My patience with the dissident right is at an end

I certainly didn’t make any friends with last night’s post. There’s been a flurry of protest over on X about it. I have not yet seen a fully formed rebuttal though. There won’t be one either – because it is a fact that the Slop Right in its current form is not capable of forming a coherent, stable government. The only party of the right that could is the Tory party. That’s not an opinion, it’s just a plain fact.

Whether I could, should or would vote Conservative is another matter. I am open to the possibility, but wouldn’t come out strong for any part of the right at the moment. What I can say is that there are examples of Tory MPs doing what I want them to do. Helen Whately is digging into welfare policy while Nick Timothy is campaigning against those who would impose blasphemy laws upon us. There’s a good few Tory MPs just getting on with the job – and I cannot say the same of any Reform MP.

Reform, meanwhile, keeps showing us that it is a purebred populist party. Its Channel pushbacks policy is not lawful or workable. They’re just not putting the work in. What strikes me about Reform’s housing policy published today (a mere ten pages) is how lacking vision and curiosity it is. It amounts to simply building more council houses – when what’s needed is a more holistic approach to rebuilding places, starting with repopulating and regenerating our towns rather than adding more urban sprawl on a long defunct socialist model. It does not address any of the structural problems in the housing market, not least the barriers to downsizing, thereby freeing up family homes, or any recognition that as the boomers die off there will be a glut of family homes.

The emphasis on expanding social housing also distracts from the real barriers to supply. Planning delays, excessive regulation and restrictions on land release continue to limit new construction across all tenures. These barriers are not free to remove, but removing them is far cheaper than subsidising below-cost housing indefinitely. Speeding up decisions, cutting unnecessary rules and allowing development on suitable urban and brownfield land would increase the total number of homes without adding to the subsidy bill.

I’ve seen enough now to know that Reform does not understand the purpose or the utility of policy, and I have abandoned any hope that the Slop Right will up its game. Where Restore Britain is concerned, they’ve had ample time to demonstrate they’re something different and better, but we now see it emerging as a far right populist party in terms of who it seeks to attract relative to where the average normie voter is. It is not a winning prospect.

I know this because, unlike the obsessive ranty right wing bores on X, I do occasionally leave the house and meet people who are not in my right wing bubble. Where the average normie is, compared to the internet addled right winger, is quite a gap – and as such, the message must be calibrated to persuade rather than deter.

There are millions of professionals out there with real jobs, who don’t have the time or the energy to invest in politics, and will maybe read the BBC at work, a few Facebook pages, the odd Triggernometry podcast in the car, and the occasional politics book from Waterstones, where the most conservative thing they’ve probably read is Rakis Ehsan’s book on identity. They probably do think Tommy Robinson is a “far right thug”, and most can’t name more than a couple of serving cabinet members at any given time.

They aren’t revolutionaries. They just want things to work better and for things to be cheaper. They want controlled immigration but they don’t want fleets of ICE vans on the street. As such, the job of a radical party is to put together a policy prospectus with skill, that will put us on the road to where we want to be rather than shitting the bed and complaining that the system is rigged.

For that, you need policies and a plan, presentable and persuasive people who can master a brief, and leadership people can relate to. Can you look me in the eye and tell me any of the Slop Right parties fit that description? No.

Ultimately, they are judged by what they produce. Contrast Reform’s bullet point slop with the Wolfson Review (first class research) that informs Badenoch ECHR thinking. Meanwhile, Badenoch’s policy commission on culture and integration is being led by Toby Young and Robert Tombs, which stands a chance of being realistic if not as ambitious as I would like.

Reform, meanwhile, has only produced one attempt at a policy paper in its whole time of existing, which amounts to welfare chain gangs and witless tinkering with PIP. You can bet a testicle they did not consult anybody on the front line of the welfare system as to how that might play out.

Moreover, policy should dictate leadership architecture. Laila Cunningham was recently humiliated on national TV because the party had nothing to say in response to the Defence Investment Plan, because the party has no defence policy at all and no defence spokesman. You don’t need any insider contacts to know that Reform is an intellectual shambles. If Reform does have an “impressive policy team” there is no outward evidence it exists.

It’s also worth noting, not for the first time, Reform’s policies are bumping into the TCA and the Brexit settlement. There is a similar conflict in their welfare policy – yet nowhere do they outline how they see that playing out. If they intend on ripping up the entire Brexit settlement, they should say so explicitly and set out what their alternative trade model is. It is not trivial and demands serious answers.

If you are going to be a radical party, then you must recognise your policy has radical consequences, for which you must have anticipated the problems and come up with compelling answers. There’s no sign of that anywhere on the right. Even the Tory plan to quit the ECHR raises more questions than it answers.

These are not conclusions I’ve arrived at on a whim. As readers will know, I started writing about Reform in early 2024. It was clear the Tory party was underperforming, and had lost its sense of purpose. An alternative was needed.

At the time, Reform wasn’t making any waves. It was circling the drain, failing to make any headway under Tice and Habib. It had nothing going for it, and no purpose of its own. The obvious flaw was that it was called Reform but still had no concept of what it would reform or how. The name implied some kind of democratic overhaul and a constitutional reset but the policy prospectus (if you can call it that) was a collection of recycled Ukip talking points.

I raised this issue. To cut a long story short, I didn’t get anywhere. I shouldn’t be surprised. Populists don’t see a problem with populism – especially when they’re leading in the polls.

But here it is helpful to understand why such a party exists in the first place. Why is there such animosity towards the Tory party? A big part of that is the sense of betrayal. A great deal of hope was poured into that party in 2019 on the back of Brexit and several years of the right being side-lined. Cameron ruled from the centre much like his predecessors.

The reason it went so badly wrong is rooted in Brexit. Delivery did not meet expectation. As a Brexit realist I always thought they were unrealistic expectations, and even when I campaigned for it, I imagined it would not make a whole world of difference – but said from the outset that it was especially likely to be kicked into the long grass without some sort of long term plan. I wasn’t wrong about that. When Boris Johnson came into office, the policy cupboard was bare.

On that basis, I have taken a very dim view of loudmouth populists who agitate against the establishment without a properly developed vision of what replaces it. I can just as easily see a Reform government winding up the exact same way – having made wild promises it could not deliver on, struggling to implement ideas that were never very sound to begin with.

As one of the earliest and most prolific critics of Reform, this didn’t go down very well. I am no stranger to being persona non-grata on the right, because I got the same treatment when I made the same points about Vote Leave Ltd. But I wasn’t the only one to notice that Reform was, putting it bluntly, crap.

You will recall a broadside by a certain ex MEP turned MP when he said “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power. Reform’s plan is to ride the protest wave, faced with two obscenely unpopular mainstream parties, but offer absolutely nothing constructive – chasing power for the sake of power”.

Hallelujah, I thought to myself. At least somebody gets it. For a moment there, I honestly thought I might have succeeded. The trickle of dissenting voices became a flood. But what we got instead was yet another dismal populist cult of personality with nothing approaching a serious plan.

I persisted with the usual critiques, optimistic that the penny might drop, but Restore was formed on a whim, with no planning or preparation and key foundational steps were overlooked – with very predictable results. In both parties we have empty vessels that will struggle to withstand the departure of their respective leaders, both of whom are living on borrowed time politically.

While this cycle of events has only been three years, for those of us who’ve documented much of it, it’s been an eternity. Looking at where we are now, compared to where all this has come from, the populist right has regressed. Shortly after the general election, in the back rooms of Westminster think tanks, there was talk of developing a full programme of policies centred around a Great Reset, but most of that work has evaporated and we’re back to transactional policy announcements which are forgotten the very next day.

Insofar as the populist right has any policy written down, most of it is just an extrusion of their existing talking points, most of which trace back to Ukip. It was lightweight risible toss back then and it still is. What also hasn’t changed from Ukip is the endemic pathological amateurism.

As I’ve explained many times, the reason you bother to develop policy is so that when you take office, you have a workplan you can start implementing on day one. The reason Andy Burnham is treading water and talking about gimmicks is because he doesn’t have a plan either, and he will pay a price for it, just as Starmer did.

As such, you can bitch, whine and moan to me about how bad the Tory party was, but you can’t convince me that we’ve fielded a viable alternative. I also note that the people who support these slop parties are the very same people who put Boris Johnson in power – and ignored all the warnings then.

What you likely get for your trouble is a government so inept that it crashes and burns within two years, marked by a succession crisis, much like the Tory party following Johnson. That then leads to a complete implosion of the right, ushering in something worse than the Labour party. The lessons are all there to be learned, but nobody seems very interested in learning them.

I’ve seen enough now to know that the Slop Right is never going to get its act together. Reform could very easily blow it to come out of the next election with fewer than fifty MPs – and the party is in such a state that they better hope so because a sudden mass influx of largely unvetted novices causes as many problems as it solves. Just ask the SNP. In any turn of events, there will have to be cooperation with the Tory party because the party has institutional memory and knowledge that Reform simply doesn’t have.

That then brings us full circle, to assess whether the Tory party has learned its lesson, and whether it has changed. The answer to which is... yes, to a point, but not nearly enough. What we do see, though, is some star performers in the background getting on with it rather than fighting like rats in a sack. I do appreciate Badenoch’s disdain for soap opera. If forced to choose, I’d rather have stable mediocrity than a gaggle of unvetted cranks who don’t know how anything works.

If you ask me, the entire right is an intellectual wasteland, and all of the big beasts of the right are tired and tainted. We certainly don’t see the precision and ruthless zeal of the Thatcher years. The entire right is beset by an “it’ll do for now” mentality, while the serious work is completely neglected. The chief reason the right won’t win in 2029 is because it doesn’t deserve to. It is left to the rest of us to do the unfashionable thing of treating politics as a serious craft rather than a purity contest or a content farm.