For the new right, a little bit of thought is too much to ask

“Above all else, we need to brutalise the size of the state. I mean brutalise. Like nothing that has ever been seen. A public sector bonfire that is visible from space - that is what Restore Britain would do” says Rupert Lowe. He says we need to "Hack down the size of the state, and drastically reduce tax. Bring it all down, in a way that’s never been seen before in Britain. And yes, that will mean the state does less. GOOD."

This is ideological Tory dogma. As it happens, I agree with it in spirit. We do have a serious productivity problem and spending is out of control. But that calls for a redesign of the state, starting from first principles, first thinking about what government is for and what you want it to do.

As such, if Uncle Rupe wants to get a handle on illegal immigration (and the physical state Britain is in) then he's going to need more trading standards officers, EHOs, housing inspectors and tax auditors, more police and an expanded border force as a starter for ten. He’s then going to have to rebuild local magistrates courts and prisons, ergo more prison officers.

You first decide what you want the machinery of state to do then plan headcount accordingly. And to do this, you need policy. We’ve been here before with this slash and burn shtick. The Tories talk tough on this but often find it’s harder than it looks when you’re in power.

Everyone talks about a bonfire of quangos, but they’re always hard pressed to specify which of them do not serve a function. Would Uncle Rupe scrap the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority? The Air Accident Investigation Branch? Or perhaps the Defence Infrastructure Organisation? This is where you need policy and a plan (going beyond the usual tropes about foreign aid) rather than shouty soundbites.

These are the same questions Reform will face since Danny Kruger is spouting the same nonsense. They will find, just as the Tories did, that a first world country needs a lot of administration. But since Lowe’s shtick is identical to that of Danny Kruger (who is allegedly shaping Reform policy), many will ask what is the functional difference between the two parties?

This is where Restore has a lot of work to do. They need to prove they’re more than just a Reform clone and that they’re actually a serious party in ways that Reform isn’t. After all, Rupert Lowe himself said “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power”. I do wonder, then, why Restore’s big policy announcement today is on legalising pepper spray.

For my part, I would be looking at why Reform’s DOGE efforts failed, which is a lot to do with what the TPA calls the straightjacket of statutory obligations. More than that, though, I’d be looking at the whole relationship between central government and local authorities, giving councils fare more freedom to raise and manage their own revenues.

Unless Restore commits to this kind of serious work (which it should have done eight months ago when it started as a pressure group/think tank) it runs the risk of making Reform look serious by contrast. Voters of the right will hesitate to turn on Reform when there’s so little functional difference.

The first task of any fledgling party is to build an organisation that can withstand the departure of its leader. That means building a coherent intellectual foundation - but the right keeps building organisations around a leader. This was Reform’s problem, and this is now Restore’s problem. Even now, with such a threadbare policy prospectus, it is still not assured that Reform can survive without Farage, but all Restore has going for it is a “based grandad” mascot whose policy base is a collection of lazy populist tropes. This does not look like a recipe for success.

As it happens, with both parties being functionally the same, I’m increasingly of the view that we’re not voting our way out of this mess. Both parties are talking about a great repeal bill, which brings its own headaches. Richard Tice has said a Reform government would repeal the Employment Rights Act and the Renters’ Rights Act - and while they are both catastrophically bad pieces of legislation, the opposition will make great hay with the idea that Reform wants to abolish renters rights and employment rights.

Essentially the new right starts to look like the old right. Both parties look like Thatcherite austerity parties who want to strip away protections and force young graduates into roadside litter picking chain gangs. The left will play hard on this, and it might even cost the right in a victory in 2029, but even if it doesn’t, the ways in which this could be mishandled (coupled with the political headaches of leaving the ECHR), getting re-elected in 2034 is not going to happen.

While there’s a lot to like about the idea of taking an axe to Blairite legislation, the optics of actually doing it aren’t pretty. This is why I prefer the gradualist precision amendments approach - and if you’re going to use a bit of stick then you need to offer a few carrots. And by that, I don’t mean using the savings from child benefit caps to cut the price of a pint. You need structural reforms to repair the social contract - especially if you want to get the young on board.

As ever, the right has a vague idea of what sort of Britain it would like to see, but no thought is going into how we get there, or how to get it done in the face of mass hostile opposition. It doesn’t help either that nothing enrages the right more than the suggestion that they need to start thinking about these things now.