Imagine a classroom with almost nothing in it, save some hard wooden benches and a stack of Bibles. Imagine the school it is in has only one loo, no canteen, gets freezing cold in winter – oh, and the playground is full of gravestones.
If this sounds to you like the perfect setting to teach the country’s most vulnerable children, then you’re going to love Reform UK’s new Send policy, which involves cutting the bill for taxiing children to far-flung special schools by repurposing nearby “empty churches” (a term that in itself may surprise vicars) as schools on weekdays. But if you have actually met any children, and therefore suspect this idea isn’t going to fly, then read on to find out why Reform looks more beatable at the end of what has undeniably been its breakthrough year than it did at the beginning.
This time last year, I was booking my place at a new year Reform rally that turned out to be a short, sharp lesson in just how fast old norms and taboos were collapsing on the right. Yet in retrospect, the most surprising thing about the young men I interviewed that night was how ordinary they were: no different, really, to all the ambitious young Tory turks I’ve met, except for the palpable sense that the energy on the right was elsewhere now. They did not seem unrecoverable, at least not to a Conservative party that could be bothered actually talking to them.
It’s fair to say that optimism has wavered a few times over the past year, which has taken me from interviewing teenage Nigel Farage fans at one end of the spectrum to making a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the far less widely examined surge in young women voting Green (which airs this Sunday night, thanks for asking) at the other. But looking back now on all those months of often bleak conversations – not only with pollsters or politicians, but also around kitchen tables, in academic seminars, over pizza after-hours in thinktank basements, with close observers of Donald Trump’s victory in the US, and plenty more places besides – the one clear theme that emerges is that in Reform’s undoubted strengths lies its weakness. Its astonishingly speedy growth disguises what now look like shallow roots; its success, meanwhile, has brought a level of scrutiny for which it simply isn’t ready.
A year and a half ago, Reform could get away with promising a “patriotic curriculum” and a ban on any children changing their pronouns, and calling that an education policy. But now it’s running 10 English councils actually responsible for Send provision, suddenly the saloon-bar wisdom is wearing thin. Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, was forced to preface the launch of his empty churches plan by apologising for an earlier suggestion that the Send crisis was down to families “abusing the system”, which understandably enraged some of those parents. It’s just one example of something that is starting to trouble Reform: a party built on Farage’s genius for knowing what a small but noisy minority were thinking seems to be struggling to replicate that trick at scale, now its base has expanded to more than a quarter of the electorate. For the first time, meanwhile, Reform voters are getting the chance to compare what their new councillors promised – including council tax cuts – with what they’re actually getting, which for many looks likely to be the opposite.
The trouble with power is that it’s exposing, both politically and personally; the half-baked ideas, the work that never happened, the secrets and the buried scandals all emerge under pressure. Though the most obviously troubling of these has been the steady stream of former classmates coming forward to accuse Farage of racist and antisemitic remarks as a schoolboy (for the record, he denies directly targeting anyone), it’s the jailing of the former Welsh Reform leader Nathan Gill for taking Russian bribes that may yet cast the longest shadow over the coming year. The government’s commissioning of a long-overdue inquiry into foreign interference in British elections suggests a new alertness not just to the national security risks, but to the need to hold some political feet to the fire.
The most basic question any prospective ruling party must be able to answer is: which side are you on, exactly? Do you choose your own country every time, over foreign actors – in Moscow or even in Washington DC – seeking to destabilise it for their own ends? Do you care about sovereignty when it really matters – when the head of MI6 is openly describing the country as suspended between war and peace, say – or just when it’s a convenient excuse for bashing Brussels?
The conversation that has kept me awake more than any other this year was a private one, illustrating just how much the possibility of Nato being at war within five years (roughly the time it might take Russia to re-arm and recover from its invasion of Ukraine) is now taken for granted in defence circles. Well, now that submarine is surfacing in increasingly ominous public warnings about the need to build resilience, delivered almost certainly not by coincidence just as Ukraine’s future rests once again in Trump’s careless hands – and a difficult defence spending review is being finalised in Downing Street. If I were Keir Starmer, I might consider repurposing Gordon Brown’s warning from 2008, when the vultures were circling his premiership, that this doesn’t feel like the time for a novice.
And if this sounds like tricky territory for Labour to fight on, perhaps the most overriding lesson of the year is to stop thinking of Reform simply as Labour’s problem to solve.
A year of number-crunching by pollsters confirms what was mostly just a hunch 12 months ago: that the Reform soufflé has been swelled mostly by deserting Tory voters, not Labour ones, and that it almost certainly won’t collapse until the Tory party recovers enough to come and get their people back. Paradoxically, the left should almost certainly take heart from the fact that Kemi Badenoch seems to be finding her feet a bit, thanks in part to a smarter backroom operation.
But if the idea of a Tory resurgence doesn’t entirely make your heart sing with Christmas joy, consider this: there have been signs in recent weeks of the government finally getting the message that endlessly aping Reform is not the answer to its prayers, and that trying to recoup some of the goodwill needlessly squandered to its left will ultimately reap more rewards. It’s been a long, grim year of learning lessons the hard way. Better that, however, than never learning them at all.
