The Reform curse strikes again
Robert Jenrick, Reform’s shadow chancellor, has been grilled on GB News - and almost every line he gives clashes with things Farage has previously said. As readers will know, this is far from the first time this has happened but it’s unusual to see GB News roughing up Reform. Reform is has yet to face the most intense scrutiny but it will come, and they’re woefully unprepared.
Worse still, TV interviewers have nowhere to go to ascertain what their actual policy is. Policy on the Reform website is sporadic, and the best they can do on the subject mentioned a is a five page glossy pamphlet which their own spokesmen haven’t bothered to learn. It seems that not even Robert Jenrick is immune from the pathological amateurism of Reform. It’s contagious.
The slop right thinks that people don't notice that they're all over the shop on policy. They insist that policy doesn't matter, and it doesn't really matter if their politicians just fart out whatever comes to mind. Well, it turns out that that even our useless media notices.
This, I suppose, is remedied with a just a little co-ordination and message discipline. But message discipline has its own problems if you’re defending policy that was dreamed up in the pub one afternoon. Reform talks about cutting VAT for the hospitality sector by 10%, paid for by way of welfare reforms (specifically by reinstating the two child cap on child benefit). It immediately smells like slop policy - and they’ve already been taken apart for it.
As it happens, I gave some thought to a pubs policy for the Manifesto Project but it wasn’t anywhere in my list of top priorities. Interestingly, it was a top priority for Restore Britain. Restore’s effort is an improvement on that of Reform, but I was actually warned off going down a similar road. It requires a greater degree of industry knowledge than I have access to.
Regardless of the helping hands proposed by both outfits, pubs face two serious problems. Firstly, the fact that young people just aren’t drinking, and secondly, energy costs in a country where high energy costs are locked in for the next decade or so.
There is then the problem of tied pubs where breweries run their pubs in maintenance mode as assets in their property portfolios. The people who own the pubs don’t really care about pubs. As such, micro-managing the industry to save it is fruitless. Both Restore and Reform’s measures amount to little more than a life support machine for a dying patient.
In any case, serious policy is somewhat redundant for populist parties since their leaders will routinely undermine their own policies by firing off pub bore boomer-slop tweets just after they roll out of bed.
I did mention several times that this is the sort of liability you need to address early on, but I was told to shut up and "get on board". Now those same people are telling me to shut up and get on board now I'm applying the same scrutiny to Restore (by the criteria set out by Rupert Lowe himself). You could hand these people what they need to avoid this kind of basic error and they'll still turn their noses up at it because they assume everyone else is as lazy and easily pleased as they are.
The point I’ve set out from the beginning is that research-based policy should inform all your policy comms and your people should know their policies. It is the best insurance against walking into ambushes. What we’re seeing instead, though, is lightweight fluff dressed up as policy, which they end up having to row back on, while making fools of themselves when they don’t even know what their own policies are.
Maybe it is the case that the public are so jaundiced with politics that they don’t care about things like credibility and consistency anymore, but I’m betting that rather a lot of people do. I can’t be the only person to have noticed the lack of it. GB News certainly has. Why dig a hole for yourself when you don’t have to?