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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.
By her own account, she was in a party that she no longer trusted, had no faith in, and could not defend. “I looked around and realised I was politically isolated and alone.” The problem, as she sees it, is not circumstantial but structural – and insoluble. “Most of the people involved in the great betrayals are the same people running the party today.”
The central betrayal, the one she returns to again and again, is immigration. “The truth,” she warns, “is that half of Conservative MPs are dead against leaving the ECHR. I know it. I sit in the tea rooms. I hear what they say under their breath.”
[…]
Why, then, does she believe that Reform can succeed where the Tories repeatedly failed? Braverman says that, when she tried to persuade the party that Britain must leave the ECHR, to cut visas, to end what she calls two-tier policing, she was left exposed. “None of my Cabinet colleagues stood up for me. Not one.” The Conservatives might respond that recollections vary, but Braverman is insistent that there is a zeal in Reform which she is convinced the Tories still lack.
– Annabel Denham writing about Suella Braverman’s defection (£) to Reform
The BBC really are a preposterous news organisation. On their website there are currently six stories about the killing of one man in Minneapolis. But not a single item about the massacres in Iran. This is biased and disproportionate beyond belief.
– Luke Johnson
Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.
– Dr. David Bell
“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.
“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
– Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison.
Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
I can’t kid myself any more. The party hasn’t changed… and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it. Don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs. In opposition, it’s easy to paper over these cracks, but the divisions – the delusions – are still there. And if we don’t get the next Government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this. I cannot, in good conscience, stick with a party that’s failed so badly, that isn’t sorry and hasn’t changed. That I know in my heart won’t… can’t… deliver what’s needed. That’s why I resolved to leave.
– Robert Jenrick
Starmer’s commitment to universal human rights – which necessarily implies open borders – is now a threat to national security and, paradoxically, the human rights of the British people. By welcoming el-Fattah, a virulent anti-Semite, Starmer has violated the right of our Jewish community to feel secure in their own land. His refusal to police the pro-Palestinian, anti-Semitic hate marchers since October 2023 has also trampled on the security of British Jews and infringed upon their liberty – Central London has become a no-go zone.
– Joe Baron
When details of its launch leaked, the Financial Times branded it a “Reform UK think tank”. It is easy to understand this assumption: it is led by Jonathan Brown, a former Foreign Office diplomat who went on to serve as Reform’s Chief Operating Officer. But the reality is more nuanced. Non party-political, CFABB is part of a broader network that is sympathetic to Reform’s aims but not an adjunct of it.
Nimbleness is one contrast with traditional approaches. As James Orr, the chairman of CFABB’s advisory board, told me, Reform is not just disrupting Westminster with their politics, but also their speed of action. “As a start-up, they operate at a much faster pace than the conventional parties; Farage makes decisions on policies in minutes, rather than months. Westminster’s methodical think-tank cycle — commissioning research, editing reports, convening panels, publishing white papers — simply cannot keep up with leaders who decide policy positions as quickly as Reform.”
– Tom Jones
Benefits should be a safety net not a lifestyle choice
– Annunziata Rees-Mogg
And what we, the people, need to worry about is therefore that this is merely the start of Project Stop Fascism. Labour were only elected 18 months ago, and they have already reached a position at which they think it sensible to delay elections, mostly abolish jury trials, and begin edging back towards EU member status. What might they do in a year’s time? Two years’ time? Three?
Delaying the next General Election would require primary legislation, and one reassures oneself by thinking that they surely couldn’t go that far. But I’m by no means the only person who has had the thought crossing his mind, and the fact that senior Labour figures are being forced to dismiss the idea publicly – a dismissal which is about as reassuring as your boss telling you that there are ‘currently no plans for compulsory redundancies’ – itself would have been unthinkable two years ago.
– David McGrogan
Which brings us to Nigel Farage. This week we received yet another reminder that the supposed “liberals” will stop at nothing – and I mean nothing – to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister, just as they previously did everything in their power to reverse the Brexit referendum. The coming battle will be both political and deeply personal. We have already witnessed attempts to manipulate the democratic process; that may prove mild compared with what will be unleashed on the Reform UK leader in the months ahead.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The very same commentators who accused Kemi Badenoch of being too harsh on Rachel Reeves during her Budget response are now hurling grotesque slurs at the MP for Clacton, branding him a neo-Nazi. The BBC even joined in. A segment on Radio 4’s Today programme questioned Mr Farage’s “relationship when he was younger with Hitler”, a framing so ludicrous it was almost comical, were the implications not so serious. Suddenly, a chorus of self-appointed critics has emerged, eager to throw decades-old allegations at the wall in the hope that something, anything, might stick.
– Camilla Tominey (£)
Richard Hanania once wrote about how the measures of freedom calculated by NGOs like Freedom House were skewed and worthless, because they were more concerned with those interpersonal freedoms than with actual concrete liberties. What matters to most people is simply whose side you’re on, and it goes without saying that a Right-wing European regime in which police turned up at people’s doors for expressing unfashionable opinions would be roundly condemned – and rightly so.
What makes our anarcho-tyranny all the more illiberal is that no one can be entirely sure what exactly are the unfashionable opinions deemed worthy of the state’s interference. In recent years moral norms have changed so quickly that people can find themselves in trouble for saying things that were totally mainstream ten years ago. In many cases they might not even be aware about the unspoken edict that such an opinion is now verboten, and I suspect it is not a coincidence that so many of the individuals caught out by this new tyranny have some form of autism.
– Ed West
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