Clark Vasey is co-founder and Executive Director of Blue Collar Conservatism.

This is part 1 of 2 articles on Re-Introducing Blue Collar Conservatism.

As political activists, we naturally like political campaigns framed as a battle of ideas with a clear mission to transform things for the better. It’s why, despite the increasing passage of time, we still look to transformative Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They defeated the left both at the ballot box and, most importantly, they defeated the left in office.

However, most elections do not look like that. Instead, they hinge on persuading voters that one side will be more competent than the other. David Cameron’s pitch accepted much of Tony Blair’s ‘modern Britain’; we would just do it better. Theresa May was ‘strong and stable’ until voters concluded she wasn’t and almost let in Jeremy Corbyn. Even ‘Get Brexit Done’ was about replacing a political class unwilling to get it done with one that would.

This mindset shaped candidate selection too. How often have we heard that Joe or Jane Bloggs has a background in business, the military, or whatever, ‘they will make a great MP’? This led to a tendency towards managerialism.

By the end of our time in office, too many of our entrenched problems stemmed from Blair-era reforms we left untouched or shamefully expanded.

Today, we face a Labour Government of astonishing incompetence. Its unimaginative socialism offers only higher taxes and more intervention, each compounding the last problem it created.

Kemi and her team are in another league when it comes to capability. However, we must resist the temptation to make the ‘competence’ of one group of people over another our central pitch. It will not work.

The end of the two-party system has changed the rules. Labour’s failures no longer send voters back in our direction. Labour’s collapse in the polls shows people understand how utterly useless they are, but less than two years ago many drew a similar conclusion about us. Reform’s supporters share our diagnosis of Labour; they are just not looking to us as the alternative.

We rightly point out how much worse things are since we left office. But the state of Britain in 2024 was not a winning formula. Talking about getting back to what we were beginning to achieve in government will fall far short, especially when you consider the voters we need to convince.

Labour and the left are our enemy, but if we are serious about winning, we must attract significant votes from Reform. There are too many of these voters for us to write off and there is no fantasy centrist coalition to replace them with.

More than a decade ago, Esther McVey and I founded Blue Collar Conservatism because we believed working-class voters had been taken for granted by Labour. We recognised that they shared our values and stood to benefit most from a genuinely conservative agenda. At the time, the leadership was still more interested in chasing metropolitan liberals, but we predicted that these voters would shift right.

2019 ought to have been a historic moment of realignment. Instead, many of these voters ended up feeling just as let down by us. The rightward realignment has continued but now largely sits with Reform.

Labour understands that working people are no longer part of its base. Its coalition is now a fraying mix of metropolitan left-wingers and state dependents. Labour’s approach to Reform has little to do with winning back lost Reform voters and everything to do with attracting the votes of Liberal Democrats and Greens. Keir Starmer’s increasingly unrestrained Europhilia will not appeal to Labour’s Brexit voting former heartlands but might convince enough Liberal Democrats to help block Reform.

Reform polling in the low 30s is uniquely blockable and they know it. Reform has squeezed Labour to its metropolitan core and there is no more juice in that direction. To build a base that can withstand tactical voting, Reform needs to take support from us in significant numbers. Recent developments have made that abundantly clear.

Our challenge is the inverse, but with greater numbers: persuading Reform voters to trust us.

We will not do this by attacking them. We will do it by presenting a better, clearer alternative. We once talked about ‘love-bombing’ Liberal Democrats (I know, I hate that phrase too), but a similar mindset is required here. We must show Reform voters that we understand their frustrations and yes, their scepticism of us. We must convince them that we will do what we say we will do, and that never again will we take right-wing votes to pursue left-wing outcomes.

We all have family and friends who have gone over to Reform. Many of those who have been involved in Blue Collar Conservatism are now prominent Reform figures. Their values are fundamentally the same as ours. They want what we want: a country that works.

We just need to convince them that we are the best vehicle to deliver an agenda that works for ordinary working Brits.

Blue Collar Conservatism exists to do exactly that: to reshape Britain into a country that works for working people by delivering a programme of national renewal built on a relentless focus on jobs and opportunity, and ensuring Britain’s place in the world by maximising the potential of its people.

In Part Two, I will set out what this means in practice.

Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.

When politicians talk about building more infrastructure, it can often seem like a fairly abstract ambition. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In January, thousands of people across Kent and Sussex, including in my constituency, lost access to running water after a “freeze and thaw event” caused pipes to burst. In other words, water infrastructure installed by the Victorians was unable to cope with predictable wintertime temperature changes after well over a century of use. Our infrastructure failed; the result was people in Britain, in 2026, forced to queue up for bottled water in order to wash themselves and cook their food.

The modern world rests on infrastructure.

The relative comfort in which we live was made possible by the building of previous generations. They created a world in which we were able to take roads, railways and reservoirs for granted. It is thanks to their work that we can travel easily around the country, heat our homes and, most of the time, rely on being able to turn on the tap to get clean, running water.

But this inheritance, impressive though it is, can’t last forever. It must be maintained and built upon. For many of my constituents last week, the consequences of failing to do that were all too real.

And what a failure it is. According to the National Audit Office, at the current rate of work and investment it would take 700 years to replace our ageing water system. In the meantime, outages like those seen in Kent and Sussex this week will, sadly, be commonplace. The promise of improvement in seven centuries’ time provides little comfort when you find yourself bathing in bottled water.

We can expect far more of this. We haven’t built a reservoir in this country since 1992, meaning that our rain-soaked island is likely to face water shortages in the decades ahead. Even if we’d built enough reservoirs, most of the country would still be relying on Victorian-era pipes, which bulge and burst as the temperature changes.

And our water system isn’t the only casualty of time and neglect. We haven’t built a new motorway since 2003, despite rising congestion. We haven’t built a new nuclear power station since 1995, helping to cause the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world. The London Underground, a marvel of Victorian ingenuity, was built so long ago that the whole system now risks overheating. The plan seems to be to encourage people to carry a bottle of water on hot days.

In his memoirs, Lee Kuan Yew, the visionary founding father of Singapore, talked of taking his island nation from third world to first. It can feel like Britain is slipping in the opposite direction, from first world to third.

Yet we should not allow our current direction to define our future destination. Things can improve, and they must, just as they have before. The blockers which have been put in place to stop us from building on our inheritance were self-imposed; they can be removed. The drive and dynamism that will be required to turn our country around is considerable but is within our grasp.

After all, we’ve done it before. By the time of the Great Stink of 1858, the Victorians were still relying on the skeleton of the Roman sewage system. London’s population had grown forty times larger, and no effort had been made to manage this growth. Much of the capital was, in effect, an open sewer.

Within just six years, an entirely new sewage system had been opened, which would go on to be expanded over the next decade. By 1875, London had 1,300 miles of new sewers, and a whole new system designed to manage the city’s water and waste. In turn, the embankments built to support the new sewage system allowed the opening of new roads, new public gardens, and the Circle Line of the London Underground.

By contrast, since the Victorians laid the modern sewage system, the country’s population has merely trebled – an enormous challenge to be sure, but a smaller proportionate increase than from the Romans to the Victorians by some margin. We can, and should, also avoid making this challenge greater by adding hundreds of thousands of people to the population each year, as we have done for the past few decades.

There are plenty of rules which will need to be changed, and regulations which will need to be slashed, if we want to achieve anything on this scale again. Yet for even these changes to be made, we’ll first need to rediscover our national sense of ambition. We will need to believe that we are a country which can solve its own problems, rather than shrugging our shoulders as we stumble from crisis to crisis. We will need to recognise that we have our own part to play in creating the world that we want future generations to enjoy.

I believe that we can, and that we will – because while many of our politicians may have failed us, the British people are still the best in the world.

Albie Amankona is a broadcaster, financial analyst, vice-chair of LGBT+ Conservatives, and co-founder of Conservatives Against Racism.

Ruth Davidson and Andy Street are right: there are millions of “politically homeless” voters who feel unrepresented, disconnected and unconvinced that British politics is capable of governing competently. Their new project to win those voters back to the centre-right is therefore a necessary intervention.

But if this moderate movement is to be taken seriously, if it is about delivery rather than posture, then it must kill “socially liberal, fiscally conservative”.

That slogan no longer describes a governing philosophy. It disguises the central failure of modern One Nation conservatism: a preference for tone over outcomes.

Street and Davidson talk about competence, place, civic pride and bread-and-butter economics. All welcome. But competence without clarity is fragile. Civic pride without common culture and customs is hollow. The “politically homeless” voters Street and Davidson want to attract are not looking for atmospherics. They are looking for solutions to problems they can feel.

Nowhere is this clearer than immigration and integration. These cannot be parked in the name of civic harmony. A genuinely restrictive immigration policy and a muscular integration strategy are not optional extras. They are the foundation of any place-based conservatism. You cannot talk credibly about wages, housing, public services or social cohesion while refusing to confront the single pressure voters most clearly identify.

Here is the irony, the “wet” moderates delivered more right-wing outcomes than the faux “dry” hardliners who followed them.

Net migration was lowest this century from the actions of “moderate” home secretaries like Theresa May and James Cleverly. By contrast, the Johnson era’s self-styled culture warriors presided over record-high immigration after Brexit. The Boriswave was a direct result of policy choices made under Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, and Suella Braverman. Damian Green did more to cut migration than Robert Jenrick.

The same inversion applies on spending. The period of greatest fiscal restraint came under “moderate” chancellors and prime Ministers like David Cameron and George Osborne. With welfare cuts too deep even for veteran right-winger, Iain Duncan Smith. They weren’t perfect, but they were materially more fiscally conservative and more right-wing in outcomes than what followed.

The post-Boris Johnson Tory administrations, enthusiastically cheer-led by many of today’s Reform defectors, did not govern as dry Thatcherites. They cosplayed as them. On immigration, spending and the size of the state, the Cameron-era leadership was more right-wing on virtually every measurable metric.

Yet One Nation conservatism refuses to own its right-wing history, paralysed by a fear of sounding “mean” or “cruel”. That confusion is sustained by continued reliance on “socially liberal, fiscally conservative”, a slogan that made sense two decades ago but is now obsolete.

The culture war it was designed to defuse is over. Four female leaders. Two non-white leaders. Equal marriage settled law. The British conservative movement, Reform UK included, is now tolerant by default: multiracial, secular, gender-agnostic and gay-friendly.

Today, “social liberalism” no longer means tolerance. It denotes an institutional ideology that treats disagreement as harm, enforcement as cruelty and group identity as a substitute for merit. It is expressed through anti-meritocratic DEI bureaucracies, race and gender essentialism, the policing of language and thought, fictional net zero economics, and an intolerance of dissent dressed up as compassion. One Nation conservatism has been slow and timid in confronting this, defaulting to the defence of institutions that are now openly hostile to conservative instincts.

Voters did not defect because language was insufficiently kind. They defected because outcomes were incoherent. Rhetoric dialled up but immigration surged, bureaucracies ballooned, net zero drifted into fantasy, and the justice system forgot the “justice” part. Post-Brexit vibes politics produced delivery failure.

Davidson and Street are right to stress civic pride and cohesion. However, cohesion is not generated by reassurance. It requires rules, expectations and enforcement. Integration is not a polite request. It is a requirement.

May, hardly a populist, argued for leaving the ECHR while Lee Anderson was still a Labour councillor. Borders, law and sovereignty are not culture-war distractions – they are the preconditions for a free society.

In three consecutive leadership contests, One Nation candidates failed to reach the final two. That is not bad luck or factional bias. It is a rejection of moderation without muscle.

If Street and Davidson want their project to succeed, they must say clearly what they are prepared to abandon. Killing “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” is necessary but not sufficient. What replaces it must be more than a change in language. It has to be a set of choices.

Clear positions on the questions that decide whether a governing philosophy exists at all. What does a genuinely restrictive immigration policy look like in practice? What does enforcement mean? What institutions need shrinking rather than managing? Where does the state step back, and where does it enforce?

What does “fiscally conservative” mean in a world of debt dependency, ageing populations and rising defence costs. What gets cut, what gets reformed, and what is protected? How is planning liberalised in practice, and homes actually built? How is infrastructure delivered without chronic overspend and pointless overbuild?

What integration actually requires? What the obligations of citizenship are? What the state will no longer tolerate? Until those questions are answered, One Nation conservatism remains a temperament rather than a governing philosophy. Pleasant, well-meaning, but electorally weightless.

If Street and Davidson’s new centrist conservative clan is to be taken seriously, “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” must die. What replaces it must be pragmatic, radical and unapologetically conservative

Reform UK treasurer and ‘property tycoon’ Nick Candy appears in the latest Epstein files. More than appears, in fact. Serial child-rapists and Israeli agents Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were so enamoured of him that Maxwell was “very disappointed” that Candy didn’t let her know he was coming to town.

Furthermore, they were eager to arrange dinner together before he left:

Candy also asked for Maxwell’s email address. Afterwards, he received congratulations as (apparently) Maxwell congratulated him on something and gushed about how great it is on “Jeffrey’s island”:

Candy also received a message from one of Maxwell’s friends, whose name is redacted – but may, based on a missed redaction in a different email, be called ‘Sarah’ — perhaps Sarah Kellen, an interior designer and Epstein associate. ‘Sarah’ wished Candy “exciting adventures” and hoped to see him again soon, even if he never got to know her surname after their first party meeting:

As Middle East Eye has pointed out:

Kellen was in her early 20s when she met Epstein, and she was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 plea deal in which Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution. But her legal representatives have said Kellen was one of Epstein’s victims.

Kellen was seemingly the sender of the ‘Ghislaine is disappointed’ email at the top of this article.

Harry Eccles, who discovered the emails in the latest release, asked Reform UK for comment. None appears to have been sent. Eccles also pointed out that emails referred to Candy’s company selling a property for Epstein and therefore making money from him:

Jed Garfield, is a known associate of Nick Candy.

Here it seems ‘Candy’ is arranging a first, and second visit to a house with the help of Jed Garfield liaising directly with Jeffrey Epstein pic.twitter.com/c5XnCOVGvQ

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— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) February 3, 2026

And here Epstien and Jobor Y are discussing Candy’s tax court case. pic.twitter.com/0u3URlWPkA

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) February 3, 2026

The emails also show that Candy had Epstein’s personal number:

The above forwarded to Epstein personally pic.twitter.com/ZrmZUvxq35

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) February 3, 2026

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And they show both that Maxwell was involved in the property discussions. Epstein said he had spoken with Candy himself. In addition, Epstein was a fan of Candy and his brother:

Epstein about Candy: ‘no I spoke to him’ pic.twitter.com/cKBi6oeqOk

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) February 3, 2026

Jeffrey Epstein about the Candy Brothers: ‘I like both of those guys’ pic.twitter.com/wPS0VEyzo7

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) February 3, 2026

And – of course – the disgraced ex-peer and senior Starmer adviser Peter Mandelson had his fingerprints on it, too:

Epstein Residence plans – on the Epstine Library has C Candy (copyright Candy) as the title. pic.twitter.com/22LgL2JVYI

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) February 3, 2026

Reform and its treasurer have questions to answer about the association. Somehow it seems unlikely that they will.

Featured image via the Canary

Never a party to miss a vapid appeal to populism, Reform UK have announced plans to cut beer duty by 10%. Except, how do they plan to fund such a feat? Well, by reintroducing the two-child benefit cap, of course.

Under Reform’s new commitment, the party would gradually phase out business rates altogether for UK pubs. Incidentally, they’d also plunge around 350,000 children back into poverty, and 700,000 into deep poverty.

The fact that a mainstream political party can suggest something like this without being spat on immediately by everyone in range indicates that something is deeply wrong with our country. I just don’t have a better way to say that.

Facts about taxes, as if that’s the problem here and not Reform

In Rachel Reeves’ autumn budget, the chancellor unveiled plans to hike business rates for pubs by 76%. This would boil down to additional costs of around £4,300 a year, after the current freeze ends.

However, on 27 January Labour announced that it would reverse course. Starting in April, pubs will now receive a 15% cut to new business rates bills, along with a two-year real-terms freeze.

Reform MP, and general shithouse, Lee Anderson stated that:

The loss of one pub is not just the loss of livelihood for a landlord, or the loss of a local employment hub. The loss of one pub is a loss to all of us as inheritors of a tradition dating back to Roman rule.

He went on:

Yet the Conservatives, and now Labour, have facilitated the closure of thousands of pubs over the last decade. Any contrition they show is false.

As things stand, beer duty – i.e., tax – averages out at around 49p a pint, although that varies according to the drink’s strength. Reform’s plan would knock 10% from that figure by taking the money directly from struggling children and families.

Likewise, the far-right party would also cut VAT from 20% to 10% for the hospitality sector. Reform said that the fact supermarkets don’t pay VAT on food sales gives them an unfair advantage over pubs, as if the party has any concept of what fairness is.

The entire plan would carry a cost of £2.29bn in the first year, rising to £2.9bn by the fourth year. For contrast, estimates suggest that scrapping the two-child benefit cap will cost £3.6bn a year once it’s fully implemented.

There’s something wrong with all of us

There are too many things to say about this, I don’t really know where to start.

As recently as May 2025, Reform was all for scrapping the two-child cap. Then, they flipped to saying it should only be lifted for two-parent full-time-working households, and finally to opposing the removal of the cap altogether. This pointless contrarianism was motivated purely by Labour getting behind scrapping the cap.

This plan is yet another monstering of people who receive benefits – this time pitting them against local pubs, of all things. These two causes are completely unrelated to one another, but Reform has very deliberately chosen to pair them off.

Given Reform’s projected image as champion’s of ‘British culture’, pubs make sense as their chosen cause to champion – but that’s not a compliment. The UK has massive problems with alcoholism and binge drinking, and has even topped world alcohol consumption charts in recent years.

And finally, this is children we’re talking about. Reform are proposing to take money directly from the very poorest children in the UK, and to then give it to pub landlords. If the landlords chose to pass that saving on to customers, a pint might be 5p cheaper, at the cost of making life harder for 100,000 kids.

When did we get to this point, as a society? How can a mainstream political party can suggest something like this without it immediately sinking them? Why are the right-wing papers reporting this like it’s a normal idea?

This job sometimes involves reading, seeing, and reporting on heinous things. Many of them are objectively more awful than this. But this is just such a banal, calculated, cynical evil, it’s turned something in my stomach. There is something deeply wrong with us all. None of this is OK.

Featured image via the Canary

Whether he is taking steps to increase the UK’s level of military independence from the US.

Pollard said:

The US remains the UK’s principal defence and security partner, and our co-operation on defence, nuclear capability and intelligence remains as close and effective as any anywhere in the world, keeping Britain safe in an increasingly dangerous environment.

No change there then, despite Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic warmongering. Pollard added:

As close friends, we are not afraid to have difficult conversations when we need to. Friends turn up for each other, as we did for the US in Afghanistan, and friends are also honest with each other, as the Prime Minister has set out.

Trump recently disparaged the NATO contribution to the disastrous Afghan war, causing immense public butthurt to British MPs. Trump eventually walked back his comments, lauding British soldiers for their efforts in that pointless, failed occupation.

Cheers, Don.

Independent nukes?

Khan had another question, however. He asked if the government would consider dropping military programs which did nothing to protect the country:

Our nuclear deterrent now consumes nearly a third of the defence budget through Trident, a system that cannot be launched without US approval. In pursuing nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction, we have drained funding from conventional forces and neglected the diplomacy and development that actually prevents conflicts.

He asked:

Does the Minister believe that prioritising nuclear defence over reducing tensions, ending conflicts and promoting peace genuinely delivers security for our people, and if so, can he explain why?

Pollard reiterated that the House of Commons is populated largely by sycophants divorced from public outlooks:

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question; it comes from a point of view that is different from that of many people in this House and in the wider public.

Then he leant into the usual inaccurate stock answer

Our nuclear deterrent is operationally independent; the only person who can authorise its firing is the Prime Minister. It is a part of our security apparatus, which keeps us safe every single day, and has done for decades.

Adding:

As a Government, we are continuing to invest in our nuclear deterrent, just as we are investing in jobs and skills right across the country that keep us safe every single day. Our relationship with the United States is a key part of that, but we will also continue to invest in our relationships with our other allies, especially around Europe.

In reality, as the US publication National Interest explained on 5 March 2025:

the Trident missiles are not even owned by Britain, but are instead leased by the British military from the Americans.

They expanded:

British nuclear deterrent relies exclusively on American ballistic missile technology, the submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) known as the Trident II D5, built by the U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

So, not independent then. The UK has lashed its future security to the whims of US leaders – whoever is in charge at a given time. Donald Trump’s first year back in power has rocked alliances like NATO. It seems like exactly the time to start thinking about what a serious, independent defence and foreign policy would look like. Pollard and Starmer, however, remain committed to a dying consensus which serves nobody but the US.

Featured image via the Canary