There’s no doubt that Reform UK is a party in trouble. While the recent accusations of financial impropriety and illegality are grave in themselves, they also expose an organisation that’s still amateurish and complacent in its attitude and operations. And while it’s true that there are elements in the establishment, particularly in the media, who are and have always been out to get it, the party still needs to get its act in order – sharpish.

It needs to do so because the issues Reform campaigns on still matter hugely to the public. Many working-class people and conservative middle-class types still don’t like what’s happened to their country and they still want it back. In order for this to happen, these people need a functioning party that can effect much-needed radical reform. And if politicians won’t ‘stop the boats’, then members of the public will, as we saw with the blockading of ports in Dover and Portsmouth.

This undiminished undercurrent of feeling was encapsulated by a retired couple who spoke to Josh Glancy of The Sunday Times at the Reform conference last week. The Crisps, from Horsham in West Sussex, voted Conservative for much of their lives but switched over in 2024. Why? ‘It was the big two’, Mr Crisp explained. ‘Welfare and immigration. We’re losing our identity as a nation. We’re in danger of getting subsumed.’

There remains a vast multitude of ordinary, hard-working citizens who loathe the Labour government, who have sour memories of the last Conservative incumbents, who despise the establishment (the Home Office, the civil service, the universities and teaching unions beholden to a hyperliberal dogma, the BBC, charities with internationalist pretensions, human-rights lawyers and idealistic judges), and yearn for its cleansing and the country’s restitution. They ache for a government that will address their acute and chronic concerns.

No matter how many times commentators have written off Nigel Farage, no matter how many times centrists and leftists have sought to smear him as stupid and racist, the populist wave that has expanded into a broadly conservative bloc has not gone away. Millions remain exasperated at the way this country has been and continues to be misruled, a country that appears to be disappearing before their eyes.

There is a hunger for a party that will wrench this country back from the illiberal left, the bien-pensants and the big state spendthrifts. Yet Reform’s ill-thought-out initiatives outlined at the party conference only point to an outfit that is unfocused and even in disarray. Voters don’t want a period of ‘national emergency’ should Reform be voted into power, and they can see the proposal to make the singing of the national anthem obligatory in schools as the gimmick for what it is.

What they want is for children to be taught rigorous lessons absent hyperliberal dogma – for teenage boys not to be dissuaded from reading the classics because they are ‘racist’ or insufficiently ‘diverse’, as is currently the case. They want a competent and efficient government that will seal the borders, not appease Islamists, stop unnecessary benefits for the neurotic and the workshy, and cut taxes in order that small businesses and the economy may thrive.

That really isn’t too much to ask for.

The post-literate left

Even before the release of his new book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, Times columnist James Marriott had sparked a conversation about the future of civilisation in a present and near future in which no one reads for pleasure, enlightenment or as active citizens.

One of the pressing concerns outlined by Marriott in a recent essay was the debasement of politics in an age when fewer people read newspapers. With people ingesting their politics instead through short-form video, where ‘there is little space for nuance’, this new post-literate settlement ‘seems to correlate with an increased vote share for the far right and populist parties’.

This may indeed be the case, but Marriott overlooks the fact that the biggest dunces in politics today are on the far left, in particular in that intersection between green and left.

The Green Party of England and Wales is perfectly representative of our post-literate society. It’s an outfit run by people who evidently don’t read history or elementary textbooks on economics, and which appeals to a certain younger demographic who similarly lives in a non-literate dreamworld.

The Greens made unprecedented gains in the May local elections largely because they made fantastical promises to a credulous and idealistic section of the electorate. They mooted a universal basic income, vowed to legalise hard drugs and prostitution. A candidate for their sister party, the Scottish Greens, pledged to abolish prisons. The Greens’ avowed position is that ‘migration is not a criminal offence under any circumstances’ and that we should strive for a ‘world without borders’, where ‘the concept of legal nationality [is] abolished’. Their latest illusory wheeze is to abolish private landlords.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are possibly even more brain-dead. They want to abolish the Senate, prisons and borders, replace the presidency and the Supreme Court, and give full voting rights to criminals and non-citizens. According to a poll earlier this year, four in 10 Americans said they would consider voting for a DSA candidate for president.

Vacuous left-green utopianism is a symptom of a society that no longer reads diligently or reflectively.

George Orwell would have had Andy Burnham’s number

For anyone who finds Andy Burnham’s vague, matey ‘northern bloke’ persona increasingly tiresome, not least because it seems to act as a substitute for saying anything meaningful, they may find comfort in the thought that George Orwell would have seen through the act.

‘There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Northern snobbishness’, wrote Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

‘A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is “real” life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only “real” work, that the North is inhabited by “real” people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has “grit”, he is grim, “dour”, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy…’

In a world of seemingly unceasing tumult, it’s reassuring to know that Burnham, who came from an unremarkable working-class Cheshire background and attended Cambridge University, is still tapping into this ancient and dubious ‘authentic northerner’ stereotype.

Andy Burnham provided one of those rare moments at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday when a politician inadvertently crystallises an entire political philosophy in a single sentence. Challenged over defence spending, the UK prime minister declared: ‘We will do everything to support our national security, but it can’t come at the expense of social security.’ You could almost hear an elderly Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge rattling approvingly in a drawer somewhere.

It was the old left slogan, ‘welfare not warfare’, reheated for the TikTok generation. Why bother with tanks when you can have tax credits? Who needs Trident when you’ve got Universal Credit? The immediate objection is obvious. At a time of Russian aggression, geopolitical instability and growing doubts about Britain’s military preparedness, a government’s first responsibility must surely be the defence of the realm. Vladimir Putin is unlikely to abandon his territorial ambitions after discovering that Britain has increased housing benefit.

But there is another problem with Burnham’s distinction between social and national security: the two are increasingly intertwined.

Britain’s welfare state was established principally as a system of national solidarity. Working-age citizens contributed to state resources from which they and their fellow Brits could draw support during unemployment, sickness and old age. Yet the contemporary welfare state increasingly strains against that principle: if anyone from anywhere can access it, it is no longer connected to the national community.

Consider asylum. Government figures show that in June 2025, some 106,000 asylum seekers were receiving state support, with 103,000 provided with accommodation. Remarkably, the government’s own asylum policy acknowledges that accommodation should be ‘decent and humane without becoming a pull factor’. That admission matters. It shows that even ministers recognise that welfare provision can be an incentive for illegal immigration.

It certainly cuts against the mainstream media narrative. We are frequently invited to believe that migrants navigate thousands of miles across continents, contact smugglers and ultimately reach Calais, yet remain mysteriously oblivious to the conditions awaiting them once they arrive. But research shows that many asylum seekers do take conditions and welfare policies into account.

One of these conditions is healthcare. In England, anyone can register with a GP and receive primary medical care without charge. NHS guidance explicitly states that GP practices do not require proof of identity, address or immigration status. That applies even to somebody without lawful immigration status. Campaigns for so-called Safe Surgeries have sought to ensure that migrants can obtain primary healthcare without immigration status becoming a barrier.

Politically, it illustrates something important. The border increasingly ceases to affect access to certain institutions of the British state. Someone can have no legal entitlement to remain in Britain while simultaneously possessing an entitlement to use its healthcare system. For primary care at least, the N in NHS seems remarkably negotiable.

Housing creates similar pressures. Britain already has a chronic shortage of affordable homes, with lengthy waiting lists in many parts of the country. Yet once migrants acquire an eligible immigration status, they can enter the social-housing system. In London, 48 per cent of social housing is occupied by a head of household who wasn’t born in the UK. We frequently read cases of asylum seekers being moved into newly built homes.

Immigration policy therefore cannot sensibly be considered separately from housing, healthcare and welfare capacity. Every additional entitlement creates demands on resources that are already scarce.

Oddly enough, Labour governments understand incentives perfectly well when trying to make us stop smoking, or encouraging us to buy electric cars and install heat pumps. But suggest that incentives might also influence migration, however, and the concept suddenly becomes bafflingly controversial.

The result is a state speaking out of both sides of its mouth. At the Channel, it insists that illegal entry is unacceptable. But once someone has crossed the border, humanitarian and universalist principles increasingly require that important services be provided regardless of how the entrant arrived. The message is essentially: NO ENTRY – but if you do get in (and we won’t stop you), there are clean towels upstairs.

And therein lies the problem. A border is more than a line on a map: it is supposed to determine who may enter, who may remain, and, ultimately, who belongs to the political community. If crossing it unlawfully has diminishing consequences for access to the institutions of the state, the border itself risks becoming little more than a paper barrier.

All this brings us back to Burnham’s false distinction between social and national security. National security isn’t simply aircraft carriers, missiles and NATO spending. It begins closer to home, with maintaining territorial integrity through enforceable borders.

That is why social security cannot simply be set against national security. A fully functioning welfare state depends upon national security. It depends on protecting a political community, demarcated by real borders. Once those borders become porous, welfare provision risks becoming another incentive to cross them, while the distinction between citizen and non-citizen becomes progressively less meaningful.

Andy Burnham can talk all he likes about putting social security before national security. But a state that cannot secure its borders cannot secure its welfare state either.