Restore Britain must stop the slop

Why am I putting so much effort into rubbishing Restore policy? Because it’s necessary. A couple of years ago, I set out a framework of policy ideas for Ben Habib and wrote a manifesto for Ukip. A lot of it was along the familiar lines of leaving the ECHR, repealing legislation and setting out a template for deportations.

The first sweep, though, was blue sky thinking - the kind of things we’d like to do given unlimited power with little to no opposition. That’s a good baseline to establish the end point of any reform programme. But then you have to start thinking about how you would put any of it into practice, bearing in mind that no government has absolute power - and most governments have limited political capital. Recognising the real world constraints, you then have to prioritise accordingly.

Then, with every policy, you have to be honest about the potential fallout. You have to look at it and ask what could possibly go wrong with this? What are the unintended consequences? Who is going to oppose you, how much power do they have, can you hold them at bay, and can you get re-elected?

That latter part is the essential part. If you take the view that up to 8m must be encouraged to leave, assuming it takes a couple of years to get the deportations policy scaffolding in place, assuming that (best case scenario) you’re not going to be able to shift more than 1m a year, you’re going to need at least two terms to do the job, and you’re not going to get two terms if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew with necessary but unpopular polices. You have to pick your battles.

You simply will not have the political capital or the parliamentary runtime to take on everyone all at once, especially when you do not have majority support for all of your policies even on your own side, recognising that you’ll probably be in a coalition government.

When you start applying that kind of thinking to your own work, you start to realise how piss weak your own shtick is. This is why the Tories (and Brexit) came a cropper. Collectively, we (the right) never applied this kind of scrutiny to our own bullshit, so we overpromised and underdelivered. Deregulation is one of those things successive right wing governments have promised, only to find that even bad regulation serves a function, and there a consequences for removing it. When you spend two years doing this kind of analysis, you then start to learn the difference between policy and daydreaming.

Even seemingly easy hit policy ideas carry unintended consequences. Banning halal, for instance, risks an explosion of dodgy meat imports, necessitating more stringent and expensive border inspections, and probably a rise in illegal backstreet slaughter using stolen livestock, making life hell for farmers and contaminating the food chain.

As I’ve found lately, the right will instantly defend bad policy just because it comes from their own side, because that’s the level of tribalism we’re dealing with. But the thing is, you can’t get away with slop policy forever. You can’t expect journalists to piece together your policy platform from a collection of random tweets. You will eventually be made to explain it, and be held accountable for its shortcomings, and if you get to implement your policy, you’re then left to explain why it didn’t work as intended - and why you failed to anticipate the problems. This is how governments lose elections.

What you don’t want to do is churn out lightweight populist slop only to realise later down the line that the real world is more complex than you assumed, and that you can’t do even half of what your promised.

As such, when I read the policies written by Reform/Restore etc, I’m looking for signs of critical thinking, and I just don’t see any. This is especially the case with leaving the ECHR, where because it is legally feasible the assumption is that it’s politically feasible, when there’s no guarantee that it comes close to solving the problems. I can see plenty of ways this goes south and brings the government down just in the initial attempt, especially when there is no majority support for leaving the ECHR. The public has no desire to relive Brexit level shenanigans.

As such, it is necessary (for those of us who actually want to win) to demand better of those who would seek our votes. When Rupert Lowe broke from Reform, he offered up scathing critiques of Reform for its lack of intellectual coherence, the lack of a plan and the lack of serious policy. I think it is proper that he should be held to the same standards. After eight months of Restore Britain existing, I was hoping for a little more than a deportations paper full of recycled padding and a hare-brained scheme to legalise pepper spray.

Maybe you do find my assessment too bleak. Maybe you find my tweets too long. Maybe you just don’t like me. Maybe I am too combative. I give you all that, but where does it say we should settle for low effort slop? Why should we lend our unequivocal support to the same lazy chancers? Anyone who’s been to a hard house night in Preston can tell you, just because you’re desperate, you shouldn’t lower your standards. The morning after is never an edifying spectacle.

Just looking at Restore’s policy on pubs, I don’t think the authors realise the scale of the problems. Their measures won’t help. A lot of pubs are closing because they places they’re located in are dying. Even with all the tax breaks and incentives, if the high street is derelict and the only people roaming the streets are addicts and alcoholics, people will not feel safe, and if they don’t feel safe, they will go elsewhere. I wouldn’t go out in Rotherham or Mexborough after dark.

Then look at the places where you would go drinking. I’ve lived near York for nearly six years now and I haven’t been out drinking in the city even once because a twenty minute taxi ride to my village costs the better part of £50 and I don’t really fancy climbing into an Uber driven by a fresh-off-the-boat Zimbabwean. This is why the young aren’t drinking.

As such, you don’t need a paper on pubs. You need a night time economy paper and a policy on urban regeneration including enforcement of vagrancy laws. Create safe and decent places and the pubs can fend for themselves. But if I was going to write a pubs paper, I might take some inspiration from Clarkson’s Farm, and look at the planning and regulatory burdens there are on reopening pubs - along with VAT implications for restorations. Restore’s paper makes no mention of planning.

Meanwhile, there’s the small problem of the breweries themselves. Smaller ones are going under for a whole host of reasons, not least energy costs. And then there’s the behaviour of the big breweries who treat vital community pubs as little more than assets in the property portfolio. The paper could have looked at community buyout schemes - and impose a use it or lose it penalty on breweries who keep them boarded up (to prevent broken window syndrome). I chucked a (tiny) bit of money into a community rescue scheme to rescue the village pub where my grandparents lived, and now it’s a thriving village shop/post office/cafe/pub and restaurant.

What I note from the paper’s acknowledgments is they consulted pub owners in the Cotswolds, but its really pubs in the north they want to be talking to. Frankly, if you can’t make money out of hospitality in the Cotswolds then you’re not going to make it anywhere. To my mind, micro-managing the industry with marginal tax breaks to save it is fruitless. Both Restore and Reform’s measures amount to little more than a life support machine for a dying patient. If we value pubs, we need to see more sophisticated thinking from policy makers.

Then we get to the latest wheeze. Legalising pepper spray. Leaving aside that Restore should have come up with something a bit more compelling in its eight months of operation, I do wonder if any thought whatsoever has been given to the operational realities of this "policy". If you go out in any British working class town after 9pm and you are almost certain to find drunken chav couples fighting in the street. What happens when you introduce pepper spray into that scenario?

It leads to escalation of everyday conflicts. People will reach for the spray in arguments, road-rage incidents, pub fights, or minor disputes instead of walking away or de-escalating. Saturday nights in A&E will be pepper spray night for nurses.

Every use would then trigger intense scrutiny: Was it proportionate? Genuine fear of imminent harm? Reasonable force? Courts already struggle with knife/self-defence cases; adding thousands of pepper-spray incidents would clog the system with disputed "mutual" claims, revenge uses disguised as self-defence, and arguments over whether carrying it implied premeditated intent to harm. Prosecutors might charge users even in genuine cases if evidence is ambiguous. I can think of plenty of ways this can go horribly wrong and backfire on women. Also opens up new vectors for domestic abuse. I don't think they researched this at all.

Aside from the obvious flaws of legalising pepper spray, the consistent problem with the slop right is their inability to make their policy brainfarts useful to everyday people. People wondering when they’re going to see an oncologist wanted to see more than “free hospital parking” under health policy, and people who care about women’s safety want to see a whole raft of measures (building women’s safety into the culture) instead of silly gimmicks. This is where the Homeland Party did much more with less.

That’s actually what sticks in the craw about Restore Britain. They’ve had eight months lead time, three full time staffers and a budget. We are entitled to expect more. It’s not even as though they have to start from scratch. There’s been some outstanding policy ideas over on Pimlico Journal, and Richard Wellings’ work on transport is fantastic if you filter out the worst excesses of his radical libertarianism. And while I often disagree with Michael Reiner’s approach (and think he needs a haircut) his work is always worth examining. then there’s the Tax Policy Associates work on tax simplification.

Meanwhile, the new paper on EDI from Policy Exchange is worth a look and so is the TPAs work on statutory obligations. Think tanks produce this stuff for free. It’s there to be used just so long as you credit them (the occasional thank you goes a long way). The pension reform idea from Steve Loftus is pretty good too.

My work on the Manifesto Project started from the premise that none of our problems are new, I can’t be the only halfway intelligent person to have thought about solutions, and that better ideas than mine could probably be found with about thirty seconds googling. I wasn’t wrong about that. That’s how I managed to do so much in such a short time, which should be easily surpassed by the boys at Restore. If they want to run with the big dogs, they need to up their game - and sharpish.