Ben Habib just doesn't get it.

I wasn’t going to write about the Reform Party again any time soon, but since Reform’s deputy leader, Ben Habib, popped up on X to respond to some of my comments, it’s worth keeping the discussion going.

In response to my previous Substack article, Habib asserts:

There are factual errors in this article. Please read our contract with the people which was published in draft on 24/2/24. It’s on our website. You will find most, if not all, of your criticisms about policy addressed in that document.

Habib has clearly not understood the nature of my criticism. The issue with Reform is the complete lack of substance, and the cavalier attitude to detail. They don’t think detail matters. As such, Reform has inherited the same rank amateurism that plagued Ukip throughout.

Picking one example at random, Let's take one at random, Reform pledges to:

--"Cut Foreign Aid by 50%. Save £6 billion from the £12.8 billion budget. British taxpayers should not be funding countries like China or India who have their own space programs. We can do much more good by spending less with better targeting. A major review is needed into the effectiveness of overseas aid."--

This is a populist trope. It sounds good, and most people agree with it, but the 50% cut is completely arbitrary. If you haven’t addressed the dysfunction in the FCDO, what’s to stop it completely wasting the remainder?

Foreign aid spending in its current form is a symptom of a captured FCDO that spends in order to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals, and has no concept of direct national interest. It even has an allergic reaction to serving the national interest. That's the root of the problem which Reform doesn’t address.

The problem is not aid spending as such, it is a wholly dysfunctional FCDO, which is dysfunctional because we don't have a coherent foreign policy, and no real sense of national purpose. It's a much more profound problem than simply government waste.

So the question we have to ask is what is the FCDO actually for?

Answer: it exists to advance Britain's interests abroad. So what are those interests in a Reformed Britain? The establishment thinks the job of the FCDO is to advance LGBT rights in Botswana and fund the Ethiopian Spice Girls. Reform needs to spell out wh a functioning foreign policy looks like - but that’s too much like serious thinking.

I might suggest that the foreign office be reintegrated with the department of trade, recognising that economic partnership agreements encompass trade facilitation measures to expedite and simplify trade, which are necessary because reductions in tariffs alone are no good if a third country doesn't have workable trade infrastructure.

As such, if the result is cheaper imports of foodstuffs we can't grow ourselves, then it's worth investing in trade facilitation, not least since creating centres of employment could work towards stabilising African countries and reducing migration - which very much is in our interest. And to what extent can foreign aid be used abroad to stop the people smuggling across the Sahara? Aid is also a useful arm of trade and foreign policy if we have a coherent foreign and trade policy.

For that you need clear set of objectives. On that score, our goals are linked to energy and food security, and immigration control. But unless I'm missing something, Reform’s "contract with the people" makes no mention of either.

I put it to Habib that “ You have no concept of joined-up thinking and you don't have the first idea how to approach policy, and it really shows. All you've got is populist tropes, and when they fall over under scrutiny, you'll yet again be forced to rewrite your manifesto. You wouldn't have this problem if you knew what you actually stood for and bothered to do the research. But Ukip never did that, BXP never did that, and nor will Reform. There's a reason for that: It's all the same oafs at the top of the party who are singularly incapable of learning, and will repeat all the same mistakes”.

In response to that, Habib denies that his “contract” is full of tropes and describes them as “perfectly sensible policies”. But these aren’t policies. A manifesto is a summary and as such, it should represent the detailed policies. Other parties issue detailed policy documents but Reform, on a platform of reform, has nothing it can point to.

The foreign aid trope is not the only problem with Reform’s “contract”. If you look at defence, for instance, it's even more superficial and doesn't begin to address the needs of this complex sector. Like others, it is a lightweight mish-mash of soundbites. It says we should reform defence procurement. Only everyone says that and we haven’t got close to fixing it in pretty much eighty years of trying.

The outline of the “policy” is that we should “Launch a Joint Acquisition Corp to ensure world class procurement. The Ministry of Defence must listen to soldiers on the front line and ensure they get the equipment they need”. There is no detail on what this acquisition corp should do, or how it would be “world class”. Everyone wants “world class”. What does this trope mean?

Moreover, when it comes to front line equipment, the very last people we should listen to are “front line soldiers”. Procurement of weapons and equipment is is a function of what you’re trying to achieve and the nature of the operation. We found soldiers in Afghanistan heaping praise on the Supacat Jackal when in fact it was fatally vulnerable to IEDs, causing casualties that that undermined morale and eroded public support for the already unpopular war. Procurement is a complex area and you can only equip your forces well if you have a clear idea of who you’re going to be fighting, where and why. Again, that flows from having a coherent foreign policy.

In another post, I picked up on Reform’s energy “policy”. Superficially, there’s not much to disagree with, but then that’s the nature of populist tropes. But an actual policy needs to go further and examine why our energy mix is in such a mess.

Currently, our bills are rising because of an ideological obsession with renewable energy, not least because we’ve signed up to an array of international agreements. The ultimate question then, is what is going so badly wrong with our democracy that binding international agreements get signed without a debate, and often without a vote? How is it that Net Zero, with such profound and far reaching implications, was waved through parliament with barely a peep of opposition or media scrutiny?

It's one thing to talk about basc policy fixes such as scrapping subsidies, but what we need to see from a "Reform" party is a major constitutional revamp that prevent virtue signalling politicians doing this to us without our consent. As such, a Reform party, should be less concerned with surface level policy, and instead focus on the architecture of a reformed Britain.

There are two tasks at hand here. One is to revamp the constitution so that no binding treaty that commits us to spending programmes (or arbitrary targets) can be passed without a referendum. The people's consent is required. The second part is to withdraw from existing conventions and treaties.

If we want to reboot Britain's energy infrastructure, then we're going to have to overhaul planning, and that means pulling out of the UN climate accords and repeal the various climate acts, because otherwise infrastructure will costs billions in planning and will take years before the first JCB reports to site. We're effectively going to go have to go to war on the entire "international rules based order".

This is not trivial. This is not a mere policy adjustment. It means going up against the EU's carbon border tax, possibly risking the TCA and the Northern Ireland protocol. Meanwhile scrapping wind subsidies in breach of contract will see the British government dragged through the courts and probably find itself in breach of WTO/investment rules and create a mess that will drag on for years.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but real constitutional reform, reasserting national democracy and the people's sovereignty, is going to have profound and lasting consequences, and major implications for trade. Bigger even than Brexit. So as much as you need a reform plan, you need one hell of a contingency plan. Nothing is as simple as pulling policy levers.

That, in part, is why the Tories don't do half the things they say they'd like to do. Unpicking decades of blobocracy is going to be a full time job and we're going to need an alternative industrial strategy. No chance of seeing any such thinking from Reform.

You can get so far with a populist manifesto, but there's an inherent ceiling of appeal unless you can demonstrate you understand the implications of what you're proposing, and you've got alternative policies ready to go. Whether Reform understands it or not, they are proposing a complete break from the international order and it's going to have consequences, for which they need compelling and persuasive policies. This collection of tombola tropes isn't going to cut it.

Generally, political parties can get away with winging it because our media is so poor, it doesn’t really do probing and comprehensive, which is part of what makes our political parties so lazy. But if Reform claims to be something different then it needs to show it has the goods.

Routinely we see politicians making fools of themselves having to backtrack on ill-thought out policies made up on the fly, but this humiliation is easily avoided by if you’ve actually bothered to do the thinking. Reform clearly hasn’t. We’re going to see in the coming months how this creates huge liabilities for Reform. Their Net Zero immigration policy still commits us to a massive influx of foreigners.

What’s striking about Habib’s comments is that he clearly doesn’t understand the difference between policy and summary. As such, Reform is going into an election without a comprehensive reform agenda, and no substance to campaign on. They’ve got the professional party image, GB News exposure, and plenty of candidates, but scratch the surface of the facade and there’s nothing there. The cupboard is bare. They have no idea what they want to achieve or how to do it.

Habib’s attitude is highly typical of the hubris I came to expect from Ukip, which ended up having to disown its own manifesto. Farage’s Ratner moment. Ukip was famed for making it up as they went along, and became an object of national ridicule. It looks as though Reform will make all the same avoidable mistakes - which it simply cannot afford.

Since Reform clearly isn’t going to invest in policy, and doesn’t see the importance of it, it has nothing much to promote. They say their aim is to destroy the Tory party (which the Tories can do unaided), but in what way are we better off if the alternative is a band of lazy, incompetent populists who haven’t got a plan to speak of?

Were Reform ever to from a government, it would be a cabinet full of Priti Patels, barking contradictory orders at civil servants, making a huge mess of everything because they hadn’t considered the unintended consequences. Reform is hardly a solution Britain’s competency crisis.