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“The Reform Party is nothing but a hotchpotch, a mess, a corpse infested by waifs, strays, weirdos, charlatans and crooks, offering the whole political spectrum from the seriously deranged to the criminally insane”

It’s a spicy line to start with, but before Reformers blow a gasket and accuse me of libel there is something they should know. This line was written by satirist Mark Taverner, in his novel “In the Red” who died in 2007, eleven years before Reform UK  were founded – as the Brexit Party – and was actually written in 1989.

In 1989 Nigel Farage was still three years from the founding of UKIP. He was then a commodities broker and metals trader and even he’d admit, probably with a grin, they were a gaggle who had their fair share of ‘charlatans and crooks’. But the quote cannot have meant his current political vehicle, first in the polls, and positioning itself for Government.

Besides, outwardly Farage is Teflon-coated to accusations his outfits are full of misfits.

His reaction in 2004 to the accusation from the then Tory leader, Lord Howard, that UKIP was filled with “cranks and political gadflies” was to have a tie made, adorned with both the tool and the insect, for members of a dining club of the same name, in Brussels!

He is, and always has been very good company socially, whatever you think of his politics. As is Lord Howard for that matter.

Attending one of these events at Nigel’s invitation twenty years ago was how I first met him. He wasn’t leader at the time, but chatting it became clear he would be. However the only ambition he’d admit to was his “own show on LBC, that would be brilliant. Did it before and loved it’” You can hear him saying it.

His ambition now is still to ‘lead Britain’s conversation’ – not from LBC’s studios but 10 Downing Street.

Many of Reform’s outriders have nearly as long an association with Farage. Reform UK may be a new insurgent party but many of its passengers and drivers – those not pushed under the bus for ‘disloyalty’ – are old hands in the insurgency business. Some of them demand the Conservatives don’t just recognise past failings, but crawl in ‘shame’. Arron Banks and newbie Zia Yusuf, a Tory until Aug 2024, like the language of snivelling abasement as the Tory price for sharing the same air!

Imagery aside I’ve said before, they and Tory defector Robert Jenrick make a challenge to the Tories that should not be airily dismissed but addressed. This site has seen Tories argue the same in order to avoid the risk of looking like they don’t need to.

It is bizarre to criticise the Tory Government as ‘a total failure’ whilst simultaneously welcoming some of its players into your ranks but there is still a feeling that – even if changing under Kemi Badenoch – the Conservatives haven’t changed enough or fully accepted why the electorate rejected them in 2024?

Suella Braverman says: “The truth is no Tory Party Leader has ever wanted to stop the boats or cut migration”.

Now despite the fact that measures brought in November 2023 by the Conservative government she’d just been removed from, have significantly cut migration – and if only someone like her had been in a position to do that, as, say, Tory Home Secretary – her defence is, the same as Robert Jenrick’s as Tory Immigration Minister; that they tried but Rishi Sunak wouldn’t let them.

It’s hard to utterly dismiss that, when the Conservative leader, who has put the entire party ‘under new management’ says similar; that she argued in Cabinet for certain courses of action but that she wasn’t ‘in charge then’ when challenged with why she didn’t do these things in Government.

Now in opposition, Badenoch and her shadow Cabinet argue they’re relentlessly focussed on the future. There’s a sound logic to that as people are crying out for vision. But having acknowledged the mistakes of the past, they’d have to accept it hasn’t landed as well as they’d have hoped. The argument about blame still continues on ConservativeHome, even this week. 

Those who demand repentance have as many different things they want it for as people doing the demanding, but if the ‘new’ Conservative party has a shrewd idea of what the old party got wrong, then maybe it needs to say so more clearly. You own the future if you can leave the past comfortably behind, not burying it and hoping people forget. Kemi is improving her standing with the public but the brand still has a long way to go.

Reform also have a past. Much shorter but nonetheless instructive.

Farage said, early on, that he knew Reform would “come under more scrutiny than probably any other party ever has”. He wanted to make this sound unfair or conspiratorial but it’s neither, nor true. They are getting exactly the same scrutiny, which they deserve as serious contenders to govern.

They jettisoned their 2024 manifesto within a year, because they recognised it was economically illiterate. They supported the scrapping of the two child benefit cap – for months backing billions of spending on top of an already ballooning welfare budget – only to U-turn on it yesterday and supporting the ‘disastrous Tories’ who’d brought it in and wanted to keep it.

Reform councils, like many others, are putting up council tax having said locally they’d cut taxes, despite denials at the top. In an emulation of Trump’s America, they instigated DOGE into local authorities. Predictably, Cllr Paul Chamberlain, one of their cabinet members in charge of such cuts at Kent County Council, told the FT:

“We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that [Musk’s] Doge found in America … and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”

In Warwickshire the nineteen year old leading Reform on the council – age not in itself the weakness some make out – has admitted “I had to learn very quickly” before complaining about the ‘blockages’ officials had put in his way. Doge-meister Yusuf has yet to visit Warwickshire. These are less ‘failings’ and more a wakeup call that promising the moon often hits hurdles higher than bravado and slogans can overcome in delivery. Reform’s solution to national problems they claim they, uniquely, can solve, too often involve just bravado and slogans.

On Monday Farage launched a telling social media attack on Charlotte Cadden, Conservative Candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. A police officer for 30 years who wants “a proper inquiry on grooming gangs” and “to get rid of carbon taxes“, both policies he agrees with, instead highlighted a fun run she did 15 years ago, as somehow a symbol of the entire Conservative now. But don’t anyone ask him about things he did fifty years ago.

Conservatives are not going to quit – in Gorton or anywhere else – to help a party that insists it wants to destroy them, but the tragedy of trading blows over the past of both parties is that it distracts from directing ire and fire at the party in charge of the present.

The past, is Labour’s well of sour motivation. Deepest dipper is the Education Secretary whose entire ethos is to attack everyone, including her own party’s legacy on education, to settle scores from when she was a school girl in an A-line skirt.

The soul raison d’etre for the now farcical Chagos deal – that no amount of phantom billions ‘won’ in China will pay for – is to apologise, to the wrong people, for the ‘colonial’ past.  Labour demand an apology for the mini-budget, an issue Badenoch has addressed more than once, and soemthing Farage supported, but Peter Mandelson’s past is apparently a closed book. Saw nothing, heard nothing, did nothing is not going to save Starmer and Morgan McSweeny was never going to bite the hand that fed, and is now punching him and his boss in the teeth.

L P Hartley once wrote “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Everyone in this now crowded political landscape is trying to express the same, but it might be an idea for all to visit it occasionally and say ‘you know what? We got that wrong’.

That goes for all politicians not just the ones you want it to.

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