An epiphany of sorts

Around the time I started this Substack, I was looking quite intently at the Reform party to see if anything useful could be made of it. My immediate criticism is that a party call Reform should have some sort of reform agenda. Not only did it not have that, it didn’t even have any policies to speak of - and not a lot has changed since.

I hoped this criticism would eventually land, but I’ve since come to learn that a policy is to populism as oil is to water. Reform defines itself by what it isn’t, and will actually harm itself if ever it defines what it’s actually for. I’ve now realised that Reform’s only ambition is to win an election - and, so far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t matter what shape the party is when it gets to power, so long as it has power. What they will do with it is as much a mystery to them as it is us.

It seems to me that Reform is so ill-prepared for government that it would not have the first clue what to do, and would likely be so oblivious as to the second order consequences of half of what it proposes in its quasi-manifesto, that it could easily send the country into a meltdown.

Alarmingly, it might even be the case that this is Reform’s unique selling point. This might very well be the actual function of of Reform. I am often told the purpose of voting Reform is to topple the uniparty and bring the entire political system to a crashing halt. I have some sympathy with that urge too. Increasingly it looks like the system is unreformable, and it may even be that come less-than-creative destruction is our only way out.

I’ve arrived at this conclusion because, as regular readers will know, I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to ECHR exit. I’ve gone from a very firm position of saying we must leave it, to a less certain position of leaving it if we have to (should workarounds fail), to a much bleaker position - that we couldn’t leave it even if we wanted to.

I say this because the ECHR is deeply woven into our constitution in several ways, with multiple dependencies. It goes hand in hand with the Human Rights Act. Repealing the lot is no small undertaking. Any notion of repealing it all in a single act is for the birds. There is no going back to what was, and that couldn’t be done without more extensive repeals such as the Constitutional Reform Act, essentially abolishing the supreme court.

Moreover, to do it you would have to have a functioning model of what you were transitioning to (ie. a British Bill of Rights), an order of execution plan, and the mandate to do it. In all probability it would have to be done over the course of two or three parliaments. I doubt any government, much less a radical right wing government, would have the mandate or the competence to do this. This kind of sophisticated constitutional engineering is simply beyond the abilities of the contemporary right.

In fact, the complexity of it is probably what would cause a populist government to try and ram it through in the form of a single act, precipitating a constitutional crisis, a cascade failure in the courts, administrative paralysis, and probably a market reaction that would sink them - in much the way Liz Truss’s otherwise unremarkable career was brought to an inglorious halt.

A populist government would likely attempt this without regard for the consequence and with no plan for the fallout. I recall well what they’d have done with Brexit without the constraint of parliament. As such, that government would be short-lived indeed. What follows will be unprecedented chaos in parliament, with no party able to command a mandate to govern.

There is, though, another possibility. That Reform makes it into office, but through lack of vetting they have as much of a problem with liberal wets as the Tories did under Boris Johnson. With a slim parliamentary majority, they may think twice about attempting to leave the ECHR, and if they don’t get a grip on immigration, we will see the emergence of an ultra-right-wing party that, at the very least, prevents Refrom from winning a second term. If then, we throw into the mix a Corbyn led party, or something of that ilk, eroding Labour’s powerbase, we are then in a state of abject political turmoil.

Either way, this trajectory does not end well.

So what about this epiphany? Well, this post was going to be a full blown takedown of an article on The Restorationist substack. It claims to be “a detailed constitutional program structured as democratic reform: to weaponise emergency powers, pack the Lords with 250 new peers, abolish 500+ public bodies, withdraw from human rights treaties, criminalise bureaucratic resistance, and lock changes behind referendum supermajorities”.

In the current context, the article is pure nonsense. Delusional fantasy. But actually, a little fantasising doesn’t go amiss now and then. From the starting point of attempting to reform the British constitution where we are now, this isn’t remotely serious work, but it could be a loose starting point in the event of an overall collapse of politics. When everything has already gone to hell, with public order collapsing around us, fretting about the diplomatic and technical fallout of sweeping reforms seems a little redundant.

On that basis, if there is any point whatsoever to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain enterprise, it should be thinking about how to “restore Britain” from a point of economic and political collapse. Many of the populist right’s ideas look a whole lot more plausible when you don’t have to consider how you’d bring it about inside the existing political paradigm.

Right now, for example, talk of quitting the Paris Agreement (as I’ve often ventured) is actually for the birds, in that Britain must give careful consideration to how it might impact EU trade relations. If we are to row back on Net Zero, and dismantle carbon taxes and emissions trading, we can reasonably expect a retaliation of some kind from the EU - and considerable market turmoil. But when everything else is disintegrating, does it even matter?

In the near future, we may as well work on the presumption that the EU itself, sooner or later, will have to re-evaluate its own climate policies in order to slow the collapse of its industry. Essentially, there’s a lot more can be done when consequences cease to matter. A country, like a man, is never more free when it has nothing much to lose.

Earlier today I was asked why we couldn’t simply emulate Javier Milei’s reforms in Argentina. I gave a considered reply to the question, postulating that second-rate basketcases at more at liberty to make sweeping reforms, and that Britain doesn’t have that same luxury. The game changes, though, should we become a second-rate basketcase - which we might very well become in the space of a single Reform government.

As such, if the dissident right (the Habib/Lowe axis) wants to use its time usefully, it should be thinking in terms of how they would build a British constitution from scratch - following a political meltdown. We must all work on the presumption that the existing settlement will eventually collapse and it might be sooner than any of us realises.

Of course, my problem with that lot is that they’re restorationists, very much infatuated with David Starkey. The grand plan there is a great repeal that restores Britain to a pre-Blair state. As much as I don’t think that would work, I don’t think the public would put up with it either. The old order was contingent on a functioning parliament, church and monarchy. The latter two are arguably broken beyond salvation. If we are to undergo a process of reform, then whatever replaces the ECHR based constitution must reflect modern Britain. This is a situation we evolved into and must evolve our way out of. I’d sooner we were looking at alternative models than harking back to 1997.

In the meantime, though, some are even more pessimistic than I, in that we may not have that much control over our destiny in the near future, and outside of our self-absorbed political machinations, deterioration in the real world matches the deterioration inside parliament - and civil society may collapse sooner than our politics. If predictions hold true, that we are on the brink of a low grade civil war, the shape of the constitution might well be the very last thing on our minds.