Against Restorationism

We have yet to see a full suite of policies from Restore Britain, but they’ve dropped enough hints. They’re in for ECHR withdrawal, the “bonfire of quangos”, and great repeals bills etc. A rollback of what we understand to be Blairism. This is pretty much where I was at two years ago - before I’d given it any serious thought.

But it’s not just policy we have to go on. You can also read a lot into the vibes and who it attracts. They’re invoking nostalgic imagery and appeals to Christianity (influenced by Restore’s Catholic new-age Tory boys). I’m not touching any of that with a barge pole.

As much as anything I think the pre-1997 constitutional settlement is a dead model and that Britain has to continue evolving. Yes, there is a lot of Blairism engineered into the system, and a lot of it does have to be carefully unpicked, but I have no desire to return to the past.

For my part, I would shelve any attempt to leave the ECHR, noting that the most egregious cases arise from the British first tier immigration tribunal, which is more the problem than the Strasbourg court. We have better things to do than reopen the fractious politics of Northern Ireland and get bogged down in constitutional wrangling.

Secondly, I’d abandon most of the slopulist agenda because it’s more geared to solving imaginary problems than actual problems. The civil service does have a few culture issues with precise causes but it’s not overrun with DEI officers, and there aren’t billions to be saved from culling quangos. It does need reform, but it needs careful sector by sector policy-based analysis rather than a libertarian-inspired purge.

As for immigration, while I share the ambition of Restore supporters to reverse mass immigration, going far beyond reversing the Boriswave, I don’t think they understand the policy landscape well enough to pull it off. Fixing immigration will not happen without first rebuilding the administrative state and improving accountability at all levels of government.

In order to do this, it’s going to take a complete reboot of local democracy, and a bonfire of statutory obligations, coupled with extensive welfare reform. You have to attend to all this before you’re likely to see results from immigration policies.

As much as anything, I don’t see much of a future of a party whose basic message can be distilled into “send the buggers back”. Even though I do want to send the buggers back, there has to be an incentive - a vision of what Britain looks like on the flip side. This is where we need a complete reimagining of housing policy, rebuilding our towns, rethinking our health system, and repairing the social contract.

We’ve now seen enough from Restore to know they have no original thinking on any of the important matters. In most areas they are indistinguishable from Reform, and I wouldn’t vote for them either (for similar reasons). Of what the do propose, they give zero thought to the operational complexities and unintended consequences. Even cursory analysis shows they’ve put no real thought into what they say.

There’s a problem here for both Reform and Restore. The Restore critiques of Reform (rooted in Lowe’s remarks last April when he slammed Reform for its lack of seriousness) are all essentially correct. Even allowing for the arguments Jack Hadfield sets out here, Reform is still a clown show, and if you apply even the slightest bit of critical thought to any “policy” Reform ventures, it falls over in about thirty seconds (which is just as well since that’s about the lifespan of a Reform policy before it mutates).

Through its own lack of seriousness and its ambiguity on important issues, Reform gradually created the gap in the market for a party like Restore where supporters can at least be reasonably sure of what they’re voting for rather than a chameleonic entity that throws its own base under the bus at every opportunity.

Restore’s problem, meanwhile, is that it doesn’t meet the standards set out by its own leader. The mission brief was “A more right wing Reform UK, but not shit”. They’ve managed the first part in the few instances where it isn’t identical to Reform, but they haven’t managed the “but not shit” part. It’s exactly the same low effort slop.

Meanwhile, the people who complained about Reform being a messianic cult seem oblivious to the fact they’ve created one of their very own which is even more cranky than any Farage led enterprise, and just as much of a lolcow as Ukip. (and that’s without mentioning some of the more obnoxious high profile supporters it’s attracting, along with the Swindon man-baby).

So while you might look at the likes of Richard Tice and think you wouldn’t leave him alone with even a TV remote let alone a government department, we’re not really being given a viable alternative here. There is no quality control on any of Restore’s output. It started off badly and gets worse by the day, posting any old slop to its narrow social media constituency, with no self-awareness of what they look like to anyone remotely normal (or anyone with any experience of running something).

As such, asking me to choose between them is like asking me to choose between vomiting and diarrhoea. Though there’s not much to be said for the Tories, they are at least capable of forming a government, whereas a slop right government would be like a garage full of meth-addled raccoons - but without the co-ordination.