Toby Berry: The fate written in Reform’s name

Toby Berry is a Young Conservative and student in South London. 

There is a curious phenomenon which many of us are bound to have seen at some point: the idea that a name can shape destiny. We are most familiar with this applied to individuals, a sailor called Mr Shipman, a prelate called Cardinal Sin, but it is worth wondering if it can be considered more broadly.

The three traditionally largest parties in Britain, the Liberals (or as they have been for some years, the Liberal Democrats), the Conservatives, and Labour, have names describing their worldview; they derive their names from their respective ideologies. Generally, to join the Liberals is to be a liberal, to join Labour is to be a union-style socialist, and to join the Conservatives is to be of a conservative disposition.

Each may lose its way, adopt newer, broader ideological taglines – liberal conservatism, the New Left, or ‘Orange Book’ liberalism – but, fundamentally, each holds to its name. In return, its name gives them a deep history to appeal to, to demonstrate to the public the approximate way they will govern, even without considering specific policy.

Other parties define themselves by other terms, more by what they oppose or seek than by what ideological ideation they hold. Their names still give a very clear indication of their priorities, and the phenomenon is observable even beyond overtly single-issue parties like the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party: the Scottish National Party is recognisably the party of Scottish regionalism, the Greens are fundamentally environmentalists, UKIP was the party of Euroscepticism.

One party, a fixture of modern British politics, has been left unmentioned thus far. What does this mean for Reform UK?

Its name and its message are commensurate with each other. It diagnoses Britain as having a broken political system – Robert Jenrick justified his defection by criticising Kemi Badenoch for not sufficiently recognising this idea. It seeks to reform the British political system in its own image. Reform, fundamentally, seeks to reform that which it considers broken.

What Reform believes on this level is clear, but what does this mean for their future?

If Reform wins, they will try to enact sweeping reforms. There are two broad possibilities: they will either succeed both in implementation and outcome, or they will fail to work, or indeed to implement them at all.

Let us work backwards and consider first the possibility of failure. The verdict of the public here would be stinging, and probably fatal. Reform would have won a desperate electorate, people viewing the party as their last hope. A party which is called Reform and which fails to reform is utterly redundant. Voters do not gift infinite patience to a movement defining itself in one way and carrying itself in another; the current Labour government, and the Conservative government before it, tell us that much.

If Reform succeeds, and our institutions are restored, borders secured, and bureaucracy slimmed, what is there to justify their continued existence? If Britain is no longer broken, what else is there to reform?

One possibility is an absurdity, inventing new causes to reform in the model of perpetual revolution. Another, conserving what they would have built, is sustainable. In this hypothetical, when Britain is fixed, it must be defended. Restored institutions must be protected from any future manifestations of Blair-era constitutional vandalism, norms embedded, and the new political settlement insulated.

This is conservatism.

Reform have already been called recycled Tories by some, given that now four of seven of their MPs sat as Conservatives, with potentially more to come. At the point at which they cease to reform, they really do become the Conservative Party. The point at which Reform defines itself not around change, but inheritance and the defence of the true, the good, and the beautiful, is the point at which it defines itself with the instincts of conservatism.

They could retain their name, or they could come out into the open as a Conservative Party, or they could synchronise and become one with whatever remains of the party of Disraeli, Churchill, and Thatcher. In any case, would Britain not have reverted to its natural state?

This says nothing to diminish the responsibility of the Conservative Party to fight for its survival. Its future must be secured on its own terms, not conceded by default. As I was recently reminded by a very experienced hand in politics, while the relationship of the Conservatives with Labour or the Liberals is business, our standing with Reform is existential. They seek to destroy the party, to annihilate it. Yet, in doing so, they may be moving closer to that which they want to end; a party which succeeds in reforming Britain will, sooner or later, face the task of conserving what it has built. Its future may look rather more like its past than it currently imagines.