Britain needs politics with purpose

Lately I’ve been discussing the many inadequacies of the Reform Party. I do it because, like Ukip, Reform is the outsider hoping to displace or disrupt the establishment. It is right that they should face scrutiny. It’s also a useful framework to discuss wider concepts in politics.

There’s a certain déjà vu in discussing Reform since it seems to have inherited many of the worst aspects of Ukip. It’s a PR operation but without the intellectual underpinnings. But unlike Ukip, there is no rallying central issue. They hover between opposition to Net Zero, immigration and the ECHR.

If ever the Tories do campaign on an ECHR withdrawal ticket, Reform is is left dangling without much of a purpose. It can bang on about immigration, but then there’s nothing much to distinguish it from half a dozen other parties. I take the view that the party should have a greater purpose.

Over on X, I opened a debate by saying that those who talk about ECHR withdrawal should take the time to define what replaces it. There is nothing whatsoever stopping the establishment from reproducing the ECHR in Britain, and with the same source material, there's nothing stopping British judges from making all the same lamentable decisions.

Some say, predictably, we shouldn’t replace it with anything. This is roughly the same mentality as those who said we should withdraw from the EU merely by repealing the relevant acts of law. It underestimates the pervasiveness.

My point is that the withdrawal from ECHR is a window of reform. There's a case for replacing it with British bill of Rights, but if that's what we're doing we need to have define it before campaigning for it so it doesn't end up being a replica of ECHR. If, however, we're taking a completely different approach, we then want a Great Restoration Act, which in effect becomes the new constitution, in which the people's sovereignty is formally recognised.

This is so that no subsequent government could take us back in, or sign us up to binding international legal frameworks or arbitrary targets without a referendum.

The act could also contain democratic reforms such as separation of powers, Lords reform, the principle of consent (direct democracy) and whatever additional constraints on executive power we might want.

My second point is that you want all of this defined well in advance of campaigning for it, not least so you have an intellectual foundation for your subsequent policies, but also to avoid a repeat of Brexit where those who never wanted it end up being the ones defining it. If you're effectively proposing a revolution, you don't let the opposition set the terms.

There are good reasons to oppose a Bill of Rights, preferring instead a reversion to the Last Known Good Configuration, but reducing ECHR withdrawal to an isolated transaction is a wasted opportunity. We might not want to go as far as a codified constitution, but certainly we want an enhanced sovereignty bill encompassing key democratic reforms.

This is something we attempted to address when we appended The Harrogate Agenda to the Leave Alliance Brexit plan. Had Vote Leave adopted some sort of vision, Brexit might not have been such a wasted enterprise.

But as we’ve discovered with the dinghy crisis and the march of Net Zero, Brexit alone is not enough to reassert British sovereignty, and we in fact need to go further to disentangle ourselves from the spiderweb of international agreements. Leaving the ECHR is a start, but it doesn’t automatically resolve anything.

This is why any party that wants a fresh start for Britain needs a battle plan based on clearly defined principles and objectives. These are mantras I’ve been repeating for some time now, and it’s just as true for Reform as it was Ukip. To that end, I attempted to sketch out roughly what that would look like.

The party I will vote for is one that has decided between them what they stand for. At present I can only vote for liberal internationalism. I want a National Democracy party.

That party does not recognise foreign courts or feel bound by arbitrary political targets laid down in treaties. It does not accept any ruling of any international arbitration body as binding, and accepts no fines or forfeitures. It recognises that the people are sovereign, and the power entrusted to their representatives is on loan, and to give away that which is not theirs is an act theft and treason.

It recognises that National Democracy requires one law for all, without exception for religious or cultural peculiarities. It also recognises that National Democracy can only exist with functioning borders and contiguous universal laws.

As such, devolution must be downgraded, and differential treatment of EU workers under the EU withdrawal agreement is void. As is the NI protocol and Windsor Framework. National Democracy shall not be bound by non-regression clauses in the TCA. It shall not be bound by targets defined in climate treaties. The verdict of the people through their parliament shall be the highest authority.

As such, the Refugee Convention is wholly void. Only Parliament may determine the basis up in which foreigners can claim a right to reside in Britain. No law, treaty or government decision shall take effect without the consent of the majority of the people, by referendum if so demanded, and that none shall continue to have effect when that consent is withdrawn by the majority of the people.

All policies thereafter shall contribute to the defence of National Democracy, its peoples, customs and borders.

In matters of defence, there shall be a framework for for international cooperation, but no British unit shall operate under the command of a foreign entity on a permanent basis. No treaty may give effect to combined armies.

I could (and probably will) expand on this, but this is to illustrate my point that if you've defined your underlying philosophy, your subsequent policies suggest themselves, and there's a framework for policy thinking. You deal with problems because they’re at odds with your guiding philosophy, not because they are problems in themselves (managerialism).

Without such, you are left to trade in populist tropes which are interchangeable with other parties. You have to decide what you stand for and go out and sell it, instead of having expendable policies that change on a whim according to what the polls say. We need politics with purpose. A party that modulates according to polls can end up alienating its base and abandoning its fundamental principles. This is why establishment politics is in such a dire state.

That said, a party with such a radical agenda must also have well developed contingency policies. We are, in effect, looking at Brexit 2.0. (Restoration of National Democracy necessarily requires a cancellation of the fudged Brexit settlement, not least so we are free to re-regulate and expedite new infrastructure).

When we (The Leave Alliance) argued for a staged exit from the EU, we argued that the EEA was the best interim option, but admitted we would eventually find the constraints intolerable. The EEA agreement would either need to be renegotiated, or a new country specific annex for Britain would be needed. It was was not a suitable long term option. But it turns out that the TCA isn’t either. In a roundabout way, in addition to the NI Protocol, the Paris Agreement, and the ECHR, we are bound by more or less the same constraints.

I think, had Net Zero played a more prominent role in Brexit politics, even I would have agitated for a harder Brexit, but with Net Zero becoming Europe’s economic suicide note, we have to walk away from the TCA and its non-regression clauses. As a consequence, we are reopening a huge can of worms, and if we’re also quitting the ECHR, then the entire settlement for Northern Ireland is in question.

What’s being proposed here is not trivial, and it’s going to require better answers than the Brexiteers had at the time. The mood music is now clear that there is no appetite for the “buccaneering” free trade agenda of the ERG, and in the current global climate, our strategic interests lie in reshoring and shortening supply chains.

This is where any party needs serious answers. We would essentially be breaking off trade relations with our nearest market. We need to be absolutely clear why it’s necessary.

The short of it is that ease of export to the EU is somewhat redundant if energy is too expensive to produce anything, and there is no return to productivity unless we abandon Net Zero. We cannot be bound by legacy EU environmental directives and the arbitrary renewables targets, nor can we replicate the EU’s war on food production by mirroring bans on pesticides, antibiotics and nitrates, without which British agriculture would collapse.

Ultimately British priorities have to come first. The EU’s high regulation, high intervention model is failing Britain and the EU. It was argued at the time of Brexit that deregulation would mark Britain’s retreat from world markets, but if anything, the EU is retreating behind an iron curtain of climate regulation, destroying its key industries in the process.

There was already a requirement to rebalance the British economy away from services, and a renewed focus on energy as cheap as we can get it is an opportunity to rekindle British manufacturing. Combined with restrictions on immigration, and increased investment in training and automation research, there is no reason why Britain can’t be an attractive investment destination and a high innovation economy.

More could have been done with Brexit had there been an inspiring vision. There’d have been greater political will to get on and do it if there’s been a workable, realistic and convincing plan. Tory free trade shtick was never going to cut it. If then, a party is essentially agitating for Brexit 2.0, now is the time to learn the lessons and develop a vision, policies and an intellectual framework.

Many assumed Brexit would have automatic benefits, or at least opportunities that would be readily exploited by a Conservative government. Instead we find that there is no appetite in the establishment to depart from the “international rules based order”, thus Brexit is stillborn. If we are once again going to have to force this issue, we should ensure that this time, we know why we’re doing it and what we demand from it.