Reform's Toryism

There are fewer people in politics worse than Robert Jenrick. So a plague on Nigel Farage for accepting his defection to Reform, and then installing him as their economics spox. Because the party is still ahead in the polls, when Jenrick now gives a speech we have to have some awareness of what he has to say. And on Wednesday it was Reform budget time. What would Farage in Number 10 mean for economics and public spending? And the answer is ... we've seen it all before.

Top of Jenrick's pops was the restoration of the two child benefit cap. This had already been trailed by Farage, with him suggesting earlier in the month that he wants the cap brought back so punters can save 5p a pint down at Spoons. Performative cruelty for pocket change? The most spiteful sections of Reform's support would lap it up. But how this sits with Matthew Goodwin's view that women should be fined/taxed punitively if they don't have children, and the generalised panic on the right about birthrates is anyone's guess.

Also on Jenrick's agenda was a pledge to keep the OBR, and the supremacy of the Treasury in state spending matters. And with that, the continued "independence" of the Bank of England. Something the establishment would be happy about, seeing as the symbiotic and interpenetrating relationships these institutions have with each other and the City of London are a crucial nexus of class power in this country. He also committed Reform to a low inflation strategy, which - as per previous governments - would be wheeled out as a technocratic wonky argument against increasing public spending. Which, funnily enough, never applies to splashing out on the military.

There wasn’t much else to Jenrick's speech, but as with such things it's the silences that are pregnant with meaning. Wanting to force hundreds of thousands of children back into poverty, dressed up as instilling "some realism into this business" could have come from any speech of George Osborne's during his time as chancellor. Indeed, one might expect Reform to go down the path of the Tories' 'austerity populism'. The arguments the Tories deployed in the run up to the 2010 general election that successfully persuaded enough people that the crisis in state finances was caused by public spending and social security commitments, and not the global response - largely led by the British government - to bail out the banks. Blaming the poorest for Britain's woes would be right up Jenrick's street. There has never been a group of vulnerable people he didn't want to punch.

This also definitively kills any suggestion of a "left turn" on Reform's part, which was always a stretch, despite Farage toying such a position for a bit of attention-seeking. Likewise, combine Suella Braverman's rants as their education spox against universities and mickey mouse courses. This is the completion of a movement back into the Reform leadership's preferred policy diet, a menu of foul tasting warm ups from the last decade. As the party's position as the main political force on the right is consolidated, making an offering that looks like traditional Tory fare might, they hope, extend Reform's reach into what is left of the Tory coalition. And perhaps those softer, more liberal-inclined elements that might otherwise go Liberal Democrat because the liberalism they care about is more of the economic than the political kind.

On the other hand, this comes with a set of difficulties. Reform's success derives from its distance from the Tories, of being the owners of Brexit in our post-Boris Johnson politics and the scapegoaters du jour of a range of powerless people. Reform aren't about to drop their racism, their anti-environmentalism, nor their soft anti-vaxism and conspiracy theory dog whistles, but sounding identical to the Tories on economic matters and getting former Tories from the last, failed government to front it? That's like exposing a swathe of ankle and renaming themselves Achilles. The populist posturing starts looking just like that, a poor cover for a programme that made life more difficult for significant sections of Reform's volatile voter coalition when the Tories were last in charge. There are political costs to positioning Reform as a racist mk II Conservative Party, and it could be a move that is already starting to depress their polling numbers.

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