Situations vacant: a serious political party

The watch word of any new conservative movement should be "resilience". National resilience should inform social policy, industrial policy, agriculture, trade, defence, energy and much else.

Starting with energy, it is absolutely absurd that we are spending billions on the grid to accommodate intermittent sources out in the middle of the sea. Similarly, the proposal to connect Britain to a Moroccan solar farm is probably the single most moronic idea anyone has ever had about anything. Making ourselves dependent on subsea interconnectors is dangerous.

Decommissioning farmland or using it for low yield solar is also moronic. Signing trade deals that export jobs or undermine key strategic interests such as steelmaking or food production is stupid. Mass, unchecked immigration undermines stability and cohesion. It has to stop.

Britain's capacity to defend itself, and remain politically independent, is contingent on energy independence, food independence (as far as is realistic), and an independent capacity to manufacture steel, fertiliser, weapons and ammunition. As such, the task of any new conservative movement is to reverse pretty much every strategic choice of the last thirty years.

But central to national resilience is a functioning democracy. Political stability is contingent on responsive government. As such, every act of constitutional vandalism since 1997 must be reversed. We then need constitutional safeguards, locked by referendum, to ensure that never again can parliament give away powers that were not theirs to give away.

Crucially, though, a resilient country is one with functioning local government. It matters on many levels. If a party talks about controlling immigration exclusively by cutting the number of visas we issue, then it's an indication they are not a serious party. We need targeted policies to deal with immigration. Much of the illegal immigration problems we have are symptomatic of a collapse of basic local governance.

The reasons so many feel they can come to Britain and disappear into the woodwork is because there traditional modes of detection no longer exists. Arms of local government such as Environmental Health and Trading Standards have deteriorated to the extent that they can barely perform their primary functions.

If you are regularly policing factory safety, housing overcrowding, farm safety/hygiene, care homes, food safety, counterfeit goods, noise pollution, money laundering and low level administrative crimes, then you usually uncover a stream of illegal immigration.

These are functions of government that have been systematically degraded for three decades. More than immigration control, they are the bedrock of civilisation. Yet, the overall national headcount of inspectors is a fraction of what it was, they no longer have local patches. Much of this work has been farmed out to regional quangos or abandoned entirely.

We have in recent years seen a collapse of prosecutions of rogue landlords, because if councils inspect suspected overcrowding they are then obliged to house anyone they evict. They don't go looking for politically inconvenient problems that will place demands on housing.

As such, we have no system of localised intelligence, and we with only sporadic policing, the volumes of laws we have are not meaningfully enforced, which has contributed to an overall decline in standards for pretty much everything. This is exacerbated by the amalgamation of local authorities, which are no longer local in the true meaning of the word.

As such, a party that is serious about fixing immigration, is one that has a plan to rebuild real local government and responsive local democracy, a by-product of which is better surveillance of criminality.

Similarly, the abuse of care visas and student visas is a symptom of a broken care system and a dysfunctional higher education system. As such we need a comprehensive social care policy and a policy to completely rebuild higher education, again dismantling three decades of Blairism.

Uncontrolled immigration is a symptom of the collapse of the administrative state. It is that which we must address, because it's also the cause of wider dysfunction in governance.

Surveying all of the parties at this election, no party gets close to understanding what must be done or how. Particularly, the Reform party does not know the meaning of the word policy, and wouldn't trouble itself to develop research based reforms. Their policy is whatever trope they pluck form the tombola. Only the SDP has bothered to produce an integrated policy on anything. True, it's dreadful, and it doesn't conform to their foundational principles, but they did at least try.

The problem we have with our political parties is that it's so long since anybody bothered with a serious manifesto, we've all forgotten what a good one looks like. This, ultimately, is why I'm not voting for any of them. The absence of serious policy thinking tells us they'd have no real idea what to do with power, and with no policy expertise they'd lack the competence to overcome the many barriers to implementing policy. It will take more than lazy populist tropes to repair Britain.