Why manifestos matter

In last night's article, I did a deeper dive on Reform's "policy" paper. It's lightweight stuff with no detail. The party doesn't seem to think detail matters. I think it does. What I'm looking for in a party is competence. A party's top people should be able to walk into any debate or television studio and comprehensively own it. It's not even a high bar given the low calibre of incumbent politicians and journalists.

If, though, you have blaggers going on the telly, reciting empty soundbites, they can very easily make a complete prat of themselves, embarrass the party and have to climb down. You can't afford to have half-informed candidates and spokesman freelancing on the fly and having to backtrack.

I remember at a point during Brexit when Jame Delingpole was on a BBC politics programme (maybe you remember it) and was challenged on why we should leave the single market. He floundered. He didn't have a comprehensive answer, and appeared to not even know what the single market was. He made a complete prat of himself and wasted some high profile exposure. The following day the clip went viral. It was an absolute gift to the opposition.

This is what happens when you haven't properly prepared and you don't know what your own position is. Not only do you need to have all your policy ducks in a row, your spokesmen need to know it backwards. Moreover, they have to be able to defend it, which they can’t do if it's just a soundbite plucked out of the air such as "cutting foreign aid by 50%". It doesn't even stand up on its own logic. If you're cutting it by half, why not completely?

If your party sets out to be an alternative to the incompetent establishment parties, your top team needs to be high calibre, and if they speak on a particular subject, they need to be expert. They need to have done the work.

Part of the reason Brexit has been a damp squib is because the Tories had no idea what to do with it, and they haven't set about any serious deregulation because it's actually quite difficult to do (harder than most people think). Often the unintended consequences create complications that can derail your agenda straight out of the gate. Already, divergence is problematic because of the Windsor Framework.

If, though, Ukip or Vote Leave had bothered to devise branded post-Brexit parties (and not disbanded immediately) they could be demanding such policies be adopted. If, though, all you've got is summaries, soundbites and populist tropes, your ideas won't survive first contact with a senior civil servant. Politicians often blame the Sir Humphrey tendency within the civil service, but in many cases, they're just doing what they're paid to do in pointing out the obvious technical and legal flaws. High quality policy, showing you've done the thinking, removes the excuses.

There's nothing wrong with instant appeal populist policy, so long as you can show it's realistic, achievable, and you've given consideration to the consequences. If, for example, you're going to abolish wind subsidies, you're still bound by contract for many years to come. If you simply stop paying, you deter any future investment because you're saying that Britain doesn't uphold contracts. So what is your ramp down mechanism?

Similarly, you could scrap a raft of climate red tape, but then your goods are immediately subject to the EU's carbon border tax. Subsidising those industries would then put you in breach of the TCA and the WTO. So what's the plan? Where's the policy document I should refer to?

But as I point out, separate policies to address symptoms is not the reform we need. You might say you'll scrap ULEZ, but the question a reform party needs to address is how such an intrusive, damaging and unworkable policy was ever implemented in the first place. These crackpot schemes tend to be the product of political narcissism. It's not dissimilar to the 20mph speed limit in Wales or the hate crime law in Scotland.

These are policies that have been implemented without consultation or consent, by unaccountable devolved administrations who can't resist meddling, playing their own cynical little party political games. Everything the SNP does is a petulant snub to Westminster.

As such, this points to the need for major democratic and constitutional overall. We need to renew our democracy, abolish devolution that nobody actually wants, get rid of metro mayors, reverse council amalgamations, and return powers to local authorities where they belong. We then need a system of local referendums and a NOTA option on the ballot paper to give people a meaningful veto on what is done to them.

As it stands, Reform doesn't address any of these issues. You’d think a party with that name would be pretty big on constitutional reform. What was Brexit if not the beginnings of a revolution? But Reform has very little to say on that. They pledge to reform the House of Lords but offer no real detail. They then pledge a British bill of rights without saying what's in it and how it would work. What's to stop it being a replica of the ECHR and a blobber's charter?

They then say they'll introduce proportional representation. The problem with that is that you still end up with 650 MPs living disconnected lives in and out of Westminster, with more in common with their opposition colleagues than a member of the public. It is a distorted political culture, and one that is increasingly remote from the needs and aspirations from the public. Tinkering with the electoral system doesn't address that, nor does it address the low quality of MPs and ministers. Voters hate the Wesminster circus for good reason. We need proper separation of powers to ensure there is no "payroll vote". We need a comprehensive package of parliamentary reforms to restore meaningful democracy. The Reform party doesn't even begin to address that.

A rag bag of populist tropes does not a manifesto make. You can secure your base with populist tropes, but that tops out at about 14% of the electorate, provided you have momentum and a charismatic leader, but if you want to get the rest of the way, you have to show you're more than just a populist party. You have to build a reputation for competence and be able to demonstrate you genuinely do have the answers. But instead we see the likes of Alex Phillips blathering away, with every TV appearance wasted on utter drivel. The party has no product to promote, no talent to nurture, and is heading into an election with nothing approaching policy.

More than anything I would like to see an insurgent party break through, but Reform is just going through the motions. There's nothing that convinces me they're a serious party. Because they don't know what they stand for they've already allowed Hope Not Hate not only to dictate who can stand, but also what is acceptable policy.

A recently suspended candidate called for a much more aggressive immigration policy, which is both needed and highly popular. But in backing away from the candidate, they have also backed away from similar policies. In seeking establishment approval, Reform is now boxed into their "net zero" immigration policy which still means an influx the size of Newcastle every year. Did anyone think that one through? If you're going to cave in on immigration policy, what else is on the chopping block? If you don't have a solid stress-tested manifesto, you'll end up compromising on everything every time you take a little heat. A party has to stand firm on its principles - but it can't if it doesn't have any. And therein lies the problem.

This is especially true of immigration policy. The problem with pandering to Hope Not Hate is that they are always going to call you far right. Its own director said as much. There is no right wing position they will accept as legitimate. There is no immigration control policy they won't call fascist. They are your ideological enemy and they exist to defeat you. As such, you don't triangulate your policy to appease them. You work out what we need to do and keep making the case for doing it.

On that score, we need a robust immigration policy. There is nothing radical about enforcing the law. If there are a million people with no right to be here then we have a right to remove a million people. The idea that there should be no consequences for breaking immigration law is an extreme position.

We also need policies to address the failures of multiculturalism. To do so we're going to have to debate the issues freely and not pussyfoot around the obvious. There are severe consequences for ignoring the problems. In that regard, policy to address specific problems necessarily has to discriminate. Pakistan is a backwards, corrupt, dysfunctional terror state and immigration from there needs to be close to zero. If we want to integrate immigrants then we must ensure they can't live as dual nationality citizens with divided loyalties.

If we're going to defend our own values and national identity then we are going to need limits on immigration from Muslim countries, especially when there's a wealth of evidence that Islamic extremism is rife and Muslim attitudes to women are completely at odds with our own.

There are plenty more avenues of debate, but a nationalist party needs to be clear on what it stands for, the lengths it will go to, and what it will not tolerate. As such, it will meet opposition. That's the very nature of politics. You exist to win the argument and you don't back down. If, though, you allow the opposition to set the terms of the debate, and set the standards of what is acceptable discourse, then you've already lost. If you're too timid to promote your own ideas and won't back your own people at the first sign of any heat, you'' forever be on the back foot, apologising for your own existence. Politics by its very nature is contentious. If you're not contentious then you're not even in the game.

Lee Anderson lost his job in the Tory party because he said, in careless terms, what many are thinking, and in fact there's a case to be made that he wasn't far wrong in what he said. That the Tory party disowned him completely tells us that the Tory party is more concerned with placating a metropolitan media than it is with connecting with British voters. In dancing to the tune of Hope Not Hate, Reform is doing likewise, only it applies HNH standards to its candidates while its senior members are exempt. You're then saying you'll moderate your own position and throw your own people under the bus.

This, of course, would not be a problem for Reform if they had a comprehensive immigration policy instead of vacuous soundbites. If you've worked out what you stand for, you've worked out what you'll stand up for. If not, you'll repeatedly cede the ground to your ideological enemies.