replies that all Conservative candidates will have to sign an agreement to put these policies into practice – or they will not be allowed to stand, but that rather misses the basic point that the institutions (“the Blob”) are both ideologically captured by the left – and have far too much power. Power should be with the elected, not the unelected.
Both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage should stop mocking Liz Truss – and start listening to this ex Prime Minister about HOW she was destroyed, it was NOT Parliament – it was the institutions.
The institutions are vastly too powerful – and are ideologically captured, they-have-to-go.
That is a very radical position to take – but it is unavoidable unless Mr Farage wants to be “in office – but not in power” as ministers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg were.
By the way…… “the markets” are no longer about the free market, “the markets” are dominated by Central Banks (such as the Bank of England and the American Federal Reserve) and a few vast entities – such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, plus the Credit Bubble banks (who are light years away from being ordinary money lenders dealing with Real Savings – most of their lending is from “money” that did not exist before they created it, from NOTHING).
This is very important – “the markets” are no longer the 19th century model of individual buyers and sellers, indeed most shares stopped being owned and controlled in the United Kingdom as long ago as 1965.
“The markets” still exist – but are wildly distorted by government and corporate-state political and cultural agendas.
They have NOT been destroyed – but they have been wildly distorted.
Reform UK need to be finding candidates who have been successful in fields outside politics, giving them media training and putting them into public view. Yes, they need people like Braverman, Jenrick, Rosindell and Zarhawi who have seen the Civil Service and the apparatus of government at work, but they also need enterpreneurs and leaders from other fields.
There is a former prison governor in Reform UK. Get her on the stage. Former police officers. Former soldiers.
People who have led teams and know how to get things done. An ideal recruit would be a former high ranking Army logistics officer, but there are many other possibilities.
It would not be good enough to field 650 candidates who are former MPs or perhaps councillors who want to get their snouts into a more luxurious trough.
Jim: “its that heavily armed behemoths struggle to defend themselves against lightly armed but mobile forces that don’t play by ‘the rules’ and who never attempt a pitched battle against superior forces. ”
Which is exactly what happened at the true ‘biggest tank battle’, the battle of Brody in 1941, where a thousand German tanks with experience, better tanks and radios beat 5 or 6 thousand Soviet tanks.
Not that I accept tank battles as good analogies
It is important that Reform, if it is to quell some of the reservations I have about it, must reach far beyond the confines of embittered (whether justifiably or not) former Tory ministers.
It also needs to work out how, if it really is appealing also to some ex-Labour voters, that it is not compromising its stance on moving to smaller, less intrusive, government. So I will keep a beady eye on whether Farage and his colleagues can resist “right populist” measures such as partly nationalising Rolls Royce, for example. I want to see hard evidence that it has plans in foot to deregulate on a significant scale. It needs to provide a shopping list of Quangos that it will chop. I want to see evidence that tens of thousands of people in the public sector will be made redundant.
I have been reading the two-volume study on how to reboot the UK by Lord (Jonathan) Moynihan, and Reform can do a heck of a lot worse than to pay very close attention to his ideas.
The ‘system’ is certainly the problem but let’s not pretend that the system operates independently, without human endeavour. The Plastic Tories like to pretend that ‘the blob’ prevented them from implementing the policies demanded by voters. This is not the true. For example, it wasn’t ‘the blob’ preventing Suella Braverman from clamping down on immigration when she was Home Secretary, it was the Tory Prime Minister. It wasn’t the blob which made Treason May try to ruin Brexit. And it certainly wasn’t the blob driving Cameron’s liberal idiocies.
Marius, I think you misunderstand what “the blob” is.
May & Cameron are absolutely products of “the blob” ideologically, emotionally, psychologically. They are foggy midwits who regard the technocratic system within which they operate as fixed aspects of reality, like gravity & electromagnetism. Anything that disrupts that or tries to prevent the growth of bureaucratic technocracy is something the “adults in the room”, the people who are “a safe pair of hands”, regard as an abnormal affront to the natural order of things.
The solution to everything is always more government, ideally via arm’s length QUANGOS.
Absolutely true, but the direction of travel was clear all the way back when “Yes Minister” first aired. Even Liz Truss, briefly the Prime Minister, had to learn the hard way that the old assumptions no longer work at all.
The big thing that Reform must remember is they can’t cut welfare at the beginning. There’s too many other fronts they will have to fight on to attempt to fight on that one as well. The masses won’t care what Reform do to the Blob classes, as long as the bennies keep flowing. If Reform take on both they’ll be scuppered by mass demonstrations of the sort we are seeing in Minnesota. The masses aren’t coming onto the streets if the BBC gets privatised, or the charity sector gets decimated, or we leave the ECHR, or the Equality act gets abolished, or Net Zero is defenestrated, or the university sector gets slimmed down by 50%. They will if the cash stops coming in every month. All the savings that can be made by cutting the Blob need to be funnelled directly into lower taxes. Allied to mass cutting of regulations hopefully that would get the economy moving enough to increase tax revenue and then slowly start to push the welfare classes into work. The savings from which can then be ploughed into more tax cuts, hopefully creating a positive spiral. Reform must pick their battles early on. Attempting a multiple front advance from day 1 will end in catastrophe.
Jim… that is wise tactical advice on all counts
A battle fought on ground of your enemies choosing is a battle lost.
So don’t fight it on their ground.
@Jim
Hopefully, reform are looking at just this sort of thing. Has actually anybody tried before?
“Can’t means won’t” as I was always told at school (cough – years ago!) The uniparty simply won’t. Reform may fail, but they can try.
Thomas is right. Markets are losing faith in the order of things, the ability of the world’s blobs to govern. Losing faith in fiat currencies. I marvelled recently that gold hit an all time high of £90,000 per kilo. Today it is £125,00!!!
Finance ministers need to not simply manage within their self defined ‘headroom’ (a bullshit construct to keep can kicking) but to run actual fiscal surpluses. Or at least to grow GDP at a rate much above the deficit as a % of GDP.
The world is reverting to fundamentals. Painful but necessary.
Jim,
I was considering a very similar comment. The enemy is wicked but not stupid. You would have to assume they have war gamed out scenarios where politicians try to wrest power from them. And of course they will have the full support of the EU, the primary aim of which is to replace elected politicians with bureaucrats.
For example, it would be tempting to try and claw back the money wasted paying foreigners to live in Britain, but that would undoubtedly lead to mass demonstrations in attempt to make the county ungovernable. You would also have to bear in mind that the entire criminal justice system works for the home office, an enemy stronghold, so expect no assistance from the police.
So yes, complete agreement, neutering the enemy must be the first priority.
BTW, regarding my previous comment about gongs, I find it ridiculous that a minister of the crown is obliged to call his subordinates “Sir”. This sets entirely the wrong tone for any interaction.
PS. Hitting the enemy’s propaganda wing by privatizing the BBC would be an excellent opening move. You could also cripple the Guardian by moving all public sector recruitment to a government web site, something that was mooted by Cameron of all people.
“Privatize” is such a fun word.
In the US, we tried to privatize government functions by handing them off to NGOs.
The cure was worse than the disease. We handed them off to progressives who run the NGO’s and lost any and all transparency.
DOGE’s biggest achievement was making this known.
bobby b,
I was think more of an asset strip. Shut it down and sell its real estate so it can’t be restarted.