Restore Britain's policy flop

Restore Britain has launched what they call a policy paper on abolishing inheritance tax. Firstly, I'll start with what's good about it. The paper sets out a moral basis for the policy - (in keeping with what we assume the party's as yet undocumented values are). If Restore isn’t going to go deep on the details, it should restrict itself to policy outlines and the moral basis for their thinking.

In this case, it's lengthy enough to make its own case. Not much needs to be said about it. I do not disagree with the premise. IHT is an abomination and the farm tax is a disaster for British agriculture.

Now, the bad. Leaving aside the Ladybird Books aesthetic, it's leaden with slopulism. They say "There are plenty of areas where the requisite savings can be made to ensure that getting rid of IHT is fiscally feasible".

They say "we would target the most grossly politicised parts of Britain’s bloated public sector for a Javier Milei-style ¡afuera! This means everything from taxpayer-funded DEI jobs to state-backed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) engaged in the racket of disguising politically contentious activism as charity"

They say "According to a Conservative Way Forward report, public sector bodies have in recent years wasted up to £212 million enlisting the services of DEI officials across all kinds of institutions, from the NHS to Warwickshire County Council. The same report found that £880 million of taxpayer money has been injected into the coffers of ‘charities’ that push open borders, trans ideology, and climate alarmism".

It's difficult to know where to start with this kind of slop. It's all based on right wing mythology and assumptions about the functioning of the state. If you're going to scrap IHT then you first need to look at how much it raises. For 2022-23, HMRC reported £6.70 billion, which rose to £8.2 billion in 2024-25.

You're not going to find that by sacking DEI officers, and of the £880m they cite, this is not grants. The British state has moved away from charity grants and instead NGOs make most of their money from services provision on everything from citizens advice & legal services through to wheelchair hire services and frontline provisions. Only a fraction of it can be identified as political spending or waste. There is some waste a long the lines of what they suggest but it is overstated.

What they will find, if every they bother to do any detailed research is that a Javier Milei-style "¡afuera!" purge of the civil service is not as simple as they believe - and they won't find many organisations that serve no function at all. You can't simply strike out entire departments with a red pen. 90% of the spending goes on the top ten organisations. There rest are small fries. As such, you need a dedicated policy for each of the top ten bodies such as NHS England, the HMRC and MoJ.

They then say "There are plenty of areas where the requisite savings can be made to ensure that getting rid of IHT is fiscally feasible. It has been reported that returning
Britain’s working age welfare bill to pre-pandemic levels alone would save the Treasury £47 billion – five times the probable cost of abolishing IHT".

So far as I can tell, this is recycled spin. Expenditure on working age health and disability benefits has risen by £19 billion since 2018/2019 according to government data. You can cut that back over time (with care), but you have to watch slopulists carefully because they'll reallocate this spending (just as they do with foreign aid) many times over. They will make the same claims to underpin defence spending increases.

I'm not saying savings cannot be found, or that the policy isn't viable, but this policy bears all the hallmarks of slopulism - written by people with a threadbare grasp of the British state.

If there was any point in Restore Britain launching as a party then it was to set a new benchmark for quality; a departure from the intelligence insulting drivel we get from Farage. What we're seeing instead is more of the same slopulism but with big a dollop of nostalgia and wishful thinking. On that basis, Restore fails by the benchmark set by its own leader when he slammed Reform for its lack of seriousness and substance.

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A lot of people insist that it doesn’t particularly matter if parties don’t have policies because there’s still three years to go before an election. There are a number of previously discussed reasons why this cavalier attitude to policy is wrong, but it’s also the case that good policy takes quite a long time to develop.

It’s now approaching a year and a half since I published the first draft of a generic right wing manifesto, which underwent an extensive rewrite for manifestoproject.org website, published last September. I'm still not happy with it though.

Since then I’ve tweaked a few policies here and there but some areas need a complete rewrite because they're actually quite poor. Listing the problems is one thing, coming up with viable solutions is another. Just having the bandwidth to cross examine your own work is a challenge - especially when hardly anyone cares.

All the same, it's worth doing just as a personal endeavour because once you’ve written a basic outline you become alert to any stories that prove or disprove your analysis, and my review process allows me to put more meat on the bones. In some cases, I arrive at completely different conclusions to the ones I started out with - which is why I’m evidently pissing off so many subscribers.

If, though, you’re content with lazy generic bullet points and classic right wing tropes, you’re not even out of the gate with policy thinking, and if that’s what you’re running with, you simply cannot expect serious people to think you are capable of running anything. You will be crucified by anyone with a working knowledge of anything you’re pontificating on.

This process explains why there’s a certain duality to my pollical commentary. Some might even call it schizophrenic. There’s a big part of me that (in spirit) completely agrees with the sentiments of the new right, but then there’s the other part of my brain that thinks about how to turn these sentiments into actionable plans and policies. Very often the two positions cancel each other out, which is why I understand the conflict between politicians and the technocrats in the civil service.

Thanks to my provisional work last year, I’m already light years ahead of the slop right parties in terms of turning aspiration into policy - even if my own efforts are mediocre. Depressingly we will find even a year from now, the slop right won’t even have scratched the surface - because they're not that interested in how things work or developing their ideas.

This has a cost in the credibility stakes. In almost all instances, I find the picture is considerably more complex than the lazy narratives of the right, and it explains why successive governments don’t get very far reforming things. As much as there are technical limits on what can be achieved, there are also political constraints. The failure to acknowledge these constraints is why populist parties overpromise and underdeliver. It’s why Yusuf’s DOGE left Reform with a red face.

If Restore Britain hopes to avoid these mistakes then they need their leader to tone it down with the rabble-rousing slop and get to work on policy. But that’s not going to happen. In a lot of ways Restore will end up being all the worst elements of Reform, and their policy, insofar as they bother with it at all, it will be more of what we've seen today - post-facto justifications for the drivel spouted by their leader, padded out with recycled right wing fodder from the Telegraph. They say they'll fill in the details later but they never do.

This is why I oppose slopulism. I don't care if they're saying all the right things that I agree with in spirit. I want to know that they could actually achieve something with power. They make grandiose claims but they really have no idea what they're up against or the scale of the task.

Moreover, what they propose demonstrate how little thought they've applied to it. The job isn't just to get re-elected. It's to hit the ground running on day one and do things in such a way that they get re-elected and can finish the job. Without planning and research, they will end up a lame duck government inside a year and will be kicked out at the first opportunity - and rightly so.