We are out of time for a peaceful solution

Matt Goodwin says "Under a Reform government, foreign nationals in social housing will be given three months to find private accommodation or face being deported". While I agree with this policy in principle, I can easily see that causing a surge in demand for private lets, thereby pushing up rents. Either that or a surge in beds in sheds, illegal sublets and illegal caravan parks. He's also talking about making families homeless at short notice. That’s not going to play well politically.

These problems are manageable with a proper plan, but without a plan, its going to be complete chaos and very poor optics. I think it has to go hand-in-hand with a remigration grant where the eviction letter sets out options for assisted repatriation. Meanwhile, it require a major upscaling of local authority housing enforcement.

As to the politics of this, you just know that the media will flag up all the heartstring edge cases, so it will be a test of the government's resolve as to how long they can cope with being presented in the media as complete bastards. Bearing in mind this is also a government that's blithely talking about leaving the ECHR and repealing equality legislation. There's only so much bad press a sitting government can withstand.

The mistake is to assume that just because these measures are individually popular with their own base that they’ll also be be popular countrywide. They’ll face local resistance, and if they're attempting all this simultaneously then it could very easily go south. Bear in mind this is also running concurrently with Reform's deportations policy. Immigration enforcement teams and housing/EHO inspectors are going to need full police escorts. As such, this is going to require an overhaul of the Home Office before commencing any of this.

This is why serious policy matters. The Slop Right tweets these policy tropes, but we don't know for a fact that they are official policies (even if they come from the lips of Farage), and there's no evidence that they've given any thought to the operational realities of what they propose. These "policies" require an enormous amount of support architecture in order to implement them, but I don't see that Reform have any people capable of designing it, or even realising the requirement for it.

Consequently, I can see Reform launching these policy initiatives only for them to hit the reality barrier within a couple of weeks, only to have to pause them pending a more detailed exploration of the issues. Soon after they get deep-sixed as other political priorities take precedence, and then Reform washes up like the Tories with a litany of unfulfilled promises - and widely hated by their own voters.

You can have the likes of Goodwin and Yusuf rattling off half-baked crowd pleasing ideas, enough to secure the base, but serious people need to know if Reform can deliver. You need people in the back room doing the hard yards of operational rollout. Reform just doesn't have people of this calibre - because they all think it's just a question of barking orders at civil servants.

This is how Danny Kruger is thinking, which is why he's invested so much in his cabinet office reform programme. I don't dispute that the civil service needs an overhaul, but you still need to be issuing detailed instructions to the civil service, communicating exactly what policy infrastructure you want them to build.

This, ultimately, is why I don't really care if Reform wins in 2029 or not, because I just don't see the makings of a viable government. Just one that creates messes and walks into every ambush.

With Restore Britain being much the same kind of slop factory, I now have no faith in a political solution. While Restore has made a stab at policy, its spokesmen clearly haven't bothered to learn it, and they’ll continue to improvise, missing much of the necessary finesse. Put simply, we are not getting a government that can meaningfully address mass immigration any time soon.

As such, there are two possible futures ahead of us. There is one in which Reform wins, probably needing to lean on the support of the rump Tory party, which bites off more than it can chew, running into consequences it never anticipated. If they are also in the process of scrambling the constitution by leaving the ECHR, they’re going to find themselves far out of their depth, to find themselves rudderless - and firefighting for the rest of their term in the same way Labour is now.

The result of this is more or less exactly where we are now, only Reform is as hated as the Tories, and the riots and protests are more violent - while everything else spirals out of control. The other possibility is that Reform doesn’t manage to close the deal in 2029, resulting in a rainbow blocking coalition, calling itself a government of national unity. That results in more of the same chaos, perhaps giving rise to an actual far right. In my view, the era of stable government is over for the foreseeable future.

This has been my settled view for some time now. What’s changed, though, is that I don’t feel quite the same animosity towards Reform for its abject incompetence. I’ve reached the conclusion that fixing this mess would be far beyond the abilities of a competent elite (if such a thing even existed).

What seems more likely is a state of low grade civil war which loosely follows recent patterns in Belfast, where migrants will be encouraged to leave by the natives, using shall we say, unsanctioned methods. There won’t be much that an overstretched and demoralised police force can do about it. While the state will clamp down on social media, they’re completely behind the curve in tracking private communications networks. You can’t keep a lid on this sort of thing when there’s a camera phone in everyone’s pocket.

Essentially, I think we’re past the point where elections could prevent a wider unravelling. Fixing the fundamentals would, at the very least, require a reset of energy and welfare policies, neither of which will happen soon, and will take at least a decade to sort out. The sand timer has run out.

We should also recall that there is enormous opposition to fixing anything in Britain. While the majority may want something done about immigration, they may not be persuaded by mass deportations. Meanwhile, there is major structural opposition to welfare reform, and renewable energy is quite popular. No government is going to have a big enough mandate to do what needs to be done.

Ultimately civil wars happen when government loses all legitimacy, and confidence in the capacity of politics to fix things evaporates. We might already be at that point. We needed a Reform-like entity circa 2016 to deliver fully on Brexit to avert what is to come. Where we should have recalibrated energy, welfare and immigration policy, we doubled down on all the worst choices of the last thirty years. I doubt there is a peaceful way to row back from that.