More Boomer-slop from Uncle Rupe

In a tweet this morning, Uncle Rupe sets out his latest brainfart “policy”.

Drive down any motorway or road in Britain, and it is FILTHY. Litter everywhere. Our country is increasingly becoming a third world dump, and we should not tolerate it.

Restore Britain would clean up Britain. How? Get healthy Brits who consistently refuse work out picking litter. If they don't want to do that, they will lose their benefits. Give them a few months to find a job they prefer, but if they fail? They must work for their benefits. Done right, it would mean hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men and women cleaning up Britain.

What a great policy.

If we were in power, there would be no foreigners on benefits - hence why they are not included in this scheme. Non-violent prisoners, they can pitch in too - safely and securely. Nearby prisons, in bright orange overalls. Instead of sitting around in prison doing horticulture classes or lifting weights in the prison gym, they can work and work bloody hard all day. Then back to prison.

Because our country increasingly resembles a dump. It does not have to be like this.

Nobody is going to argue that Britain is increasingly squalid. But the issues identified here actually call for three strands of policy. Firstly, waste disposal needs a compete overhaul, repealing the Waste Framework Directive, removing the carbon tax on waste, and repealing the ban on landfill.

This goes a long way towards ending the blight of fly tipping. When it comes to roadside litter, it calls for more modern lorry parks with proper amenities so drivers don’t end up clogging up laybys when the tachograph tells them to.

As it happens, I’m not opposed to pressing prisoners into litter sweeps but that should be an adjunct of a broader prison reform programme - especially if Lowe thinks prisoners “are doing horticulture classes or lifting weights in the prison gym”. I would have invited Ian Acheson to author such a policy rather than farting out a soundbite.

As to pressing welfare claimants into this kind of work, it ignores all the reasons why we see long term unemployment (not least the collapsing retail and hospitality sectors), and the perverse incentives to stay on benefits. Lowe could tap Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre of Social Justice for welfare reform policy. There is something very boomerish about the assumption that everyone on benefits is an idle scrounger who hasn’t paid into the system - and must do punitive menial work just to eat. Maybe there is a role for community service in the welfare system, but this is pub bore policy.

But as I say above, I do not dispute that Britain is turning into a bit of a dump. There’s no wonder civic pride has completely collapsed. But it’s going to take more than just litter picking. Civic pride doesn’t come from from sticking plasters and gimmicks. You have to build it into society at every level, starting with doing something about the way Britain looks.

Go to any town in Britain and you’ll see decay everywhere. What’s there to be proud of? I’d be thinking in terms of heavy fines for property owners who allow buildings to fall into disrepair or stand vacant. I would implement a “use it or lose it” compulsory purchase scheme, and where a building was appropriated, I would give it to the local college so they can teach young people renovations skills, in line with a housing policy of turning empty spaces above shops into decent homes.

On that score, we need to break up the universities and rebuild trade schools, and partner them with local councils, so that students are supervised contractors to carry out local renovation works on churches and culturally important buildings.

I would then look at places like Gateshead and demolish all the horrible 1990’s era buildings, with a view to restoring the old town halls and libraries, and turn them into community arts hubs with career advisors and pop-up courts to clear the magistrates court backlog. (joined up policy). What I want to see is a comprehensive policy-backed campaign to Make Britain Nice Again, not these disjointed slogans and tropes.

Here, again, I draw your attention to the words of Rupert Lowe. Last April he wrote “I have received countless questions on my recommendation for who to vote for this Thursday, and I have thought long and hard about the answer. Here is my honest assessment:

For months, I pushed Reform to propose radical, but credible policies. To detail it, with substance and costings. Write it down, produce policy documents. I was mocked and ignored. I hoped that there might be some form of plan for these elections, maybe a well-thought out policy or two? To even go as far to write a proposal - not thrown together on a flashy social media graphic, but in properly constructed sentences on an actual document. None came. Nothing.

All we get, day after day after day, is glossy pictures of Nigel Farage. No manifesto, just an empty promise that ‘Reform will fix it’. HOW? Please, tell me how? If I have to watch another overproduced video of Farage, I’ll vomit turquoise coloured confetti. Sweeping shots, backed by booming dramatic music, of the man going about mundane campaigning activities. It’s a parody. Where is the policy?! All we get is vacuous bull, piled on top of more vacuous bull - purely designed to pump up Farage’s ego at a time when British airspace is already dangerously full.

I’m not interested. I want numbers, detail, substance. A plan.”

He went on to say “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power”. Yet all Lowe offers is more of the same slop. Worse still, it’s even more lame than Reform. Lowe went to the trouble of starting a party on the back of his damning critique of Reform, but this is evidently the best he can do.