One of Reform UK’s biggest struggles is turning rhetoric into actionable policy, but this changed on Friday at the start of Reform’s first conference with former chairman Zia Yusuf saying the party is “preparing” for leadership.
He adds that Reform is “taking seriously the important work of getting ready for government,” with Zia now head of policy, much of this lies on his shoulders.
Working on a voluntary basis alongside three paid policy officials, he has been tasked to build up the party’s governing credentials.
Four more paid policy officials are set to be recruited, alongside a small team of unpaid volunteers working to draft up ideas, particularly in areas like Scotland where the party does not have a strong foothold or paid position.
This small, but growing team is tasked with making Reform UK into a serious candidate for election, with members like Helen Manson, interim chair of the party’s South Cambridgeshire branch saying that when knocking on doorsteps, Reform UK candidates “can’t respond” to the question of how Reform is ready to govern – to many, it appears as though the party has no plan.
The party has laid out a number of bold, often controversial pledges, but questions linger over how it plans to pay for them. While announcing and confirming more policies at the conference, the way they intend to implement them remains uncertain.
Immigration and Policing
The party is best known for its stance on immigration: Calling for mass deportations and an end to the small boats crisis.
Standing in front of the crowd in Birmingham, he announced plans to end the crisis in two weeks, adding to the wave of pledges including removing the UK from the European Convenvtion on Human Rights (ECHR) to repeal laws that block mass deportations, with plans to deport 600,000 migrants over five years.
While he would later reframe these statements, instead pledging to end the crisis within two weeks of a new immigration bill being passed, he maintained that Reform UK would complete it’s mission as “quickyl as possible.”
Another main focus of Nigel Farage’s wide ranging speach was policing: Pledging to “police the streets and not the tweets”, referring to new hate crime laws that saw people like Lucy Connolly, who appeared on stage at the conference, arrested for offensive tweets, with Connolly calling for her X followers to “set fire” to hotels housing asylum seekers.
New pledges to expand stop and search powers were also announced, with Farage hoping to “bring back genuine stop and search on our streets” to tackle knife crime.
Net Zero and Climate
Reform UK’s new mayor of Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns called for the UK to “drill, baby, drill”, an early sign of Reform’s climate policy.
Farage has already pledged to scrap net zero targets, bring fracking back to the UK, and increase drilling in the North Sea.
Two opinions were made clear at the conference: Reform UK’s leadership to do not attribute global warming to human activity, with party deputy Richard Tice calling the idea “absolute garbage”, and the nation’s top priority should be reducing energy bills rather than the focus on sustainability which party chairman David Bull claims has been “against the wishes of local communities.”
A number of Reform UK figures were also calling for the dissolution of Ed Milliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, aiming to replace it with an “energy security group”, and wide support was seen for repealing the Climate Change Act.
“We will end full subsisdies on renewabke energy” and “reindustrialise Britain, making things we want and need”, Farage told the cheering crowd, pledging that the UK will produce its own oil and gas instead of prioritising “harmful, wasteful” net zero policies.
Tax reform and Welfare
Another policy on the chopping block is welfare, with “some serious cuts to the welfare budget” planned. Controversial historian, made famous for racist remarks about slavery, spoke of the welfare state being “the tragedy of the 20th century.”
Lee Anderson, one of the party’s four MPs was announced as the party’s welfare spokesman, with Farage telling ITV: “There are too many young people being put on disability benefits, being literally cast out of the system, classed as victims, left there. It isn’t good for the economy, it isn’t good for them as human beings. From today, Lee Anderson is going to be our new spokesman on welfare.
“He’s going to work with others and craft policy. And the thing about Lee is that he worked in a Citizens Advice Bureau. You know, he knows there are those that genuinely deserve help, but there are many frankly that don’t.”
Featured image via Reform UK of Youtube.
