1. The reality we face

2. What we believe

3. Our programme for government

Our Programme for Government: Fix the state; Get Britain growing; Defend our people.

Fix the state

With this analysis (that successive governments have broken Britain, which could yet be a great country once again) and on this ground of beliefs (in family, community and country) we can build our programme for government. This programme is a triple project: to fix the British state; to get Britain growing economically; and to defend our people from the threats that challenge us from without and within.

In the last 30 years we have seen a wholesale transformation of the British political system, to the detriment of Britain. A government composed of arms-length bodies; ministers unable to account honestly to Parliament for what the government does, and Parliament unable to demand it; a self-appointing judiciary; civil servants and judges obeying the ‘higher law’ of international human rights - these are the reasons the state has failed.

Ominously, in anticipation of a government - namely Reform UK - that threatens to expose and end them, the system is now organising itself to entrench and codify these malignant features under the guise of ‘safeguard[ing the Civil Service’s] impartiality and core values within the constitution’.¹

Reform UK’s principal objective in government is to restore the proper constitutional basis of our democracy and the proper conception of the rule of law. In future sovereignty will rest once again with the ‘Crown in Parliament’, the traditional formulation by which Ministers exercise the powers of the state with the consent of the people’s representatives.

Civil Service

The immediate problem with the British state is that it is simply too large. Over half a million people now work for central government. More than 11,000 of them work in the Cabinet Office and its quangos, the sprawling bureaucracy at the heart of Whitehall whose essential function no-one knows, but whose chief (the Cabinet Secretary) regards herself as the ‘guardian and steward of the constitution’.² The Civil Service is bloated, unproductive and wasteful; and it is a law unto itself.

This is the deeper problem. Over the last three decades the Civil Service, the permanent government of the country, has become deliberately more independent from what are seen as the partisan whims of politics, including by the creation of expert-led agencies or ‘quangos’ and by a new law (the Constitutional and Governance Reform Act 2010) which established an artificial boundary between the Civil Service and the elected government. Senior civil servants took it upon themselves, especially in the turmoil and misgovernment of the post-Brexit years, to develop an independent constitutional role. This is inappropriate and indeed unconstitutional.

Under a Reform UK government the Civil Service will be restored to its proper place as the servant of the elected government, not the independent ‘guardian of the constitution’. The Cabinet Office, and the post of Cabinet Secretary, will be abolished. We will radically reduce the size of Whitehall, improve its efficiency - including through the rapid adoption of AI - and incentivise results through management and pay structures that reward achievement and attract talent from outside government.³

Separation of powers

Before 1997 there was no formal separation of powers in Britain. The executive and the judiciary were led from within the legislature, by members of the Commons and Lords; the ultimate power we call sovereignty (including the power to appoint judges) rested with ‘the Crown in Parliament’.

Tony Blair and his successors found this confusion of roles untidy and consciously sought to introduce the separation of powers on the American model. The executive was ‘professionalised’, as we have seen, with a new model of quasi-independent civil servants directing the state rather than the elected ministers from the House of Commons. The judiciary was extracted from Parliament (with a new Supreme Court, rather than the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, now the final court of appeal) and the Lord Chancellor lost the right to appoint judges.

As the front bench of the House of Commons lost its hold on the executive, so the back benches lost their autonomy. Blair’s government neutered the Commons through reforms (led by Robin Cook) that greatly empowered the government - itself increasingly detached from Parliament - to manage the business of the House.

Meanwhile the House of Lords, no longer the ultimate court of law, abandoned its function as the sense-checker and scrutineer of draft legislation and became merely a repository of whinging activists and superannuated party hacks, perfectly reflecting the cultural and political elite of Britain - overwhelmingly left-wing and hostile to the agenda of restoration the country itself demands. There is not a single Reform UK peer in the House of Lords.

Reform UK will reestablish the mixed constitution, ending the experiment with the separation of powers, including the self-appointment of judges. We will restore the authority of the House of Commons. The House of Lords will resume its role as a scrutinising chamber, and not block legislation assented to by the voting public.

International law

As the formerly integrated elements of the political community were picked apart by Blair, a new element was slyly added: the principle of international law.

Under the dualist British model, treaties never had the same status as laws passed by Parliament, which remained superior to all decisions of the executive including its foreign agreements. Thanks in part to the European Communities Act 1972 and in part to the active pursuit of this principle by Tony Blair’s government, however, these agreements have acquired the dignity of law, and of superior law.

The European Convention on Human Rights, notoriously, was incorporated into domestic law through the Human Rights Act 1998. This nod to dualism - which requires treaties to be incorporated to be effective at home - was actually a prelude to a creeping monism (the continental principle that treaties automatically apply domestically, and indeed that they trump domestic law). The assumption grew, greatly aided by former Lord Chief Justice Tom Bingham’s The Rule of Law (2010), that honouring treaties is as much part of the ‘rule of law’ as statute and precedent, indeed that they take precedence over domestic statute and judgments. The result is that government lawyers now routinely murmur the word ‘illegal’ to warn ministers against any action that a court might interpret as a breach of an international commitment; and civil servants threaten to strike on the same grounds.⁴

A Reform UK government will immediately withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and repeal the Human Rights Act. We will repeal remaining EU law and replace it, where necessary, with law made in Parliament.

We will reestablish the dualist principle that judgements made in international courts and tribunals have no standing in Britain unless they are explicitly incorporated by Act of Parliament.

We will also reform the rules around Judicial Review so that - whether the case is brought under international law or domestic law - activists have less opportunity to block action on vexatious or politically motivated grounds.

The Union

Restoring the proper constitutional basis of our democracy means making a proper commitment to the Union. The last government and this one tacitly accepted the demand of the EU that the price of Brexit was Northern Ireland. The six counties were left in the economic orbit of the EU, which is working with Dublin to change the facts on the ground in favour of a united Ireland.

Reform UK will renegotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol to the Brexit agreement to restore the sovereignty of Parliament over the whole United Kingdom.

We will also work with the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales to deliver a more sustainable settlement which recognises the political, cultural and economic integrity of the United Kingdom.

Get Britain growing

Growth is imperative. Things naturally decay, and the only way to sustain life is for new life to appear. A successful country sees its businesses grow, and new businesses spring up to challenge them.

Growth must be real. Prosperity is not measured purely by economic activity or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - which increases, for instance, with high rates of immigration or artificial expansion of the money supply - but by actual value created. GDP per head, or national wealth measured equally among the population, is a better metric of growth.

The availability of cheap labour from abroad has discouraged governments and businesses from investing in our own people or in technology. Meanwhile the cheap capital created by low interest rates and money printing (‘quantitative easing’) has flowed not into new businesses but into assets, especially housing, boosting the balance sheets of the already wealthy and creating unsustainable levels of public and private debt.

Add to this the profound dysfunctions in the policy frameworks - energy, planning, skills - in which businesses operate, including the retention of the EU laws which hamper innovation, and we see why Britain is failing economically.

We have a crisis in productivity, a syndrome of underperforming businesses, and wage stagnation. And now, after years of successive governments ducking the challenges and opportunities of tech, AI is about to deliver the most profound shock to the economy in modern history.

Welfare

These problems, and this new factor, demand radical, immediate action by an incoming Reform government.

We need to address the crisis in the public finances, by deep cuts in wasteful and unproductive expenditure and a determined reduction in borrowing. A model of universal welfare entitlement for anyone, however irresponsible they are, is ruinous to the taxpayer and to the recipients of welfare themselves. A state which aspires to look after everyone directly is a state that will fail in this, and fail in its real responsibility of creating the conditions for prosperity in general.

We need much tighter rules on who gets benefits and for how long, which will free up more money for those, such as severely disabled people, who need it most. Reform UK will create a single, comprehensive, clinician-led, rigorous but fair assessment to distinguish between the severely disabled who cannot work and who deserve a decent income from the taxpayer, those who need help - not cash - to enable them to get and keep a job, and those who are simply trying to scam the system.⁵ We will ensure that taxpayers’ money is reserved for the most vulnerable and genuinely needy citizens.

Housing

We need to invest money and responsibility in the best, the first and last systems of welfare, namely families and communities themselves. That means an explicit expectation that people are responsible for those closest to them. The state will help people who do the right thing by their dependents - who care for their children, their elderly, their neighbours.

Core to stronger families and communities is housing. A Reform UK government will build 500,000 new affordable social homes over ten years. Priority for these houses will be for British-born workers and married couples. Ending foreign-national access would make around one million homes available for British families, while a restored Right to Buy will expand home ownership and help young families put down roots.⁶

Energy

We need immediate action to free up the abundant sources of energy that are available in Britain. It is a fine ambition to one day live entirely off the clean, abundant energy of wind, water, the sun or the ground itself, but the reckless pursuit of ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 is unreal and self-harming. A Reform Government will abandon this target and instead support the exploitation of every immediately available source of energy, including new oil fields in the North Sea, shale gas on the mainland, and the new generation of small nuclear reactors.

Planning

We need immediate action to let businesses build the infrastructure and the industrial assets required to create jobs and boost wealth, including energy facilities but also factories, logistic hubs and data centres. Legitimate local concerns about any particular proposal, including concerns for the environment, should be swiftly and fully assessed, and a decision made - by people accountable to elected politicians - to proceed with or decline the application. Assessment and decision need to happen transparently, and above all quickly.

Business

We need immediate action to get capital to the people, places and projects that need it. A fairer tax regime will bring home many of the wealthy people and companies that have fled the UK in recent years, and attract more global capital here. Reform UK’s proposed Britannia Card scheme will offer internationally mobile wealth creators a 10-year renewable residence permit and favourable tax status in return for a one-off £250,000 contribution which would be entirely directed to boost the income of Britain’s lowest-paid workers.⁷ A better banking system - with more local, more patient capital - will support the growth of ‘left behind’ towns and cities far from London.

We need immediate action to reduce the burdens on business. Taxation is far too high to support a growing economy. We will reduce taxes, and also strip away confusing and time-consuming regulations, including those inherited from our EU membership and those added by the myriad of City regulators. The opportunity of Brexit is to diverge from the high-tax, high-regulation model of European economies, and to maximise the difference - already bringing us big dividends - between British and European regimes for the industries of the future: advanced manufacturing; life sciences including biotech and agritech; and the extraordinary revolution that is modern computing.

AI

We are on the cusp of a curve in innovation that is entirely unprecedented in human history. The enormous potential of AI - to boost productivity and growth; to conquer disease; to eliminate drudgery and create the conditions for a well-lived life for everyone - is real.

Yet the dangers - to jobs, to wellbeing, to our very existence - are real too. Most of all, humans are not well adapted to cope with this pace of change, especially when we are disunited and culturally confused, lacking in an idea of human purpose and unable to state the essentials that need defending. We are developing technologies that could obliterate life; and we don’t even know what life is for.

What we do know is that inventions cannot be undone, and that ‘the only way out is through’. The paradox is that to mitigate the dangers of tech, we need more tech. To reduce the danger of AI servitude, Britain, and British businesses, need more AI: more ‘compute’ (more data centres to run the AI models), more innovation and more tech talent.⁸

It is a source of great relief that, currently, the world leaders in AI are American firms committed to Western values. This precarious advantage must be maintained. Britain should work closely with the US and also play its own part in developing an AI industry, and a tech sector generally, that can contribute to the security and the success of civilisation.

The great challenge of our time is to find a way to moralise this great new power, to make it serve humanity and steward creation responsibly. This is a Western project, and a British one. We could lead the world in the development of tech solutions in manufacturing, in healthcare, in food, energy and defence - and also help the world shape an AI reality that is, in the Pope’s words, ‘oriented toward the good’.⁹

Defend our people

The state’s primary responsibility is to maintain the security of the country from internal and external attack. We currently have a culture of impunity for low-level criminality; long delays for justice; overcrowded prisons that are simultaneously soft and inhumane, and utterly fail to reduce reoffending; and in consequence we have unsafe streets, unlovely communities, and vulnerable people living in constant fear.

We have Armed Forces that - despite their heroic personnel - are simply inadequate to the likely challenges they will face if Britain has to fight a major war. And we have a society weakened and divided by immigration and the failure of successive governments to insist on meaningful integration and the allegiance of newcomers to the values and institutions of the United Kingdom.

Crime

Reform UK will unapologetically enforce the rule of law. This means a rapid expansion of the police force, and the removal of the laws, codes and culture that privilege political correctness over common sense policing.¹⁰ It means an uncompromising assault on the gangs that plague our communities. It means an urgent increase in prison capacity, an end to the early release system, and prison regimes that actually rehabilitate offenders rather than leave them lying on their beds for 23 hours a day. And it means the expulsion from Britain of foreign national criminals.¹¹

Defence

The Armed Forces need to be properly funded; Reform UK will spend 3.5% of GDP on defence as demanded by NATO. But even more than this, the Armed Forces need to be properly led.

That means using defence budgets much, much better, to commission the weapons and systems that modern warfare demands.

It means clarity about the purpose and therefore the posture of UK defence. We cannot do everything everywhere; there is no value in aping the USA’s ‘full spectrum dominance’ on a tiny scale. We need to lead the defence of the West in the European theatre, principally against Russia. This requires superior capabilities in the marine and cyber domains; in intelligence; in Special Forces; and in headquarter functions.¹²

And perhaps most of all, it means standing by our troops, our veterans and their families - and ending the disgraceful, human-rights-driven persecution of soldiers for actions committed within the rules of engagement, with the authority of the chain of command, on operations ordered by the British government.

Immigration

The steady invasion of Britain by illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel in dinghies - ferried to our shores by the RNLI and the Coastguard, then housed at public expense and in almost all cases allowed to remain here for life - is a chronic feature of a state that has abandoned its most essential function: to protect its borders and decide, on behalf of the public, who comes in.

Reform UK will stop illegal immigration by the straightforward expedient of returning migrants attempting to cross the Channel to France. We expect to do this with the cooperation of the French authorities, who have already agreed to prevent migrants leaving their shores and who have every incentive to eliminate the camps of migrants drawn by the opportunity of a one-way voyage to Britain.¹³

We will also remove people who have previously arrived in Britain and are living and working here illegally.¹⁴

And we will undo the disaster of the ‘Boriswave’ - the issuing of four million visas to low-wage workers and their dependents between 2021 and 2024, only a fraction of whom are actually working and who will collectively cost the taxpayer £623bn in public spending over their lifetimes if they remain in Britain. They will not remain in Britain unless they can demonstrate a history of self-support, an appropriate level of earnings, and proficiency in English.¹⁵

The dominant challenge to the cohesion of British society comes from people who arrived, principally from South Asia, over the last half-century, and their descendants. The first wave came post-war, partly to fill gaps in the workforce in industries - such as textiles in Lancashire - that were already in decline. But they stayed, and have had many children, and brought many relatives over. In 2023-24 240,000 Indians and 101,000 Pakistanis arrived.¹⁶ In all there are now approximately five million people of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin (first, second and third generation immigrants) living in the United Kingdom. Many are concentrated in the Midlands and the North of England, and in some places - in large parts of Leicester, Blackburn or Preston for instance - they can represent 50, 60 or 70 percent of the local population. These places have changed utterly, not least by the disappearance of pubs and churches, the traditional gathering-places of the community, and the appearance of mosques, often two or three to a street to cater for all the different sects and clans of modern Islam.

The tragic reality is that Britain has imported millions of people from communities which are essentially ill-adapted to life in Britain. Islam is capable of many interpretations but the one that is now dominant in the mosques of northern England, particularly those serving Pakistani communities, is the Deobandi doctrine which grew out of the anti-British campaign in India in the 19th century. The Deobandi preach total separation of the ummah - the Muslim community - from the rest of the world. Their mission is to bring all lands currently in the Dar al-Harb - the House of War, i.e. non-Islamic states - into the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. They want the whole world to be under Islamic jurisdiction. The means to this end is jihad, variously interpreted as personal struggle, political activism, or violence.

A country needs a common creed. This does not mean everyone needs to believe in the same religion. But it does mean tacit assent and general recognition of a particular religion as the foundation on which the institutions of the state are built, and which provides the social and spiritual infrastructure for ordinary life. With that foundation, that infrastructure, it is possible to accommodate a wide diversity of religions and religious ideas.

The institutional foundation and the social-spiritual infrastructure of Britain is Christianity. This is the source of our liberalism as well as our conservatism. It is because of Christianity that we developed the rule of law, and the equality of everyone under it, and the protections we have traditionally enjoyed for free speech and against unlawful arrest. It is because of Christianity that we developed democracy, and indeed secularism itself (the principle that we need some non-religious rules to manage civic life during the ‘saeculum’, the time of waiting before Christ returns).

Christianity is perfectly suited to the British way of life. Deobandi Islam is not. Most British Muslims simply want an ordinary life without a political or religious mission. Many are proud to be British. But many are not, and their leadership is frequently explicitly hostile to Britain and the West. Add to this the endemic clan structure of Pakistani communities here - the deep persistence of familial and economic ties to the mother country - and the alternative legal system, the sharia, that governs property and marriage. We have a parallel social system in Britain, involving millions of British citizens, that is incompatible with the traditions as well as the future security and well-being of the country.

The three options facing Britain are: continued turning-a-blind-eye to the growing segregation of our communities, to the point where Deobandi activists can plausibly claim swathes of Britain as part of the Dar al-Islam; the forced expulsion of millions of British citizens, many born here and, albeit they live a life apart, knowing no other country; or deliberate acculturation of immigrant communities - the reestablishment of a common creed to which all citizens are expected to sign up.

We cannot continue to turn a blind eye to what is happening to Britain. We can and should expel illegal immigrants and foreign national criminals, and we can encourage the remigration of people who contribute nothing to Britain and would be better off if they returned to their mother country; but we cannot forcibly remove millions of law-abiding British citizens. The principal means of overcoming our divided society must be the third option: deliberate acculturation.

We urgently need to restore a singular national identity to which all citizens subscribe, and to which all secondary identities of religion and national origin submit. We need a deliberate strategy of compulsory integration, by which the formal belonging of citizenship is conditional on the actual belonging of being British.

This strategy will be comprehensive and complex, with a major emphasis on the means of local integration: councils taking steps to stop the proliferation of mosques and end segregation in housing and public services, and civil society (including churches, and the mosques that do not follow the doctrine of separation and jihad) playing a leading role in building a genuinely inclusive local society.

But the strategy of acculturation also requires action from above, for Church and State to set the culture and to fix the law. The Church of England’s mission should be - as it once was - to maintain the parish system and use it as a platform for the promotion of Christianity in every community. And the state’s mission should be to exhort and indeed enforce loyalty to itself - to the United Kingdom, and to the legal settlement that defines our country. This includes: the singular judicial systems of the nations of the UK, with no role for sharia; the equality of the sexes, with no subordinate status for women and a legal framework for marriage that treats husbands and wives the same; the illegitimacy of extremism, with no platforms for the preachers of sedition, violence and antisemitism; and the legitimacy of apostasy, with no punishment or blame attaching to people who leave their inherited religion for another, or indeed for atheism.

The state also has a responsibility to defend the integrity of our voting system - reinforcing the principle that we are one nation, speaking a common language, taking part together in one electoral system - a system built on the principle of individual voting and the secret ballot. That means eliminating non-citizen voting (2.5 million Commonwealth citizens are entitled to vote in British elections), insisting all election materials be published in native British languages, restricting postal voting and cracking down on coercive ‘family voting’.¹⁷

Footnotes
^1. Review into the Organisation, Performance and Transformation of the Permanent Civil Service (Gov.uk, 2026)

^2. Cabinet Secretary Objectives 2026-27 (Gov.uk)

^3. Fixing the Centre (Reform UK); Storm and Sunshine (Reform UK); Restoring Government (Reform UK)

^4. Home Office staff threaten to strike over Rwanda deportation policy (Daily Telegraph)

^5. Making Welfare Work (Reform UK)

^6. Affordable Social Housing for Working Britain (Reform UK)

^7. The Britannia Card (Reform UK)

^8. Britain and AI: the Patriotic Compact (Danny Kruger)

^9. Papal Encyclical on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Pope Leo XIV)

^10. Reform's Equal Treatment Act (Reform UK)

^11. Keeping Criminals Behind Bars (Reform UK)

^12. Speech at Spectator's National Security Summit (Danny Kruger)

^13. Operation Fortress (Reform UK)

^14. Operation Restoring Justice (Reform UK)

^15. Stop The Boriswave: The cost of Boris Johnson's immigration policies to every British household (Reform UK)

^16. Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending June 2024 - Estimates (ONS)

^17. Elections Integrity Bill (Reform UK)

1. The reality we face

2. What we believe

3. Our programme for government (published tomorrow)

What we believe: Family; Community; Country.

Family

The purpose of politics is to create the conditions for people to succeed - to flourish in an objective sense, and to have the freedom to pursue one’s subjective idea of the good life. The essential conditions of success are families, communities, and the country itself. When these things are strong, society as a whole will be prosperous and secure, and people will flourish and be free.

The foundation of society is the family. This little network of people, related by blood and love, offers emotional and material protection to the young, the elderly and the vulnerable. It is the principal system by which individuals pool their assets and abilities and meet each other’s needs. It is the essential source of the skills and resilience a child will need in adulthood; what we learn from our families is largely what makes us, for good or ill. And for most adults it is the purpose of living: we get out of bed in the morning because our family needs us to, and because we want to see them thrive.

Not everyone lives with their family; certainly not everyone comes from a ‘traditional’ family headed by married parents; and for many people the experience of family life is one of abuse, neglect, conflict or plain unhappiness. The right to leave home or your partner is as foundational to society as family itself. And yet a society that disregards family formation or disparages the normative concepts of family life - mother, father; husband, wife; boy, girl - is a society that will see families fall apart, and ultimately fall apart itself.

This is happening. The culture, and politics, and the economy, disregard the habits and expectations that support family life, and so individuals - being creatures of culture, and responsive to incentives - do so too. The culture adapts further to accommodate the challenges that arise, to mitigate and validate them; and so the downward spiral continues. The family, as a form of living, is dying out. Over half of all teenagers don’t live with both their parents. For every three children wanted by women, only two are born. Half of all women aged 25-35 say they do not want to have children at all.¹

Politics cannot be neutral about families. Government policies - on tax and benefits, education, housing, employment, the NHS and social care - directly affect the decisions people make about when and whether to get married or have children, where to live, how to look after their elderly parents, whether and where to work or study. Too many policies currently militate against marriage, children, work, caring for elderly or vulnerable adults, and living near one’s relatives - despite clear evidence that most people want policies that make these things easier.²

We believe it is right for the government to care about family formation and stability, and to enact policies that strengthen couple relationships and help people to look after those who depend on them.

In a phrase, we believe we should optimise for the normative: that is, direct policy towards helping people to build the sort of family life that most people want.

This is not only the best means of ensuring the personal wellbeing of people in ‘normative’ families, and of encouraging more people into this happy state. It will help everyone more substantially, including those who, by choice or accident, don’t follow the normative model. A society that has more stable families is a better society for everyone. It is also the only possible means of realising a smaller state, with lower taxes and less welfare spending. The alternative is a large, expensive, interventionist government acting as an impersonal, inefficient, surrogate family for millions of people who should be looked after by the people who love them.

Community

The problems that affect 21st century society are complex and interconnected. They include widespread chronic illness, both physical and, increasingly, mental; generational unemployment, exacerbated by low skills, low wages and unconditional welfare; solitude among older people and loneliness at all ages; the effective segregation of large cultural and religious minorities; inadequate housing and poor housing standards; and widespread incivility and disrespect for the law, making neighbourhood life unpleasant and often dangerous.

These problems are not simply the result of inadequate access to healthcare, education or unemployment support - the things the welfare state was set up to provide. They are not solely personal circumstances that can be alleviated by government action and taxpayers’ money. They are social and economic problems, and they require social and economic solutions. That means communities themselves, not remote state agencies, taking a leading role in the renewal of local neighbourhoods and the support of families; and it means an economic strategy that creates good, well-paid jobs in the places where people live.

We believe the government should fulfil its proper responsibilities to local places, principally the responsibility of enforcing law and order. Crime is intolerable to a civilised society. Criminals prey on the weak - the elderly, the poor, vulnerable young people - and they make local communities less livable and less prosperous. The government is the only agency with the legitimate use of physical force, and it has an absolute imperative to use that power to make the streets safe for law-abiding people. It should do this without apology and with maximum force, including many more police, much more punishment, and direct action to destroy the (often international) organised gangs that are upstream of local crime.

Beyond this principal responsibility of the state, we believe the government should facilitate the fullest possible degree of local freedom and responsibility so that communities themselves, in all their forms, can create the conditions for their own success.

We believe the government should - through radical action to cut energy bills and reduce taxes and red tape - make life more affordable for businesses and workers. We want a more local, more sustainable economy that revives market towns and coastal communities, and makes places far from London viable centres for professionals and businesspeople to live and work. Our cities need far more ambition to become, as they once were, proud centres of regional economies. Our high streets need beauty, and vitality, and purpose.

When it comes to tackling those entrenched, interconnected social problems - ill-health, unemployment, poor housing and social separation - the answer is not more national programmes and state agencies. The answer is more local responsibility and agency; more neighbourliness; more recognition by people with resources of their own - time, money, expertise - that they have a role to play in the renewal of their communities. The state will continue to fund a social welfare safety net and to set the rules for standards and entitlements, but far more can and should be done by communities themselves.³ That includes supporting people who cause trouble and cost to wider society, including ex-offenders and unemployed benefit claimants, who need opportunity, sympathy, and a firm message that the ultimate responsibility for their lives rests with them.

Country

A government that supports families and communities with the freedom and the means to thrive - that helps people fulfil their proper responsibilities to the people closest to them - is a government that is able to focus on its own proper responsibility: the security and prosperity of the country as a whole.

The nation state is the ultimate object of political loyalty for individuals and the only legitimate source of power over them. We live in a community of nations and we have special friendships with our former colonies and with our neighbours in Europe. The treaty Edward III signed with Portugal in 1373 is still in force today. But no international alliance, treaty or convention - including the system called ‘international law’ - has supremacy over the government and laws of the United Kingdom.

‘International law’ exists in the form of treaty arrangements between sovereign states. It has no comparable standing to the internal laws of nations because it represents no state or authority itself.

We believe sovereignty rests with ‘the Crown in Parliament’, meaning the King’s ministers, the government, working through the Houses of Commons and Lords.

We believe the responsibility of the British state is not to international law, nor to humanity in general, but to the people of the United Kingdom. We call this ‘national preference’: an unapologetic bias in favour of the citizens of our own country.

National preference means an absolute obligation to secure the perimeter of the nation, guarding the border against people who would break into Britain without permission. It means having Armed Forces capable of defending our national territory and our national interests at home and abroad.

It means an economic strategy that enables the prosperity which only flows from free enterprise, and that also guarantees the supply of food, energy and industrial essentials like steel. Given the state of the world, much more of these things must be produced at home rather than imported. Energy, in particular, should be maximally home-grown. The means to energy independence, however, is not the chimera of renewables but the reality of the fossil fuel treasure buried under our feet and in our waters. The pursuit of Net Zero carbon emissions - an explicitly anti-national preference, a commitment made at Britain’s expense on behalf of the whole world - has made us critically vulnerable to hostile or accidental adversity; it is a policy perfectly designed to weaken the United Kingdom from within.

Perhaps most of all, national preference means a commitment to the way of life of the majority. The descendants of the people who made our country over the centuries before us have a right to expect the country to uphold their ancestors’ traditions. These traditions include a strong belief in freedom, in ‘live and let live’ and in the rights of minorities. But a society is normative or it is nothing. Either it has a sense of ‘we’, an understanding of itself as a community with common memories, attitudes, rituals and habits, or it ceases to exist.

A communal, normative understanding of the nation cannot be enforced by the state. But it can be honoured and privileged by the state and by the institutions that regulate the national culture. The Church of England should remain privileged in our constitution; our heroes like Nelson or Churchill should be privileged in the history curriculum; and our popular traditions (pub and football club, Remembrance Day and Christmas, royal weddings and bonfire night) should be privileged in the media, the calendar, and the parish notice-board. These things are the property of all of us. They bind us together and they give newcomers something to accommodate to - something to join.

The institutional foundation of the nations of the British Isles is the Christian church. Of the four nations only England has an established church today, and this provides a strong cohesive force from above and below - from the monarchy to the parish - which helps to hold society together. But established or not, Christianity is the cultural technology that created our institutions and our worldview. The absolute value and equal dignity of all people, and the commitment by the state to serve something greater (God) and something smaller than itself (every citizen), derive only from the Bible. Christianity gives us a particular culture, an idea that ‘we’ collectively (if often only nominally) subscribe to. And because its core principles include freedom of belief and respect for the stranger, it also enables a high degree of religious pluralism. Other religions, if they remain minorities, are easily tolerated within the normative culture of a Christian country.

Final part out tomorrow: Our Programme for Government

Footnotes

^1. The Birth Gap (Whitestone Insight)

^2. Why Family Matters (Centre for Social Justice)

^3. The Strong Society (Danny Kruger, Adam Smith Institute)

1. The reality we face

2. What we believe

3. Our programme for government

The reality we face: Britain is great; Britain is broken; The state has failed.

Britain is great

Britain has the greatest history, and could have the greatest future, of any country in the world. England is the oldest national community in the West, with its origins in Bede’s recognition of the gens Anglorum, the English people, in the early 8th century and then political unification under King Aethelstan, the first rex Anglorum, in the 10th century. The United Kingdom, which extended the English model of government over the rest of the British Isles while upholding the distinction of its four member nations, has been the most successful political union in world history.

For over a thousand years our institutions have developed a unique mix of authority and consent, of national unity and personal liberty. We have built a country that is held together by a strong central state while the law protects individual conscience, freedom, and the rights of property. The result has been independence and comparative peace (albeit not in Ireland) and a remarkable record of invention, prosperity, and global influence.

This past could be reflected in the future. Britain is perfectly placed to prosper in the 21st century. In an age of insecurity and rapid change, our geography, our language, our global relationships, our economic model, and most of all our institutions, our national culture and the character of our people mean that we are uniquely fitted to ride out the challenges, and seize the opportunities, of our time. Tech, for all its disrupting effects and apocalyptic possibilities, offers enormous benefits in which the UK has the potential to lead the world. We should be very hopeful about the coming years.

Britain is broken

And yet, across the entire range of our national life, we are failing to live up to our past or the promise of our future. Britain is broken.

Our economy is stagnant. Wages have flat-lined for nearly 20 years, while the only people who have prospered are the already-wealthy holders of assets. Productivity growth has stalled. We are failing to innovate. We have the highest electricity prices in the developed world, driven in part by the pursuit of green energy solutions that are simply unaffordable; in consequence our manufacturing sectors have been almost destroyed. We have a planning system that means we can’t build the infrastructure we need to grow the economy; in the last 25 years no new reservoir, nuclear power station, runway or motorway has been built in Britain. Large parts of the country are poorer than the former Communist bloc. Even the City of London is in decline: the London Stock Exchange has lost a third of its listings in the last 10 years. Foreign investment is at a historic low. People with assets and skills are leaving the country; more than a quarter of all young people are considering emigration.¹

Society is in crisis. Families are falling apart, or not being formed in the first place. Three antidepressant prescriptions are issued per second in England - over 90 million per year, for a population of 60 million.² Welfare takes more of our national wealth than the Armed Forces, the police and schools combined; every penny of Income Tax revenue goes to paying people not to work. Crime is endemic in many neighbourhoods, with flagrant breaches of the law common everywhere, including the systematic abuse of vulnerable girls by gangs of rapists.

Our economic and social poverty is reflected in the state of our national security. Our Armed Forces are their weakest, relative to our allies and our enemies, since the modern era began. At a time of extreme danger in Europe and globally, we are chronically exposed to attack, and have very little ability to project force abroad by land, sea or air.

And yet our most dangerous weakness is within. Our country is deeply divided, not least because of the unprecedented rate of immigration over the last 25 years. Many immigrants bring valuable skills and indeed attitudes - respect for the elderly, a strong work ethic, a powerful love for Britain - which are a blessing to our country. But many don’t. And the plain fact is the numbers are way, way too high. Leave aside the hundreds of thousands of people, including terrorists and criminals, who have entered our country illegally in small boat crossings of the English Channel. Between 2000 and 2020, 12 million people came, legally, to live in the UK from abroad. Since 2020, the immigration policy of Boris Johnson and his successors has brought in four million more people - less than a fifth of them with work visas. All in all, legal migration since the turn of the century has brought a population to this country equivalent to 14 new Birminghams.

The result of the immigration scandal is not merely unsustainable pressure on housing and public services. Whole towns and cities have been transformed utterly, taken over by immigrant communities living entirely separate lives from mainstream British society.

We are threatened with the cultural extinction of Britain as a distinct European civilisation. This is most directly the consequence of immigration. But more profoundly it is the consequence of a loss of confidence in the country, and its inheritance, by its own elite.

The state has failed

The British people are not broken. Britain is: its institutions, its economy, its society. And the reason Britain is broken isn’t the fault of the British people. It’s the fault of successive British governments, and the cultural elite that produces and advises them.

Excessive public borrowing; money-printing; record welfare spending; importing cheap labour from overseas rather than investing in the skills of British workers; failing to seize the opportunities of Brexit; suicidal Net Zero policies apparently designed to destroy British industry; relying on hostile foreign states for critical national supplies; chronic regulatory growth, EU alignment and ever-rising taxes - these are the economic policies pursued by Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative ministers from 1997 to 2026.

Centralisation; bureaucracy; disempowerment of front-line professionals and local leaders; unconditional, unsustainable welfare entitlement; ignorance of the private sector and the contribution it can make to the public good; indifference or active hostility to traditional families; squeamishness and apology for British culture and history; failing to build enough houses; the pursuit of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ rather than high-quality services and fairness for citizens; distrust of citizens themselves, who are treated as passive recipients of state generosity rather than as capable adults responsible for their own lives - these are the social policies pursued by ministers from 1997 to 2026.

These economic and social policy failures reflect a deeper failure of governance. Fake ‘progress’ - the imaginary promotion of rights at the expense of real improvement in services and standards of living - has left the country badly unmodernised.

Most of all the state has abdicated its essential responsibilities - to protect the nation, to govern on behalf of the people, and to account for its decisions to Parliament.

After the Cold War, and even after 9/11 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, the delusions of perpetual peace sustained by international law and the ‘rules-based order’ resulted in the hollowing out of our Armed Forces.

Indeed in the hands of British officials and lawyers the ‘rules’ actively conspire against Britain. In compliance with what it regards as international legal obligations the government is permitting the relentless legal pursuit of former British soldiers for actions in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq - actions undertaken within the Rules of Engagement, on operations ordered by the British government.

The current government is actively seeking to surrender the Chagos Islands, sovereign British territory and a vital security asset in the Indian Ocean, to another state, and paying them for the privilege; a sharp echo of the more protracted betrayal of Northern Ireland, effectively given to the EU by Britain as the price of the Brexit deal.

And most absurdly of all, the government is permitting tens of thousands of illegal immigrants each year to sail through our waters on rubber dinghies and to land on our beaches, accommodating them at public expense and then, in the vast majority of cases, permitting them to live and work in the UK for the rest of their lives.

It is said that the best way to understand the behaviour of a dysfunctional organisation is to imagine it has been taken over by a cabal of its enemies. How has this happened to the United Kingdom? More precisely, what are the personal and institutional forces driving these acts of national stupidity and self-harm - what we might call treason by the state against itself - none of which are supported by the voting public?

The explanation is that for the last 30 years the state has been in thrall to a civil service and a judiciary that claim to serve a higher authority than the elected government and the laws passed in Parliament. This higher authority is variously called ‘the rule of law’ (interpreted as including the vagaries of international law), ‘the constitution’, ‘the Crown’, or even (as in the case of the Supreme Court cases to stop Brexit in 2017 and 2019) ‘Parliament’ itself; high-sounding terms that do indeed describe the ultimate sovereignty of the British state, but are here twisted and abused to empower unelected officials at the expense of the public and the politicians who represent them.

More prosaically, a ring of public bodies, quangos and regulators now surrounds the government, taking key state functions - from industrial and environmental policy to financial regulation, policing and the management of schools and the NHS - ‘out of politics’ and thus out of democratic control. These bodies derive their authority and funding from government but owe no obedience to ministers or accountability to Parliament. They are therefore free to pursue ideological agendas without reference to public opinion and without the ordinary process of political decision-making, accountable to voters, that reconciles competing ideas and interests.

These failures represent a crisis of power. The proper agency of the public, the Crown in Parliament, has given up its authority and its responsibility to quangos, expert bodies and the courts of international law, while neglecting its most essential duties to police our borders and maintain national defences.

Beneath the crisis of power is a crisis of culture. The British governing elite no longer believes in Britain, in its inherited institutions or the assumptions that have regulated our common life over the centuries. The critical failure of recent governments has been the failure to stand up for Britain and to prefer the British people over the people of other countries.

The crisis of power and the crisis of culture have produced a crisis of legitimacy. The government’s abdication of its responsibility and its disrespect to the British people are poisoning the source of our politics: popular consent. The powers artificially separated by the Blair administration - government, Parliament, the courts - have each lost the respect of the public. Other national institutions, including the monarchy, the Church of England, the NHS and the BBC, are weakened, vulnerable to scandals of their own making and prompting critics to question their value and their future.

A Reform UK government seeks to resolve the crises of power, culture and legitimacy. We want ministers, not remote quangos and courts, to run the state and to be accountable to Parliament. We want the governing elite to believe in Britain, to prefer its citizens to those of other countries, to guard its borders and to stand by its Armed Forces. Most fundamentally, we want our institutions to deserve public trust.

To resolve these crises and restore public trust we need a set of beliefs, an idea of what matters most; we need a vision to aim for. For Reform UK what matters most are families, communities, and the country itself. Our vision is a future where these things are strong.

Part 2 out tomorrow: What We Believe


Footnotes

^1. New Polling Shows 1 In 4 Young Brits Could Leave (Adam Smith Institute)

^2. Antidepressant Prescriptions in England Surge to Record High (YuLife)

Race, religion, sexuality and sexual identity are highly contentious issues. Insofar as the government has any business in these areas the right people to decide on them are ministers, answerable to the Prime Minister and accountable through Parliament to voters. Yet the Civil Service has established a whole range of bodies or ‘Staff Networks’ whose function is to support political causes in these and other areas.

This activity is not as overt as it once was. We have passed ‘peak woke’. In 2017 the Civil Service Race Forum published a Strategy paper pledging to bring about ‘the increase of BAME representation’ in the Senior Civil Service and to tackle ‘institutional racism’ in Whitehall; it stated that ‘Critical Race Theory’ was a ‘core element’ of this project.¹ In 2020 (the ‘Civil Service Year of Inclusion’) the Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education aspired for Whitehall to be ‘the most LGB&TI-inclusive employer in the UK’ and ‘salute[d] the courage’ of the Civil Service LGBT+ Network for their campaigning for trans rights.²

Public statements like these are not so common now. As recently as 2024, however, the Civil Service Muslim Network was hosting events at which speakers encouraged officials to ‘lobby’ ministers to change the Government’s policy towards Gaza.³

It is plain that the institutional culture of Whitehall remains strongly left-wing. Its leader, the all-powerful Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo, sees DEI initiatives as ‘absolutely crucial’.⁴ She was formerly the Civil Service’s ‘Gender Inclusion Champion’, and made staff join ‘non-binary book clubs’.⁵ Such views are required for anyone wanting to be recruited and promoted in Whitehall: the ‘Success Profiles’ used to guide careers include a set of Civil Service ‘behaviours’ that include the expectation to ‘value difference, diversity and inclusion’.⁶ And political activity in a Staff Network can be counted as a ‘corporate contribution’, leading to bigger bonuses.⁷

Condoned activism in Whitehall is a major contributor to the loss of trust by the public in its government. It also carries an enormous financial cost to the taxpayer, calculated by Reform UK to be over £200 million per year.

This includes £24.1m spent on 2,115 officials who act as chairs of Staff Networks.⁸ This position allows them and select other lead members to claim up to twenty percent of their time (one full day every week) on maintaining their networks. That means scheduling gatherings, writing newsletters, drafting opinion pieces, and influencing seniors and ministers.

Ordinary Staff Network members add to the bill by another £12.2 million through their official allowance of up to 177.6 hours of working time to be spent on ‘network activity’ a year.⁹

Then there are all the other civil servants who are targeted by networks and encouraged to attend their events and complete their ‘training’. Assuming only half of civil servants use only a single hour to attend network events a month, an additional £108.9 million is lost.¹⁰

Forcing all 550,000 civil servants through just two hours of mandatory DEI training a year costs another £36.3 million in lost productivity annually.¹¹

Finally, the Civil Service employs 767 full-time employees in roles that are focused solely on the pursuit of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), costing the taxpayer another £37.7 million every year.¹²

In total, the taxpayer spends over £200m a year on civil servants either running political ‘Staff Networks’, attending them, or working full time on political causes. To put this in perspective, the same number could fund the salaries of almost 7,000 newly qualified nurses or Border Force officers.¹³

The combined cost and obvious political influence of political activists and union reps make the current situation a textbook case of institutional capture. Labour and the Civil Service are working together to abandon the principle of neutrality laid out in the Armstrong Memorandum. Reform UK will not tolerate a guerrilla government run by activist officials and financially drained by taxpayer-funded union officials.

Under a Reform UK government, all Staff Networks will require permission from the Department of the Civil Service (DCS) to operate, with strict guidelines on what they can and cannot do. All networks must be strictly non-political and adhere to the principles of the Armstrong Memorandum. For example, religious networks will be generally permissible but only to discuss matters of faith. Discussing political questions, let alone strategies to apply ‘pressure’ on the government such as the Civil Service Muslim Network did, will lead to an immediate ban. Meetings must also always take place outside of working hours.

Civil servants are servants of the Crown and therefore rightfully subject to strict limitations on their political activities. Reform UK will further strengthen the Civil Service Management Code to ban civil servants from holding official positions in political parties, or in any other organisation or campaign group dedicated to a particular political or policy agenda which places their impartiality in doubt.

The British people pay for efficient public services, not progressive indoctrination or partisan guerrilla tactics within Whitehall. Dismantling the £200 million activist industrial complex alongside taxpayer-funded union subsidies will be key elements of Reform’s plan to end institutional capture. We seek to reinstate strict political neutrality, bring back real ministerial accountability, and ensure civil servants are clear who they ultimately serve: you, the British people.

Footnotes
^1. https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2017/03/CSRF-Strategy-2016-17.pdf

^2. https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/2020/03/31/transgender-day-of-visibility/

^3. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/civil-servants-antisemitism-muslim-network-rxnvd9prt

^4. https://www.civilserviceworld.com/in-depth/article/on-purpose-moj-perm-sec-antonia-romeo-on-leadership

^5. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/20/starmer-cabinet-secretary-staff-join-non-binary-book-club/

^6. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/success-profiles/success-profiles-civil-service-behaviours

^7. For the Senior Civil Service, this is mandated through the public Performance Management Framework. For junior civil servants, this is decentralised to departments but follows similar standards.

^8. Assuming an average of 5 networks per government body across 423 bodies = 2,115 Chairs; a time loss of 20% of a working year = 350 hours; and a cost of £32.53 per civil servant per hour. 2,115 x 350 hours x £32.53 = £24.1m.

^9. There are no official records of Staff Network membership. We therefore assume the official maximum allowance is used in full once per network per year. 2,115 x 177.6 hours x £32.53 = £12.2m.

^10. There are 557,825 civil servants overall. If half of them spend a single hour a month engaging with Staff Networks the cost is: (557,825/2) x 12 hours x £32.53 = £108.9m.

^11. 557,825 x 2 hours x £32.53 = £31.9m.

^12. 380 FTE roles with a sole focus on EDI; 184 FTE roles in the Office for Equality and Opportunity; 203 roles in the Equality and Human Rights Commission. 767 FTE roles in total at a median total cost per civil servant of £49,166. 767 FTE staff x £49,166 = £37.7m.

^13. At an average starting salary of £30,000.

Following the enactment of the Employment Rights Act 2025 in February 2026, the previous statutory framework protecting the taxpayer from union overreach has been dismantled. Ministers have been stripped of their powers to cap taxpayer-funded ‘facility time’ - union activity performed within paid hours - and government departments are also no longer legally mandated to publish the cost or even the number of union representatives. Labour and the public sector unions have worked hand-in-glove to introduce a data blackout, hiding the financial cost of full-time union activists from public scrutiny.

All of this is thanks to the new ‘Civil Service Facility Time Framework’, which removed previous mandatory annual publication of headcounts, total working hours, and exact financial costs in their entirety, meaning there is no longer a legal requirement for departments to track or centrally report data. In addition, financial spending caps, which previously allowed Ministers to impose strict caps on keeping union spending at under 0.1% of the pay bill, have been eliminated entirely, with that threshold downgraded to a ‘suggested guideline’.¹

Furthermore, staff leave for trade union activities, such as attending annual conferences, executing internal elections, or attending National Executive Committee meetings, which used to be unpaid or strictly discretionary, is now fully paid and funded directly via departmental operational budgets. The Cabinet Office has even been tasked with actively encouraging departments to provide this funding.² With special leave normally subject to extremely high bars, Labour have effectively created an exception for the sole advantage of their union benefactors.

The Government has also scrapped the obligation on unions to cover the administrative cost of collecting membership fees through the civil service payroll; the cost of collecting unions’ income is now met by the taxpayer too.³

Even the technical benchmark that a union representative must spend at least fifty percent of their hours on their actual civil service role is now a mockery. Labour has empowered individual HR departments to sign their own agreements with unions to override this rule, completely bypassing ministerial approval and thus eroding democratic accountability further.⁴ This framework is set to expand even further in October 2026, extending paid time off to union ‘Equality Representatives’ and mandating direct access for unions to Civil Service intranets.⁵

Because of this deliberate cover-up, the true financial cost of trade union activism in Whitehall is now obscured. The final validated dataset from 2024/25, however, gives us a good idea. Across thirty-eight surveyed departments, taxpayers paid £13.8 million for union facility time.⁶

The dataset shows that the Ministry of Justice alone managed to burn through £3.3 million to fund 647 representatives taking time off for union activities. The Department for Work and Pensions funded 1,014 representatives at a cost of close to £1m. HMRC funded 776 representatives and spent £2.3 million. 26 employees of the Scottish Prison Service perform absolutely zero civil service work.

In all, it appears that the taxpayer funds the equivalent of 278 full-time staff who are completely removed from public service, translating into 535,000 paid working hours lost every single year to union business.

Reform UK will scrap ‘facility time’ for trade union members in the Civil Service. Government officials should not use their paid working hours to plan campaigns to strengthen their own pay and conditions or attend events that have nothing to do with delivering for the country.

Where other public bodies maintain facility time we will also introduce a strengthened transparency mandate and legislation to ensure that every public sector body contributes to a real-time, searchable online database of all union facility time, including the exact hours lost and the financial cost to the taxpayer.

Taxpayers deserve a machinery of government focused entirely on delivering efficient public services, not bankrolling union campaigns. By ending these stealth subsidies and enforcing real transparency, Reform UK will ensure that every hour of every civil servant’s work day is spent serving the British people.

Look out for tomorrow’s post, where I will discuss the £200m activist industrial complex of ‘Staff Networks’ operating within the Civil Service.


Footnotes
^1. https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/civil-service-union-reps-secure-radical-facility-time-boosts

^2. https://mypcs.pcs.org.uk/s/article/Civil-Service-Facility-Time-Framework-and-Guidance---April-2026

^3. Section 116B of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 was repealed under the Employment Rights Act 2025, removing the legal requirement for public sector employers to charge trade unions for administering payroll deductions (‘check-off’).

^4. https://www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/news/improved-cabinet-office-guidance-time-union-reps-secured

^5. As per Sections 59 and 65 of the Employment Rights Act 2025.

^6. The financial figures from the final 2024/25 Cabinet Office dataset released before the transparency blackout show that across 38 surveyed Civil Service departments, the cost of facility time was recorded at £13.75m.

Reality is happening

Let’s start with what’s been happening in the last few months.

On 7 April Anthropic announced it had developed a model - Claude Mythos Preview - which could threaten cybersecurity defences in every major operating system and web browser in the world. Instead of launching the model to the public, the company instead launched Project Glasswing, a collaboration with the US government and with other firms to test vulnerabilities ahead of Mythos-class models eventually being released.

The day after this news broke I wrote to the British government urging them to seek to join Project Glasswing, and to engage with Anthropic to defend British institutions from cyber attack.

It only took two and a half months but I got a reply to my letter from the government last week. It basically said it’s all in hand - and that the UK’s AI Security Institute was working closely with Anthropic. That’s encouraging - and I do state here my appreciation of the vital work that the AISI does.

The problem is that the very next day after the letter they sent me, on Friday last week, it was completely overtaken by events. OpenAI announced the staggered release of its latest model, GPT-5.6, which they say is even more powerful for cybersecurity. Only a limited number of trusted US partners have access, and there is no sign that any of them are British.

And in the past 24 hours, Anthropic finally released a ‘Mythos class’ model, Mythos 5, for wider cybersecurity use - but only for select American partners, not for Brits.

What does this story tell us about AI - and about Britain’s place in the world of AI?

It tells us, tragically, that we in this country are irrelevant to the big decisions about AI. It tells us we have extreme vulnerability to the whims of the US government and of big tech. It tells us that America puts America first.

It also tells us - see that two and half month delay to turn around a ministerial letter, and the immediate redundancy of the response - that Whitehall is broken.

And yet where we have something to offer, something that is useful to the US - in this case AISI - things are different.

And so the lesson is this.

We need to be relevant. We need to bring something to the table.

And we need to build an AI industry ourselves.

Framing the issue

As Reform UK prepares for government, what actions do we need to plan to ensure that Britain will be safe, and prosperous, in this new age?

I want to start by framing the issue correctly, as I see it. AI is not a new industrial sector, or a new tool, or even a new technology. It is all of these, but these definitions miss the scale of what AI represents.

AI is properly seen as a profound change in the conditions of national life.

Industrial policy usually asks: which sector should we back, which region should we help, which firm might grow? And there are many promising technologies we should continue to nurture: quantum, fusion, space, biotechnology, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing. Britain has research strengths, capable companies and real opportunities in all of them.

But AI is a bigger question.

AI is not a sector. It is a change in the conditions of national life.

It will shape the boardroom and the battlefield. The classroom and the hospital ward. Fraud, crime, policing and justice. Scientific discovery. The media we consume, the elections we contest, and the way power is distributed between citizens, companies and countries.

AI policy therefore asks a deeper question: who controls the tools by which decisions are made? Who has the power to discover, simulate, design, persuade, automate and defend?

That is why AI is becoming regulated infrastructure. It is closer to electricity, media, transport and defence than to an ordinary growth industry; and it is arguably more significant than any of them.

Even defence is increasingly a subset of AI. The Defence Investment Plan published yesterday was typical of the British government: too little, too late, the rhetoric outstripping the reality.

And that is why dependency is so dangerous.

Whatever one thinks of the US Government’s recent actions, the lesson for Britain is plain. Access to compute and intelligence is not a neutral commercial matter. It is a question of sovereignty, security and leverage.

The dangers we face

In the years ahead, access to advanced AI may become a critical bottleneck in the competitiveness of our firms and industries. More than that, without access to good AI, it will become much harder for our companies, hospitals, utilities and public bodies to defend themselves against the cyberattacks they face every day.

Even assuming we can mitigate the security risks of AI, however; even if we can attain AI sovereignty (in some measure, and however defined); even then profound challenges remain for how to navigate the new world.

The most immediate effect - already upon us, already well-known to any recent graduate - is the disruption of the white-collar labour market. AI is creating big profits and massive capital concentration at the expense of the unit of production that used to be necessary to growth, namely human beings.

Britain is uniquely exposed to this crisis because of our reliance on services.

Meanwhile the inflationary effects of massive energy demand from data centres, and massive borrowing demand to fund their construction, could drive up interest rates catastrophically both for mortgaged households and for government debt.

More profoundly, AI could have the social and strategic effects of the printing press, nuclear energy, and the internet - all at the same time, concentrated into less than a decade.

Each of these had enormous benefits for humanity - but huge side-effects too. The printing press drove the Reformation and all its positive social consequences in terms of personal liberty, economic development and national sovereignty. But the Reformation prompted the Thirty Years War, devastating the continent.

Seeing the upheaval that printing threatened for an ordered society, Europe’s neighbour the Ottoman Empire took a different approach: they banned it. That didn’t work out well for the Ottomans. They permanently and ultimately lost the race of civilisation, and declined and declined till they were finally snuffed out in 1918.

Our challenge is to avoid the fate of the Ottomans, but to avoid the Thirty Years War as well. Because our Thirty Years War may be a lot shorter, and a lot more terminal.

If we get AI and AI regulation wrong the catastrophes are almost unthinkable - but we must think about them.

It is going to become quite easy to get instructions from AI to assemble weapons including bombs and chemical weapons. Only slightly more sophisticated actors may be able to create pathogens. A positive initiative from AI leaders pledging to screen any work they do on viruses and DNA to prevent the next manmade pandemic, is welcome - but shows the danger we are in.

It is a great thing that the leaders of AI are mostly pro-Western, and that they have an idea of the human being and human society as things worth defending. Being human themselves, they are social animals - which is to say they cluster around common ideas and values, and feel the need, as in that letter about pathogens, to signal their commitment to these values.

The great danger is recursive self-improvement as AI agents create new AIs which do not have these human checks, which are not constrained by a common moral framework and an urge to cluster around pro-social norms.

The opportunities

Before we rush to imagine a means of regulating AI, however, let us consider the upside.

The immense opportunities of AI to transform healthcare and medicine are well known. But at a more prosaic level we should see great benefits in the simple administration of life.

I am responsible for helping Reform UK prepare for government - to ensure that when we win the next election we can deliver a British state that actually works. As Public First have suggested, there are tens of billions of pounds of savings to be made by automating clerical functions in public bodies like HMRC and DWP, although humans should take the ultimate decisions on benefit entitlement or tax liability.

Whitehall cannot ask the country to embrace AI while running itself on email chains, PDFs and manual form-checking. Every Department should review its high-volume administrative processes and how AI could reduce cost, delay or error.

Procurement should target measurable productivity gains, not glossy pilots. Departments should be allowed to keep part of the savings they generate to give civil servants an incentive to adopt.

This would free up budgets to be returned to the public in tax cuts or diverted into investment - like defence - that we so badly need. Crucially, it would mean diverting human capital to the things humans are good at, and that give us meaning and purpose.

In government services that means the work of dealing with citizens directly, helping people and places to prosper.

And in the private sector, it means realising the huge growth opportunities not just in the exciting new areas of technology and what Dan Wang calls the ‘sounding-clever industries’ like finance, media and the law - but in the everyday economy where the job growth is going to come from.

Britain’s productivity problem is the long tail of SMEs, where management capacity is thin and digital adoption has always lagged. The OECD describes technology adoption by SMEs as one of the main channels for boosting productivity growth in Britain.

AI must not become another advantage captured only by the already productive. It must be the tool that lets the small firm in Walsall, Swansea or Hartlepool compete with the big firm in London.

I am just old enough to remember what growth looked like. But anyone under 40 has lived their whole adult lives in a dismal economic reality of low growth, low wages, low productivity. Our divided and turbulent politics, it is obvious, is the consequence of twenty years of flatlining prosperity and the steady exclusion from the fruits of progress of everyone but the owners of capital.

AI offers a way out of this chronic malaise.

Not by magic, not without disruption, not by pretending every old job, credential and institution will remain untouched, but by giving every worker a new tool, every business a new capacity, every public service a new way to improve, and every young person a reason to believe Britain can shape the future, and give them a country worth staying in and believing in.

The road ahead

So let me outline where I think we could go; what Reform UK imagines as the future of AI policy in the UK.

Let’s start with the perhaps obvious point that what’s needed is action. The metaphysics of all this - the great cosmic questions about the future of humanity - are only going to be answered if we crack on and do something.

Will we make the difficult trade-offs required to act decisively?

Will we build the infrastructure, reform the state, protect working people, defend democracy, and give British enterprise the confidence to scale?

Or will we do what Britain has too often done: discover, admire, regulate, hesitate - and then watch the future be built somewhere else?

That’s the path it looks like continental Europe is taking. The brilliant and chilling story - part recent history, part prophecy - called Europe 2031 paints a bleak picture of what happens if you leave AI development to the US and China.

As this story mentions in passing, the UK has a chance to escape the doldrums and then the awful choice that Europe faces, forced to sell itself to one of the two superpowers.

Decisions we make in the next 2 or 3 years are going to set our trajectory, perhaps permanently. And the trajectory we need is the old-fashioned word, suddenly fashionable among the people who despised it when it was used in the Brexit debates: the word sovereignty.

We need to define the term, of course.

What it doesn’t mean is a massive dollop of state funding to create our own independent frontier models - our training LLMs - so we can cease our use of American tech.

The dominance of the US in AI is a fact for our lifetimes; at least I hope it is, because the alternative is the dominance of China.

We need to stay friends with America for no other reason than this: that we need their compute, in order to make use of their models.

But a friendship that is required for our survival isn’t a real friendship; it’s one-way dependence.

I said recently that when it comes to defence and national security we need to become indispensable to America: a necessary ally, with assets and relationships that help them defend themselves and so defend the West.

That applies to AI too. Our sovereignty need not be at the expense of our American friendship or American interests.

We need the dependence to flow both ways.

That means becoming as much of an AI superpower in our own right as we reasonably can.

British companies should be active and important participants up and down the AI “stack”. That means we need to be suppliers of chips and compute, in the form of data centres. It means we need to be users of AI models across the economy, so that we’re an important market for all frontier AI companies. And it means we need to be a leading participant in security assessments through AISI.

Office of Technology

The first thing is to ensure that government itself adapts to AI, and places AI policy properly at the heart of things.

As I have said, there are huge opportunities to make government better, from improving procurement to cutting headcount.

More generally, though, we need to make expediting AI capacity and adoption across the economy a priority for government.

That means a powerful Office for Technology at the heart of Whitehall, in the Office of the Prime Minister which we have announced will replace the Cabinet Office.

This Office will track a series of commitments including grid timetables, planning approvals and proper security frameworks. Not how many memoranda were signed. But how many megawatts were connected? How much compute came online? Which planning barriers were removed? Which communities were compensated? Which British firms gained access?

The Office will have the authority to unblock compute, grid, procurement and public-service deployment. We need named accountable owners. We need quarterly delivery reviews. We need public dashboards. We need serious technical talent in government.

Data centres

These commitments represent what a Reform government would prioritise.

We will mobilise British pension and institutional capital into British technology. We will offer compute access, procurement support, scale-up capital and strategic backing to firms willing to build substantial operations here.

The most immediate need is, of course, the data centres that enable AI.

We need to build our own compute, initially just for inference - to make use of models trained in the US - but one day for training too.

Data centres are the key industrial asset of the future and we need more of them - especially outside the South East and the Thames Corridor, in the places where they can drive growth and what used to be called levelling up.

To build data centres you need two things most of all - planning permission, and energy.

On planning permission, data centres should of course be built with community consent, and we must protect rural areas and our green spaces.

But to stimulate a wave of data centres we are looking at a series of options including allowing local areas to keep all or some of the business rates they generate. It’s worth noting that Loudoun County in Virginia has generated 45pc of local government tax revenue from data centres. This has transformed their finances and allowed wage rises, well-paved roads etc - all without additional demand on local services.

On energy, our policy is to maximise all sources of energy with technology that works today - yes to successful renewables, but also yes to more oil and gas, and yes to more nuclear.

We are also looking at allowing data centres to bid for quicker connection to the grid, for instance through higher connection fees or auctions, and allowing them to pay for upgrades to the grid that benefit everyone, and to build their own energy generators on site.

The Patriotic Compact

If Britain offers compute, procurement, capital, data access and strategic backing, then British founders should know that this country is serious about helping them grow.

We celebrate wealth creation. We need more of it, not less. We need more founders, more investors, more risk-taking, more technical ambition, more firms that scale from Britain into the world.

And we would expect something in return.

Let’s call it the Patriotic Compact.

For our part we will unblock growth. We will create the conditions in which capacity and adoption can rocket.

But it is also reasonable to ask for something in return: create jobs here, keep capability here, pay tax here; and a presumption against selling strategic assets before Britain has had a chance to benefit.

This country educates talent. It protects property. It enforces contracts. It funds science. It provides universities. It connects companies to allies. It gives enterprise the legal order in which it can flourish.

That does not justify crude protectionism, or state control, or crushing taxation to fund a reformed welfare state.

But it does mean loyalty.

If the taxpayer helps you scale, Britain should share in the upside. If national data helps you build, public value should return to the public. If British procurement validates you and brings you revenue, do not sell the whole future at the first foreign offer.

That’s the Patriotic Compact.

The directive state

As this suggests, we don’t believe in subsidising or controlling industry but we do believe in directing it in the national interest.

Like Mrs Thatcher - ‘we are not laissez faire’. Let me end with three ways in which a Reform government will be directive about AI.

First, in the preference for British firms - what we call national preference.

Let’s be clear - Palantir are delivering immense benefits to the NHS. They did it in Covid and even more now. They are saving lives.

But it’s instructive that we are relying on a US company, albeit one that employs a lot of people here in London, for this essential service.

The fact is there were no British firms in the shortlist for the NHS contract.

There are no British tech companies at any scale: no database companies (like Oracle), no OS companies (like Microsoft or Palantir), no Cloud companies (like Amazon), no frontier labs (like Anthropic).

So it isn’t just the NHS contract, it’s almost every single government IT contract - and every single U.K. corporate’s IT contract - that is American.

I’d rather buy from an ally like the US - but it’s deeply regrettable that we have no firms ourselves to make use of.

Changing that must be an absolute priority.

Labour market

The second way we need to be directive is in mitigating the impact of AI on labour. Reform UK is the party of white and blue collar workers.

We are seeing the emergence of a new labour market. The shift towards self-employment could be mirrored in white collar sectors as AI increases the breadth of work that can be sub-divided into discrete tasks.

The answer to this is not to resist it - if we don’t do it, other firms in other countries will do it to us. The answer is to help people adapt.

Taxing jobs to destruction, as the Labour government are doing, is catastrophic. Instead we need to help workers find their next job. Denmark, Sweden and Singapore all offer lessons: flexicurity, mid-career reskilling, and a focus on dignity, not just income.

We should use tax incentives, the welfare budget and the skills budget to train workers before redundancy, not merely compensate them afterwards. We should build faster routes into shortage sectors: care, construction, energy, cyber, AI operations, advanced manufacturing and teaching support.

The moral framework

Finally, the third area of direction, is in the thing itself: the moral framework in which AI operates.

The Pope’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued last month, is an important restatement of the Social Doctrine issued by the Pope’s predecessor at the height of the last industrial revolution in the late 19th century. It shows a deep concern for the dignity of work, and for our obligations to each other - especially the poorest.

The Pope helpfully and rightly points that for all its marvels, AI is not human.

‘Artificial intelligences’, he writes, ‘do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.’

This is to argue, and I profoundly agree, that the ultimate consideration for any policy towards AI is human supremacy. If AI is to help us rather than destroy us, it must be ‘oriented toward the good’.

We must focus ourselves, and focus AI, on nurturing human relationships - or will be, like the builders of Babel, ‘lords of towers destined for ruin’.

The only way out is through

The Pope argues for ‘more active political involvement’ in the management of AI. I agree. But that involvement should not attempt to slow or even reverse the development of new models.

For our part we should be seeking to play our part in developing them at the pace of innovation - which is the actual pace they will develop, in the US and China and elsewhere if not in Britain.

What Britain, and countries like it, can do is develop AI at the pace of innovation but in the direction of human flourishing.

Fundamentally Britain cannot slow down AI.

It offers great blessings and if we do our job right, we can avoid its huge dangers.

The only way out is through - the only way to avoid the dangers of AI is to have more of it here in Britain.

I recognise this is a difficult message to land with a rightly skeptical, rightly dubious public.

But it’s the right message because it’s the truth.

Help us deliver it.

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We the British people

Reclaimed our country.

We took back the right to rule ourselves - for better or for worse.

We restored our democracy

And made a bet on Britain.

And so we resumed this long island story of ours -

We reminded ourselves, and we reminded the world

That the only basis for greatness is independence

That the origins of England - sometime between the departure of the Romans and the expulsion of the Danes - make this claim

That the sovereignty of this nation is founded on the rock of ages.

All politics is story telling

And stories can be good or they can be bad

There is a story that is told that goes like this

Once the people of England were in darkness, living in prejudice and superstition

Then came Reason, and Enlightenment

And a new society was born

Of equality and fairness for all.

Now, the story goes, that society is at risk

From Brexiteers, and populists, and Christian nationalists,

Who want to take us back into the dark past.

This story is bad and it is wrong

The story we need to tell ourselves is this.

The people of England have fought a long defence

The defence of something deep in our founding

Deep in our laws and in the kingdom itself -

As it were, an aquifer

A deep source of water.

That water is the words of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament

Words that soaked into the soil of Wessex and then of England

And in defending this source over the centuries

We defended the settlement that grew around it

Laws and institutions and a way of life

The English settlement, built on the rock of national independence, watered by the sacred spring

That produced the most perfect politics we can have:

A Christian King in a sovereign Parliament

Ruling a free people

Under an equal law.

From this source, in this settlement, grow the fruits we prize so much

Personal freedom, and fairness, and decency, and toleration of difference -

Including toleration of different faiths and cultures

The right to believe what you want and to say what you believe.

In every generation this settlement comes under attack

Usually from some portion of the elite

A set of discontented Lucifers

With a rival idea and a rival plan.

They want the fruits of decency and toleration

without the source they spring from and the settlement they grow in.

They want to destroy the settlement and drain the spring

Tear down the institutions

Empty the aquifer from which all our ideas of human dignity and goodness grow

And build a new society in the dust

But in every generation the source and the settlement are defended - by the people

And by that portion of the elite that identifies itself with the people

That defects from a corrupt establishment to join the popular revolt

And so (through much struggle) returns the establishment to its duty

The only good revolutions are conservative ones

Good revolutions are a turning back - an act of restoration

Of what once was, and can be again

Not a revolution the way the French or the Russians do it -

A new system on rational principles

A new heaven on a new earth

Actually a blood-red heaven over a scorched earth -

But a revolution the way the English and the Americans do it

An act of restoration

A reclaiming of the settlement that has been lost

So my friends

Let me remind you

Our battle is not an assault but a defence

We are not the assailants

but the defenders of a settlement

Let’s not look for people to attack

If you want a fight - and I honour you if you do, for we are made for battle -

If you want a fight there is enough of a battle for you here

In the defence of our home - of the spring and the settlement

And the rebuilding of the walls which our ancestors built but which we have allowed to crumble.

Ultimately our battle is not against flesh and blood

It is against the principles and the policies that would ruin us

We are not fighting immigrants - we are fighting mass migration,

and the surrender of our borders, and the unasked-for transformation of our towns and cities

We are not fighting trans people but the doctrine of personal self-creation,

a doctrine of power, and the abuse of reality, whose principal victims are the people who believe in it.

We are not fighting Muslims,

but the version of Islam that recognises no allegiance to the King in Parliament,

that marches for Gaza but sees no sin in the subjection of women and the rape of children.

Let me end with this

The secret power of the English settlement is its capacity for renewal.

And so it is that in our time

We are hard pressed on every side

But we are not crushed

Because a renewal is underway.

We can and must be optimists -

For all around us we see the shape of the English settlement re-emerging from the rubble

Most of all - in the generation rising up

Taking their place on the walls

With a new seriousness and new skills

Technology is central to this

Yes tech has huge dangers

If we forget ourselves

It will become the dark god of the new age

It will become like the worst of us - bent on domination and exploitation

But if we remember who we are - the stewards of creation

With dominion over all that is made

We can make safe and fruitful this great new power.

Through tech, and the sectors Brexit freed us to pursue - life sciences, agritech, AI -

we can attain something of what we lost in the last century

We can have a life less drudgerous

Work closer to home

An economy where human beings do the human things

The jobs of creativity and care

Work of imagination and of relationship

And a society where family, and community, are properly prized

Where all our diversity is reconciled in common allegiance

To our Christian King in our sovereign Parliament.

Where we walk in the ways of gentleness

Beneath the battlemented turret of the English country church -

Where the cross of St George

Flies over the green fields

And the grey stone

Of the English village

This is the idea of England, the English settlement

And this surely is worth defending.

Thank you. I am the British speaker on your programme, and I think I have been invited here to reassure you.

To stand up, after our American friends, and tell you that the special relationship is alive and well. That the bonds of history and language and blood are unbreakable. That whatever the headlines say, Britain remains your steadfast friend.

I am not going to do that. Not because it is untrue — but because reassurance is precisely what has hollowed this relationship out.

When Churchill named the special relationship at a small college in Fulton, Missouri – he was not a confident man telling a confident country how fond he was of it.

He was the dismissed leader of a bankrupt and retreating nation, telling a reluctant and half-isolationist America that there was work to be done, an adversary to be named, and that Britain would bring to that work something America did not yet have.

The Ordering Civilisation

Because the special relationship is not, at bottom, about Britain and America. It is about a thing the two of us have done together, and very largely alone, for two hundred years. It is about the building of international order.

Most great powers in history have not believed that order is something you build. They believed it was something you imposed, or something you inherited, or something the heavens provided.

The distinctive idea of the English-speaking peoples — and it is genuinely distinctive — is that order among nations is a human artefact. That it can be designed.

That it rests not on the whip of a single master but on legitimacy, on restraint, on the consent of the powers who have to live inside it. That a settlement the losers can live with will outlast a settlement that merely crushes them.

That idea has a father, and he was British. His name was Castlereagh.

He was Foreign Secretary through the last years of the war against Napoleon. He did the unglamorous work — he held the coalition together when it kept threatening to fall apart, financed it, kept the allies pointed at the same enemy. And then, when it was won, he did the harder thing.

At the Congress of Vienna, he built a peace that did not crush the defeated. He brought France back into the room, against the wishes of those who wanted her dismembered, because he understood that a France with a stake in the order would keep the order, and a France humiliated would one day burn it down.

The result was a concert of powers, and a peace that held — more or less — for a hundred years.

And then America inherited the craft and built at a scale Britain never could. Bretton Woods. The Marshall Plan. NATO. The order that won the Cold War and lifted more human beings out of poverty than any arrangement in the history of the world.

A young Harvard student named Henry Kissinger wrote his doctoral thesis about how Castlereagh did it.

But Kissinger taught us something else, too — what happens when the ordering work stops. When the statesmen stop building order on purpose, and let the machinery run by itself, the alliances and the timetables and the mobilisation plans carry them over the edge. He was describing 1914. When order is not built deliberately, catastrophe builds it for you.

The order Castlereagh’s heirs created, the order America scaled, is ending. Not because anyone voted to end it, but because the conditions that produced it have gone.

The order is broken, or breaking. And no amount of American firepower will save it.

The only thing that will save it is a recovery of the old craft. And the proper craftsmen are the old ones - us – Britain and America.

The Diagnosis — The Blob, and Liberty Reclaimed

So let me be honest about why we are not, at this moment, equal to that work — and let me start with my own country.

You have heard — perhaps from this very stage today — that something has gone badly wrong in Britain. That a country which more or less invented free speech now polices it. That a country which gave the world the freeborn Englishman now arrests him for what he posts and even for what he prays.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that you are wrong. You are not wrong.

But I am going to tell you who is wrong, because the diagnosis matters far more than the complaint. Britain has not betrayed liberty. Britain’s governing class has. A post-national managerial class that mistook process for power, regulation for order, and the careful administration of decline for statecraft.

You know the type, because you have your own version of it. You call it the administrative state. We call it the Blob.

It is the same disease in two countries: a class of people who govern by procedure, who treat the nation as a slightly embarrassing inheritance to be managed downwards, and who have quietly stopped believing that their own country is anything special at all.

Here is the measure of it. Britain has not made its own grand strategy — a real one, a national one, a decision about our place in the world — since the Suez crisis of 1956. Seventy years.

In that time, we lost the people who do strategy, the ideas they work with, and the machinery they work in — in that order. We kept the ceremonies and lost the function. We built committees where we used to have strategists, and we called it seriousness.

And here is what I most want my American friends to understand. Liberty is not something Britain needs to be taught.

Liberty under law is Britain’s own invention and Britain’s gift — Magna Carta, the common law, the settlement of 1688, government by the consent of the governed. It is the inheritance your own founders took from us and wrote into your republic.

When Britain loses its liberty, it is not failing to live up to an American standard. It is betraying its own.

So, the cure for Britain is not American rescue. It is British self-government, recovered. And recovering it is exactly what my party exists to do. We are not asking to be saved.

We are proposing to take a country that has spent thirty years apologising for itself and make it worth allying with again.

Transform, Don’t Restore

Now — the temptation, on both sides of the Atlantic, is to meet the end of the order in one of two wrong ways.

The first wrong way is nostalgia. To try to put the old order back exactly as it was – not after the Second World War but after the Cold War.

To rebuild the 1990 moment - summon the summits, issue the communiqués, and behave as though the unipolar moment was a permanent feature of the universe rather than the brief and strange interlude it actually was.

That is the reflex of my country’s governing class, and of a good deal of the Western foreign-policy establishment. It is a foreign policy conducted as a séance — an attempt to raise the dead.

The second wrong way is cruder, and more dangerous. It says: very well, the rules are gone, so let us simply set power against power. Build the blocs, count the divisions, let the balance of fear keep the peace.

Here I turn to historian Paul Schroeder who spent his life on exactly this question. And his great finding was this: the peace that largely held in Europe for a century after 1815 did not rest on a balance of power.

A balance of power is what Europe had in 1914 — rival blocs, rigid alliances, mobilisation timetables — and it produced the worst catastrophe in human history.

What Castlereagh and his generation built was something different in kind. They did not balance the system. They transformed it — into one where the great powers accepted restraint, accepted consultation, accepted that an order they could all live inside served each of them better than the gamble of trying to overturn it. Not a balance of power. An order – built around national strength but also national restraint.

Even the Soviets were in that order. The frozen conflict from the 1950s to the 1980s – appalling as it was for the people living in the eastern bloc – reflected a world in which the great powers accepted the limits of their power, and practised restraint. The disaster of the post-Cold War era, the era of Vladimir Putin, is that we are facing a dictator whose only limit is what he can get away with. The same goes for the Iranians – and arguably the Chinese.

So this is the task in front of us. Not to restore the order that is dying. Not to settle for a balance of terror, which ends where balances of terror always end.

But to build — deliberately, and while there is still time — a new and legitimate equilibrium fit for an age of great-power competition. And building order is the one thing the English-speaking peoples have always known how to do. The only question is whether we still remember how.

What Britain Brings — The Indispensable Ally

So let me tell you what Britain brings to that work. Not as a supplicant, and not as a sentimental old friend, but as the partner who does the part of the job you need done and would rather not do yourselves.

You are turning towards the Pacific. You are right to. The defining contest of this century is the management of Chinese power, it will be settled in Asia, and the United States is the only nation that can anchor the response there.

But you cannot turn towards the Pacific while glancing back over your shoulder at Europe. You need Europe held. You need Russia deterred on a continent you are, slowly and structurally, disengaging from. You have asked the Europeans to do it themselves, and you have watched them not do it.

A Reform-led Britain can do it. Britain is the natural leader of European order — and let me say why, plainly, because flattery serves no one here.

Britain is the only nuclear power in Europe whose deterrent has, since the day it was first deployed, been declared for the defence of the whole continent — not hedged, not kept ambiguous, not reserved to us. The French deterrent is for France. Ours is for Europe. Full stop.

Britain is your senior partner in Five Eyes — the analytical spine of the entire Western intelligence effort.

Britain is the City of London — the largest pool of mobile capital outside the United States, which is, in the end, how the rearmament of a continent actually gets paid for.

Britain holds the bases — a global network of overseas territories that no treaty could buy and no rival could replicate.

Britain has the Commonwealth — two and a half billion people, a quarter of the world’s output, and the largest body on earth in which the English-speaking idea of ordered liberty is still, however imperfectly, alive. That is not a museum. Used deliberately, it is the institutional core of whatever order comes next.

And Britain intends to build the thing this war in Ukraine has taught all of us matters most. Not the platforms — the system that produces and replaces them faster than the enemy can.

We mean to be the Western home of autonomy: open to your manufacturers, sovereign in our own direction, and built so that the drone which decides the next war is not one whose supply chain runs through Beijing.

So here is the offer a serious Britain makes to a serious America. Not equality — we are not your equal, and a friend who pretends otherwise is not being honest with you. Something more useful than equality: indispensability.

America underwrites. Britain leads Europe.

Around NATO and inside it, we build a concert of the few powers that can actually project force, and we lead it from London. The burden you want shifted, shifts. The continent you want held, is held.

And the relationship is held on terms Britain controls — because a Britain that needs your permission to act is no use to you, and a Britain that has rebuilt its own sovereign strength is the most valuable ally you have.

But — and this is the whole of it — Britain can only make that offer if Britain first repairs itself. Rebuilds the machine. Recovers the strategy-making we threw away after Suez. Stops managing our decline and starts reversing it.

That is not work you can do for us, and we would not want you to. It is the work my party exists to do. We are not asking you to make Britain great again. We are telling you that we intend to — and that when we have, you will have your indispensable ally back.

And while I proudly claim that America learnt the craft of order-making from the British, we in our turn have something to learn from you today.

Your recent National Security Strategy is a masterful statement of reality and of purpose.

Crucially, America has concluded that leadership abroad starts with strength at home: secure borders, industrial capacity, energy dominance, technological leadership and national resilience.

Before Britain can become America’s indispensable ally, it must rebuild the foundations of power that make influence possible.

Close

So let me end where I began, with the man who started all of this.

Castlereagh built the longest peace Europe had ever known, and his own countrymen hated him for it. The poets wrote him into their verse as a monster – ‘I met murder on the way, he had a mask like Castlereagh’ – said Shelley.

Building order is thankless work. It wins no applause. The men who do it are rarely loved in their own lifetimes, and the applause-seeking political class will always prefer the séance and the communiqué to the hard, unglamorous labour of construction.

But the work is the relationship. Not the past we share — the future we will build. Not how we feel about one another — what we will make together, while there is still time to make it.

The Anglosphere is not a club, and not a nostalgia. It is a working inheritance — a way of holding liberty and order together that the world still badly needs, and that no one else is going to supply if we do not.

Shelley finished his poem with the call to the British people – ‘rise like lions!’. Churchill talked of the British people’s lion’s heart. That heart still beats. We will rise again.

Voters in Makerfield are offered a choice of a dreary continuation of the leftwing recipe, or the Reform alternative: best expressed in the words of our strapline Family, Community and Country.

As a party, we talk about country - some of these national elements include Parliamentary sovereignty, strong borders, and the need for a growing economy.

We are beginning to talk more about family as well - indeed today Suella Braverman announced new support for mothers and young families.

We want to support the economy of the household, we don’t see children as a luxury good. We see them as a public good and think it is proper for society and the state to support children and parenthood.

I want to talk tonight about the middle part of the “Family, Community and Country” triad: I want to talk about community.

I should start by saying I had a hand in what came to be known as the “Big Society” about 15 years ago.

Apart from the Brexit vote - which was a sort of inadvertent achievement - the Big Society was the best thing David Cameron did - or tried to do.

Because, let’s face it, it didn’t really work.

Except for some useful steps towards local planning - and of course the great experiment in free schools - the dream of the community stepping forward and stepping up to take responsibility for the neighbourhood, never came true.

And the brilliant title of the Tory 2010 manifesto - ‘an invitation to join the government of Britain’ - was a hollow mockery of what actually happened.

Instead there was ever higher taxes, ever higher immigration and cultural madness from the Equality Act onwards. None of the things people - especially Conservative people - voted for or wanted.

And while, so-called, austerity didn’t happen overall (public spending kept on rising in all the key services), it is true that the axe did fall on local government: and therefore on the part of the state where most people might meaningfully have had a role to play in the government of Britain, or at least of their own communities.

So I want to set out what I hope is a more meaningful vision: Not the Big Society but the Strong Society.

Because I suggest that strength matters more than size.

Yes we need a smaller state, and yes we need a bigger society, but most of all we need a better state and a better society.

Just as - on the other side of the ledger - we need a bigger defence budget; frankly more important than the proportion of GDP defence gets, is the question of the value for money we get from the public spending we make: How do we spend - not just how much.

The fact is we spend money terribly badly. The defence minister who just resigned, Al Carns, was in the Commons today and was rightly damning about MOD procurement.

His point, like mine, was that the DIP isn’t just too little too late: whatever size it is, it’s not going to set the UK up to fight the wars of today and tomorrow.

And indeed the defence debate has interesting parallels with our social policy conversation.

Because we increasingly recognise that defence and security isn’t just about tanks and drones and soldiers, it’s about the whole of society: our economic, our cultural, our social resilience.

Can we take shocks - practical and psychological?

Can we withstand hardship?

Will our people fight?

These are questions for social and cultural policy - they refer to community as well as country.

So we need a stronger society, more prosperous and more resilient - how do we get that?

Well, Adam Smith had a recipe: he said ‘Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

This purist vision of a country, with the government focused only on the coercive powers of the state - defence, taxation, and justice - is appealing to us all.

But you’ll notice that this vision supposes something else is there already. What Smith called the ‘natural course of things’ - What is that?

Smith and Burke

Before I answer that let me explain how I first came across Adam Smith.

I met him in the company of Edmund Burke. I did a history PhD on Burke.

Smith was in the circle of the odious Earl of Shelburne, Burke’s sworn enemy because his canting belief in democracy and his patronage of atrocious scientists and radical agitators like Joseph Priestley.

Yet Burke and Smith were friends.

Smith famously said Burke “is the only man I ever knew who, without communication, thought on economic subjects exactly as I.“”

Now I first met Burke through Conor Cruise O’Brien and his brilliant biography The Great Melody, which I recommend. A helpful introduction, because the caricature of Burke - certainly Marx’s caricature, the template of every left wing attack on conservatives - Burke depicted as the lackey of corrupt power, an apologist for inequality - is totally wrong, as O’Brien demonstrates.

O’Brien presented him as a whig, or at least as a reformer, sympathetic to the little guy left out of the propertied dispensation. Pushing for fair treatment for everyone, especially the poor. And in that Smith was Burke’s ally.

And I want to pay tribute here to Jesse Norman, my erstwhile friend, who has written brilliantly on both Burke and Smith.

And on Smith - just as O’Brien put the Whig back into Burke, Jesse put the Tory back into Smith. He rescued Smith from the sterility and aridity of the economists and the utilitarians who came after him, and restored him to the liberal tradition - in the 18th century sense - meaning generous, enlarged, magnanimous, not licentious or left wing. The liberal 18th century was the best time to be alive, at least if you were healthy and wealthy and male.

Sympathy
Let me try and make the case for the Toryism of Adam Smith.

Jesse points out that Smith might have been the first economist of the modern age, economic history can be classified as being before and after Smith - because he marked the end of mercantilism.

But he was also the last economist of the pre-modern economy, in the sense of living in a pre-industrial Britain.

He may have missed some important modern concepts - as someone said ‘the wily bird / had never heard / of marginal utility’ - but it doesn’t matter, because his value is his philosophy and how he applied it.

Not to the dismal science of economics (which was not a word in his day) but to society in general, in which money and markets were an integral part of daily life, not a distinct and separate subject.

In that sense his wisdom is valuable not because he introduced a new theory - market economics - but because he articulated a timeless set of truths.

For the heart of Smith’s philosophy, as you all know, isn’t in his Wealth of Nations but in his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments.

As Jesse shows the earlier book is not in conflict or even tension with the later one, but prelude or complement; Smith regarded them as companion volumes.

And the argument of the Moral Sentiments is simply this: that social norms, and therefore society itself - in the sense of a community of people functioning safely together - society evolves gradually not through top-down direction but through the development of language, and thus the development of sympathy or fellow feeling.

This sympathy is the foundation of society - indeed of nations, and of the wealth of nations - Smith expressed the core principle of relationship as a connection between different people, groups or indeed nations: The free exchange which markets enable, even when motivated by personal gain, is of general benefit when it occurs within a community of sympathy.

So Smith stood in the long tradition of thinkers from Aristotle to Roger Scruton, who pointed out that ‘we’ preceded ‘I’; that there was no primeval signing ceremony of a social contract when previously independent individuals voluntarily joined the body politic. That didn’t happen.

The body politic created the individual, not the other way around - because it created the things Smith wrote about - peace, and justice, supported by taxes that were ‘easy’ or tolerable: the things which enabled individuals to be free, in a meaningful sense of the word.

Not alone - the proud solitary - in the ‘nakedness of metaphysical abstraction’ as Burke said - but free in the sense of having safety, and agency, and an actual set of choices.

But as I said - more is needed for this, than peace and justice, and easy taxes.

What Smith called ‘the natural course of things’ is also the product of the body politic.

Not of the state - though a sympathetic state is needed - but of the community more broadly.

The natural course of things described by Smith - albeit implicitly as it hardly needed saying - was and is this:

The natural course of things is a moderately homogenous society - with a common worship - and a set of institutions where people gather and cooperate.

That is the condition of freedom and prosperity, no less than peace and justice.

I mentioned three things:

1) First - a moderately homogenous society - meaning the majority of the people share a heritage, share a culture; that they are related either directly through kinship or indirectly through shared experience and interests.

This is why immigration is so destabilising; and why narratives that stress the supposed economic benefits of immigration are so beside the point.

A community is a sympathetic not a transactional bond. Indeed it is explicitly not one of self-interest, despite the caricature of Smith.

Burke, again, said: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco…. It is a partnership … not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

The long continuity of a community is essential to the sympathy that exists between people who don’t know each other; and therefore to the prosperity and security of everyone.

2) The second thing I mentioned as part of the natural course of things is common worship.

A culture celebrates something together; it puts something at the apex of our common hopes and our collective scale of what matters.

A Christian civilisation puts the Christian God at the apex, the object of our common worship.

And the great value of this object - even if you don’t subscribe to all the metaphysics of the theology - is its idea of a God at the apex who values each of us absolutely.

Christianity simultaneously degrades us and ennobles us - it makes us lesser and greater beings, than we would be without a God who made us and died for us.

And a Christian civilisation also made space for toleration, for dissent:

I was with some leaders in the arts sector today, tentatively engaging Reform.

One of them made the very good point that art is essentially disruptive, so she asked: what about punk?

She imagined we would not be sympathetic to the disruptive principle of the arts. So I said Reform is punk!

Yes we have our traditional wing - people like me - who like an early night. But there’s another wing that is just as Reform as the ex-Tory types.

For instance, all our young members who thrill to the thought of disruption and dissent.

My argument is that the dissenting spirit needs the conservative spirit - it needs a normative against which to rebel and with which it must ultimately make its peace - otherwise it is not disruptive but merely destructive.

So a Christian conservative culture that is confident, that - in a moderately homogenous society - is sure of its status - can tolerate all kinds of transgression, even punk.

What matters is the sympathy that holds the whole community together, and the slow evolution over centuries of a sense of who we are.

3) And the third element of the natural course of things is institutional life, or what we call civil society.

And this brings me to the sense of community which is so important to us.

If there’s a common thread that connects Reform voters everywhere - whether they have joined us from Conservative or Labour or others - it’s a strong connection to their community and a desire to see it stronger and happier

Place

We are in the era of the politics of place.

And I think we need to be careful about applying simplistic Smithism to this politics.

When he wrote - though he didn’t make much of it as I’ve said - the industrial revolution was getting under way

After 1815, slowly, peace and justice and easy taxes prevailed - and so through the 19th century capital and labour found each other, and they found each other in the towns of the North and the Midlands and even places like Swindon, parts of which I represent.

In our lifetimes, two hundred years later, the process might appear to be in reverse.

The capital has gone. The labour, that is the people, hasn’t. The places made by industry haven’t disappeared with deindustrialisation.

But nor has simple Smithism applied either.

The theory is that in towns where the industry has left, some labour would melt away to other places offering jobs, and capital would come in to make use of cheap labour and cheap land that had been left behind by the departed industry.

But it hasn’t happened - or not enough.

It turns out that places are sticky - people don’t want to get on their bike and leave their families and their community for an unknown job in a distant city.

Likewise, capital investment needs more than unskilled workers and derelict buildings to invest in.

So these places - like Swindon, like Makerfield - continue to decline despite all the rhetorical efforts to level them up.

Policy isn’t helping. Years of the Treasury orthodoxy, operating that simplistic Smithism that made them prefer what’s called ‘spatially blind’ investment - i.e. putting public money into wealthy places where the demand is higher and the return is better - that didn’t help.

And now - going the other way - we are seeing legislation for renters rights and employees rights that simply make it economically self-defeating for landlords to rent out homes or for employers to offer jobs.

We are seeing high rents, gig economy jobs and deep pockets of stubborn deprivation - small neighbourhoods like the ones I have worked in, costing tens of millions of pounds a year and yet still everyone is poor. Still services are overstretched, still the place is shabby.

So how do we mitigate the stickiness of labour and capital in the post-industrial age?

This is the principal challenge of political economy now, one possibly made vastly harder - or possibly vastly easier - by the new age of technology.

Our focus is on creating the conditions both for the tech economy - that means cheaper energy, quicker planning, better skills - and the conditions for what is called the ordinary or everyday economy where most people live - people like our brilliant plumber from Makerfield.

The key social policy challenge is to strengthen the national course of things - locally as well as nationally.

That’s why civil society, why the institutional or associational life, is so vital.

I’m not going to try and resolve the old - the important - question about whether we should focus on cutting the supply of government - i.e. reducing services and entitlements so that people take more responsibility for themselves, their families and communities - or on cutting demand for government - i.e. promoting personal responsibility and social alternatives so there is less need for expensive state services.

That’s an important debate to have and while the easy answer is ‘it’s a bit of both’ - the actual balance between withdrawing current support and promoting alternatives is a difficult one, and one that can only be reconciled in particular places with particular cases in mind.

So yes we need to make immediate cuts - for instance to young people who should be working, or people with mild mental health conditions, or indeed foreign nationals - none of whom should be sitting at home funded by the taxpayer.

But just as important are the conditions that drove people into welfare, and the alternatives to welfare that society should be offering.

That age of tech is driving people apart into isolation, that is true, we recognise that.

But it’s also driving people together again search of meaning, of connection, of experience.

Some of the arts people I was with today were telling me about the extraordinary resurgence in cinema attendance among young people, which I was not aware of. Clearly something remarkable is happening. So you’re in a dark room and you don’t have to talk but at least you’re together, you’re looking at the same screen, you have something in common, a shared experience.

So I think we should be positive about what tech can do to reknit the bonds of community.

It can create places that actually look more like the 18th century than the late 20th century - the coffee shop and the newspaper, the theatre and the assembly room, these tremendous civic institutions of the 18th century are being recreated.

We are in deep need of human connection.

And both for entertainment but also for the tougher things in life - skills, health and mental health support, family support - we need to create a new civil society that provides these things without reliance on central government for everything.

Brain
I want to finish with an observation that would have been unavailable to Smith because of the state of science at the time but would have interested him and the other philosophes.

Recent years have seen rapid strides in understanding the human brain.

We now understand there is a difference between the amygdala - the core animal part that seeks security and promotes fight or flight responses to danger - and the pre-frontal cortex - the thinking reasoning regulating part, that makes us very pleased with ourselves - as Hamlet put it, “the paragon of animals”.

I sometimes feel, though I’ve never actually seen this said, that critics of Reform imagine our party, our supporters, are operating out of the amygdala - out of the base, fight-or-flight animal responses. Whereas clever decent enlightened people like them operate from the pre-frontal cortex.

Of course this is outrageous and doesn’t take account of all the research showing how clever, enlightened, highly educated people are more likely than less high-status people to be duped by their own prejudices, their fear of outgroups, their need for security and status.

The posher your credentials the stronger your basic instincts of fear and aggression - albeit you’re very polite about it, on the surface. Usually. Except on twitter.

Anyway - I think there’s another bit of brain science that reflects the political divide better than the amygdala-prefrontal cortex distinction.

Reformers are right-brain people. Everyone else - the economists and sophisters - are left-brain people.

As Iain MacGilchrist has shown the right hemisphere is the home of creativity, relationships, and intuition.

The left hemisphere is the course of calculation, categorization, organization.

The great fault of our society is that we have promoted the left hemisphere - properly just the servant or ‘vizier’ as MacGhilcrist said - over the right brain, which is properly the master.

We have put economics above moral philosophy and we sometimes even imagine that Smith, the moral philosopher we call the father of economics, would have approved.

I don’t believe he would.

He would have been appalled at what the economists and the Treasury have done to our country.

He would be leading the revolution - the “trad” revolution - to restore the right brain over the left, to reestablish not just low taxes and justice, but the natural course of things: moderate homogeneity; common worship; civil society.

And I’m sure he would have been delighted to see - on his 250th anniversary of his birth - a group of intelligent people gathering to remember him under the aegis of the brilliant institution that bears his name.

I hope we have remembered him aright.

The fact is defence is just one aspect of National Security - which includes foreign policy, homeland security, intelligence, and of course resilience in all its forms: economic, social and cultural.

The challenge is ultimately not operational but political.

The fact is a limited ‘defence’ perspective - the abdication by politicians in favour of generals and the MOD - accounts for the lack of strategic thinking and the steady reduction of British power and security we have seen since the end of the Cold War.

And this reflects the broader crisis of the moment.

Reform’s principal mission in government is to restore meaningful democratic leadership to the British state. To make the government serve the people.

Nowhere is that more needed than in national security.

Every week in Whitehall, before the big group of Wednesday Morning Colleagues - the Departmental Perm Secs and the Cabinet Secretary - who get together to fix the domestic agenda of the government, a smaller group of unelected officials meets to set our foreign and security policy.

To anticipate problems between ministers. Smooth the rough edges. Polish the pebble of British security until it shines - and is very small.

It’s this way of working that explains the reviews every few years that caused the armed forces to shrink, recruitment to fall, capabilities to erode, and bus after bus of new technology and innovation to be missed.

Start at the start

We need to do things differently.

We need to sequence the conversation properly.

Start at the start. That means accepting reality - a clear statement of the world as it is, and Britain’s place in it.

Next, set a National Security Strategy.

That begins with an objective - What’s our destination? What are we able to change about the world and Britain’s place in it?

From there we agree a doctrine - the theory for how we can realise the objective.

Only then do we come to policy - the development of assets like defence but also the rest of the suite of enablers that can help realise the doctrine and deliver the objective.

Accept reality

Let me walk us through these steps at a very high level, as I see them.

When it comes to accepting reality there are three facts we need to recognise.

The first fact is this. The post-Cold-War holiday is over, and at the end of it Britain is no longer a Great Power.

The rules-based international system, as an operating assumption rather than a wished-for outcome, has ended. The era now under way is Great Power Competition — major countries competing for advantage across every domain of national activity, continuously, on horizons measured in decades.

And in that competition, Britain is not at the table. The global system is increasingly being managed by five countries. The Americans allegedly call it the Core Five — the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan.

The best that can be said about Britain is that we are a regional heavyweight with some global influence, world-leading in several specific domains -

but structurally weakened in others, and on a trajectory that is leading to permanent middle-power status and dependence on decisions taken elsewhere, by others.

That’s the first fact. The second is that the West is coming apart while its adversaries are coming together.

The Western alliance we have been part of for sixty years is fracturing. The United States is disengaging from Continental Europe in slow motion, and that disengagement is structural, not personal to any one administration.

Meanwhile the West’s adversaries are integrating. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — the CRINK alignment — is the most integrated adversary the West has ever faced. They share weapons, targeting, platforms, industries and lessons.

The third fact is this. Power isn’t just about state capacity anymore. Artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber, space — the capabilities that decide modern conflict — none of them are principally state-owned. The job of the state in this new world is to build the architecture for these assets to succeed and integrate.

Objective and doctrine

So that’s the context, the reality we’re working in. An era of national competition in which Britain is not at the table, while our allies diverge and our antagonists converge, and the key levers of national security increasingly lie outside the remit of the state.

We now need to set an objective for the UK and a doctrine on how to achieve it.

My simple suggestion for the objective is this. The UK should become a Great Power once again. That means moving from a regional heavyweight to being the leading economic, technological, diplomatic and security power in Europe, and a meaningful - not a peripheral - player in the affairs of the world.

I don’t set this ambition out for reasons of swagger or national self-esteem. It’s simply what the national interest demands.

In this new world you’re either subject or object - you’re either exercising power or you’re being exercised on. It’s only by gaining power that we can secure our prosperity and our security.

That way we can be what we want to be - a force for peace, minding our own business but one of the good guys in the world, able to act in our own or our allies’ interests when we have to.

Britain retains the ingredients of a Great Power.

The sixth-largest economy.

The nuclear deterrent.

Tier One Special Forces.

Intelligence services that remain the operational anchor of the Anglophone intelligence world.

Universities at the front rank of global research.

The City of London — the largest non-American pool of mobile financial capital on earth.

A defence-tech start-up ecosystem - under-capitalised and under-procured but real, and hugely rich in potential.

The Commonwealth and the Overseas Territories — an alliance and a global basing network no diplomatic settlement could buy.

AUKUS as our anchor in the Indo-Pacific.

The wartime alliance with Ukraine - proving Britain’s claim to leadership of the European security system.

What Britain lacks is not the instruments for success. What Britain lacks is a conductor to orchestrate and direct existing capabilities and develop new ones as the 4th industrial revolution accelerates.

Given these assets the objective of great power status is achievable.

And the doctrine to achieve it is simply this.

Active Deterrence.

Hardening of the target in all domains- making Britain a tougher nut to crack at home and with meaningful capabilities to maintain continental equilibrium.

Properly resilient in the key industries for sovereignty: energy, food, and the ingredients of the tech economy.

And culturally confident, united and politically resolute.

Policy

So that’s the objective - great power status in the national interest - and the doctrine: Active Deterrence, across all domains.

The policy follows - the use of ways and means to deliver the doctrine.

Reform UK is working with a range of national security experts, with foreign policy professionals, with veterans, with tech entrepreneurs and financiers to build the plan and to build the team.

Let me set out some aspects of the strategy that is emerging - some of the outcomes that will be achieved if we succeed.

First - the homeland will be safe. Our territory will be defended against the spectrum of threats by state actors and others - including criminal people-smuggling gangs. We will have the legal power and the material means to defend our island.

Second - Russia will be deterred from attacking the United Kingdom whether kinetically or in the gray zone. That means a more deliberate use of our means to push back against sub-threshold action, including in partnership with private companies who are often in the front line of cyber attacks from Russia.

Third - Britain will have meaningful sovereign capability in AI and in the new generation of unmanned weapon systems. We will speak more about this in due course but for now let me simply say this is the front on which the war for Britain’s survival will be won or lost.

Fourth and finally - the realisation of our great power aspiration - Britain will be the acknowledged leader of the defence of Europe. This isn’t a pointless boast. It’s our natural position given our relationships and our capabilities.

Leadership in Europe will not fall to the nation with the largest army or the biggest economy. It will fall to the nation that holds a coalition together. That has been Britain’s strategic vocation for three centuries.

Not the EU model. There is no greater strategic oxymoron in the national security debate than the claim we need to rejoin the EU in order to collaborate with our allies.

The EU has spent decades imagining that committees are a substitute for capabilities, thinking that national security is compatible with the surrender of sovereign decision-making.

An entity unable to project hard power - let alone one that is strangling its own AI sector - can never become a Great Power.

We remain committed to NATO, and of course to the Article V doctrine that commits all 32 members to collective security.

But within that great alliance are inner conversations in which Britain has always had a leading voice. The JEF, Lancaster House, the E3, the Northern Group. Britain has led or helped lead these for decades. We will continue to do so whatever our relations with the EU.

Beyond Europe Britain must continue to support the alliances which hold the West together, not least in the great strategic challenge of the next quarter-century: the management of Chinese power.

The Atlantic Bridge is the complement of this arrangement. The United States remains the indispensable Western power - and whoever is in the White House we must be their friend.

In the Commonwealth we have a leading role among fifty-six nations, two and a half billion people. Reform will treat the Commonwealth not as a ceremony, or a memory of empire, but an alliance that directly serves Britain’s national interest in the 21st century.

Ways and means

Let me finish with what this conference was originally billed as - a conversation about defence. As I’ve said this is way downstream of objective, doctrine and strategy - all of which need clarifying in order to get defence policy right.

But we can say some things with certainty.

I’m confident that we will set a path towards rebuilding Britain’s sea power. We are a maritime nation reliant on seaborne trade, undersea cables for power and communications, and we have a global diaspora and overseas territories that require naval capability.

But the essential fact in the defence debate - and of course the reason for the scandalous delay in the DIP - is that procurement is broken. I don’t need to rehash the examples and the evidence here.

But even if we had a system that could innovate, spiral, support a network of SMEs, harness front-line expertise but also imagine what’s not yet possible - even then it’s all wrong because it’s seen through the prism of defence.

Procurement is about technology and the tech we need isn’t primarily about kinetic force, it’s about AI, cyber, space, robotics - where the frontier is being pushed in the civilian world.

So Reform is thinking actively about a total reform of procurement - including the option to take National Security procurement away from line departments altogether, including the Ministry of Defence. Making procurement properly aligned with the civilian innovation system that is the real source of the kit we are going to need to defend ourselves in this century.

And crucially - making it fast. Speed is critical to performance and to saving money. But speed is literally illegal under our procurement rules. Under a Reform government, we will make ‘building the right things fast’ the critical driver of procurement policy.

And as for the spending envelope. Even once we’re getting good value from current spending we will need more money.

Of course we need to get to 3.5% by 2035 - the new NATO target - but that is a floor, not a ceiling. It may have to rise.

But most importantly, an arbitrary figure expressed as a % of GDP is meaningless unless related to a proper appraisal of need, and transparent budgets, set against a clear objective, doctrine and strategy.

So Reform will institute a meaningful assessment - an annual Strategic Net Security Assessment, presented to Parliament, with a confidential version for the ISC. Not an annual budget - short term budgeting is one of the dysfunctions we need to end - but an annual assessment of our readiness, our resilience, and our progress towards our objective.

Conclusion

I hope this has helped contribute to this important conversation today.

In an age of very contested politics I hope that together we can arrive at a consensus on this most important of all subjects.

I invite anyone interested in shaping Reform’s national security agenda to get in touch.

The Civil Service as such has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted Government of the day.

Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary, ‘The Armstrong Memorandum’, 1985

Introduction

In my paper of 15 December 2025 (Storm and Sunshine) I explained that Reform UK was reviewing ‘the best way of organising the centre of government to give effect to the wishes of the Prime Minister’. I also invited civil servants to share their experiences, ideas and expertise with us through an anonymous survey. The response has been overwhelming, and I am grateful to everyone who participated and shared their frank and candid assessments.

Today, I am setting out Reform UK’s plans for the centre of government, shaped by the research of the Preparation for Government team, input from leading experts, and our survey of current civil servants. At its heart the proposal seeks to restore the principle set out by Lord Armstrong in 1985. There can be no distinction between the ‘elected’ and the ‘permanent’ government. The Civil Service simply provides staff for politicians to inform and then implement their decisions.

Sadly this is not the view of everyone in the Civil Service today. Last year, in a lecture held at UCL on ‘Bureaucracy and Distrust: The Civil Service in the Constitution’ Dr Ben Yong reflected the views of certain officials working in Whitehall that explicitly contradict the Armstrong principle.

As Yong put it, ‘the Civil Service might have duties to the continuity of the state which are separate from its duty to support incumbent governments’. He suggested ‘the Civil Service has duties not just to the incumbent government but also to something greater: the Crown’. And he discussed that ‘preparation behind the scenes’ could be under way in Whitehall to ensure that in the event of a new government of whom officials disapprove, these ‘duties’ could lead to the Civil Service engaging in ‘guerilla government’, including bureaucratic shirking, leaking and whistleblowing.

This week the Public and Commercial Services Union, representing civil servants, debated a motion to ‘counter a hostile Reform government’ with ‘sustained industrial action’: they are planning to go on strike if we win. (I responded stating that striking on these grounds would be illegal and the civil servants in question would not have jobs to return to.)

It is right that there are checks and balances on the power of the government. We do not have an elective dictatorship. But the proper checks on government are not civil servants, but Parliament and the courts. We want to ensure those institutions are properly empowered to fulfil their roles, without in their turn encroaching on the proper powers of the government. Future papers will look at legislative and judicial reform.

This paper sets out certain proposed changes to the executive, i.e. the apparatus around the Prime Minister and Cabinet: No10, the Cabinet Office, Departments of State, and the Civil Service. Further announcements will be made in due course concerning the Civil Service Code and Ministerial Code.

Our belief is that the current system prevents Ministers, and even the Prime Minister, from getting good quality advice and information; prevents them from implementing decisions effectively; and obscures accountability. Real power is held not by the elected government but by the permanent Civil Service, especially the Cabinet Secretary and the sprawling, incoherent bureaucracy of the Cabinet Office.

The Cabinet Office was set up in 1916 to ensure effective management of the Cabinet itself, enabling collective responsibility and good process. Throughout the 20^th century it performed this limited function.

Under Tony Blair and his successors, however, the remit of the Cabinet Office expanded hugely. The Cabinet Office became the principal source of authority, outside HM Treasury, for the rest of government, and the place where all cross-Whitehall functions and priorities were managed. Since 1997 the Cabinet Office has grown nearly fivefold to the point that it now employs over 11,000 staff.

The most telling feature of the current set-up is that 10 Downing Street, the office of the Prime Minister, is categorised in the official organogram of government as a subsidiary unit of the Cabinet Office, listed among The Office for Veterans’ Affairs, the Public Inquiry Response Unit and the Propriety and Constitution Group.

It appears that the people at the top of the Civil Service have seen the weakness of the current Government as an opportunity to extend their power; and are about to go further, under the guise of ‘enhancing trust’. The recent King’s Speech announced ‘proposals [to] strengthen the delivery, accountability, innovation and productivity of the Civil Service. These proposals will also seek to safeguard its impartiality and core values, to enhance trust and confidence in the institutions of government’. This follows the announcement by the new Cabinet Secretary, Dame Antonia Romeo, of far-reaching ‘objectives’ for herself - in which she appointed herself ‘steward for the democratic system of government and guardian of the constitution’. Subsequently the government has announced that ‘every department across Whitehall will be setting up a delivery team led by a top civil servant’; this is either a bizarre replication of the job (‘delivery’) that the Department is already supposed to do, or - more likely - a means by which the Cabinet Office and Cabinet Secretary will extend their control over Whitehall.

It is time to restore the power and authority of the Prime Minister. This paper details the intention of Reform UK to scrap the Cabinet Office, to break up the job of the Cabinet Secretary, and to reintroduce proper responsibility and accountability for Departments of State. These measures will ensure good government for a Reform Prime Minister and all subsequent Prime Ministers. They will also ensure that any action of non-compliance or sabotage by civil servants hostile to the government can be swiftly dealt with.

International comparison

Certainly, Britain is not the only country to have faced challenges with a bloated, paralysed centre of government and a mutinous bureaucracy. Both Australia and Japan use political systems heavily inspired by our Westminster model and experienced similar issues to what we see in Whitehall today. However, they took decisive action a long time ago, ensuring problems could not compound in the way they have for us in Britain.

Australia identified the problems with a ‘dual centre’ of government over half a century ago. They introduced the combined ‘Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’ in the 1970s to act as a single, lean authority. With only 1,000 skilled officials, the PM&C put Canberra firmly back under the control of the Prime Minister. More recently, when Australia faced an influx of illegal immigrants very similar to ours, the PM&C was tasked with Operation Sovereign Borders. It quickly created a unified command with the Prime Minister’s authority, and ended illegal boat arrivals within a matter of weeks.

Japan launched radical reforms in 2001 after powerful career civil servants began to run their departments as independent operations, often ignoring the Prime Minister’s agenda and the government’s mandate. The government decisively shifted power from the bureaucracy to the elected executive, eliminating their veto power and reducing the number of departments from 22 to 12. This enabled Japanese leaders to implement vital reforms for the benefit of their country against established institutional interests.

These case studies have helped develop and inform the ideas set out in this paper. There is no reason why Britain cannot implement similar reforms under a government that is properly prepared and is willing to resist attempts by the Civil Service to frustrate them.

Where responsibilities will lie

Under a Reform UK Government the responsibilities will be clear:

No10 (housing the Office of the Prime Minister) will be responsible for setting the Government’s priorities; for coordinating both policy and delivery across government; and for monitoring data to track progress and inform decision-making.

Departments of State will be responsible for developing policy and delivering policy in their respective areas.

A new non-ministerial Department of the Civil Service will be responsible for corporate functions that are not delivered by Departments of State and for transforming the Civil Service as a whole into a smaller, more productive and more capable bureaucracy.

The Cabinet Office will be abolished and be replaced by two new institutions: an Office of the Prime Minister and a Department of the Civil Service. Its policy-making functions will return to Departments.

These changes will allow for the majority of the 11,000+ staff currently employed by the Cabinet Office to be either made redundant or return to specialist functions in Departments.

We are also conscious of the important role of HMT at the centre of government and the need to ensure its work on public spending control does not create damaging levels of micromanagement in other Departments, including in the new OPM and DCS. We will set out further detail on the Treasury’s future role in due course.

The role of the Cabinet Secretary

The post of Cabinet Secretary will be abolished and the role will be split into three distinct jobs.

The role of principal policy adviser and gatekeeper to the PM will be filled by a Chief of Staff, who will be the senior special adviser in government. The Chief of Staff will be appointed personally by the PM, and is likely to be a highly aligned and trusted political staffer who arrives with the PM from opposition.

The role of managing the flow of information and decisions into and out of the Cabinet and Cabinet Committees will be filled by a Chief Secretary, reporting to the Chief of Staff. The Chief Secretary will oversee the combined domestic policy secretariat (see below). This job is also a political one, and it is expected the post holder will be appointed from outside the civil service.

The role of Head of the Civil Service will be filled by the CEO of the Department of the Civil Service. He/she will be responsible for managing the (currently) 550,000-strong Civil Service, and for transforming it into a much smaller and more productive organisation, not least through the adoption of AI. The CEO of DCS is likely to be a business leader with experience of transforming large organisations.

Office of the Prime Minister

“Remove the Cabinet Office. Make No10 powerful again.”

Official, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

Submission to the Reform UK Civil Servant Survey

The OPM will be led by the PM’s Chief of Staff, who will manage, with full power of appointment and dismissal, all staff working there. Work is under way to prepare the relevant measures to allow the Chief of Staff and select other appointees to exercise these powers.

Under the Chief of Staff we expect to appoint the following senior staff.

The National Security Adviser, as currently, will lead the National Security Secretariat and advise the Prime Minister and Cabinet on foreign, defence and security policy. Further work is underway to plan reforms to the processes for managing national security and civil contingencies.

The Chief Secretary will lead a Domestic Policy Secretariat to support the Prime Minister, Cabinet and Cabinet Committees on all economic, social, constitutional and cultural policy, incorporating the work of the current Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat. Secretariat staff will be a combination of special advisers and civil servants. The team will include a high-functioning data centre or ‘observatory’ capable of tracking progress in the Government’s priorities and developments across any aspect of national life. This would build on the current National Situation Centre used by the National Security Secretariat, including the Resilience Directorate and the COBR Unit. The OPM will design standards for reporting and analysis across Whitehall and conduct regular stocktakes on key policies and priorities. Where necessary, the OPM will be able to deploy specialist project teams to work closely with responsible Departments where specific projects are at risk, identifying and resolving barriers to delivery - especially where this requires action from other Departments.

The Permanent Secretary at the OPM will oversee the managerial and constitutional functions of 10 Downing Street, including honours and appointments, relations with HM The King, and the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Secretariat. The OPM Permanent Secretary will be a career civil servant, though not necessarily recruited from the current Permanent Secretary cadre.

The Press Secretary or Communications Director at the OPM will oversee all government communications.

The Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, as currently, will lead the Private Office and support the PM directly.

Departments of State

“[The] NHS doesn’t speak to DWP doesn’t speak to HMRC doesn’t speak to Insolvency Service doesn’t speak to Police and so on. Departments cannot [share data], many are legally prevented from doing so, and the net result is that we lose billions in fraud and error year on year [...]”

Official, Government Agency

Submission to the Reform UK Civil Servant Survey

The core principle of Reform’s preparation for government is the restoration of Ministerial accountability for the actions of the state. This accountability demands real responsibility. Responsibility starts at the top, with the centre of government being equipped in the ways explained above to properly drive the Prime Minister’s agenda through government.

Accountability and responsibility apply equally at the Departmental level. A stronger, more agile centre, focused on prioritising, coordinating and monitoring government activity, depends on much stronger Departments responsible for the actual design and delivery of policy.

Under Nigel Farage’s premiership, Secretaries of State will know what they are supposed to do. Ministers will enter their Departments on day one of a Reform government with a clear programme of action and clear expectations for delivery.

The ‘machinery of government’ - what Departments are needed, and which Departments do what - matters, and we will come forward with a planned structure of Whitehall in due course. More important than structures, however, is the quality and the culture of the people who occupy them. Any ‘MoG’ changes we will bring forward will be designed to improve this.

Since the 1990s Departments have had their own delegated powers to hire their own people and manage their own functions. Delegation has the benefit of avoiding whole-of-government equal pay claims; it has also had the downside of being uneven and duplicative, which is why Francis Maude, working for David Cameron, introduced so many central functions at the Cabinet Office.

More importantly, however, delegation means that Departments, if they wish, are able to innovate with staffing and operations; it means that Departments, if the government wishes, are responsible for what they do. This is the right principle.

The principle is not upheld at present. Since 1997 strategic policy has been centralised in the Cabinet Office, while tactical policy, and the delivery of it, have been outsourced to quangos. The result, to put it bluntly, is that Departments are frequently very poor at both policy and delivery.

Quangos are not only captured by lobby groups in the sectors they oversee, and unaccountable to Ministers and the public. As stand-alone regulators or agencies, each solely focused on their particular individual responsibility, they issue absolute edicts designed to protect or promote their singular priority. Natural England, notoriously, has no remit to consider the impact of its environmental regulations on the supply of housing or jobs. And yet voters will, quite rightly, reward or punish the government ‘in the round’, not least for the way it manages the trade-offs involved in any particular decision. Managing trade-offs is the business of politics, and we need more politics, not less.

Under a Reform UK government the great majority of quangos and agencies will be brought back into the Departments, or scrapped. This will bring the real experts into government; make them meaningfully accountable to Ministers and thus to Parliament and the public; and ensure their issue-specific advice is considered alongside other, competing priorities.

The abolition of the Cabinet Office, the establishment of the Office of the Prime Minister and the restoration of responsibility and accountability to Departments create the opportunity to establish stand-alone teams tasked with innovating outside ‘business as usual’ operations.

A team or taskforce could work with OPM colleagues, similar to how cross-government units work today but directly reporting to a Minister, to develop bespoke solutions to sudden crises; to fix long-running dysfunctions that the ‘business as usual’ team can’t spare the time, or lacks the expertise, to deal with; or even to establish parallel, probably highly digital, operations in certain functions to demonstrate a better way of working than the analogue operation of the status quo.

Departmental leadership

Each Department will be headed by the Secretary of State who would appoint a Chief of Staff and a Permanent Secretary with the approval of the Prime Minister.

Whereas the job of the OPM will be focused on setting the government’s priorities and ensuring the smooth flow of information and the communication of decisions among the Prime Minister, Cabinet and Cabinet Committees, Departments of State are responsible for policy design and, crucially, delivery - including in some cases the delivery of large and critical state functions and public services.

While it is expected that the OPM Permanent Secretary will be a senior civil servant with experience in Whitehall, it is likely that a significant number of other Permanent Secretaries will be appointed from outside the Civil Service. We are looking for proven leaders with a track record of effective delivery and the interplay of strategy, analysis and operations.

Permanent Secretaries will be expected to work closely with the CEO of the Department of the Civil Service, who will certainly be a proven business leader, to deliver the changes we expect to make in Whitehall, including in headcount, AI adoption, and ways of working.

Staffing

“The fact that no one gets sacked creates a sense of entitlement in staff; as though the departments exist for their benefit. Consequently, many colleagues don’t do any work [...] The ability to sack people for poor performance would solve this.”

Official, HM Revenue & Customs

Submission to the Reform UK Civil Servant Survey

It is essential that Ministers, who are responsible to the Prime Minister and to Parliament for the work of their Departments, have the power to choose the officials who advise them and execute their decisions. In addition, as set out above, we also want select officials such as the OPM Chief of Staff to have full control over staffing.

Crucially, under a Reform government the Secretary of State will have the power to appoint or dismiss the Permanent Secretary of his or her Department. The Permanent Secretary will direct the staff of the Department but the principle should be clearly established that Ministers can request the appointment or dismissal of particular officials. Private Offices, in particular, should be entirely appointed by Ministers.

We are working through the legal implications of these proposals. We expect to replace the Constitutional Reform and Governance (CRAG) Act 2010 in order to grant Secretaries of State and select officials these powers. We also want to remove statutory barriers to direct appointments into the most senior leadership tiers (SCS3 and above).

To support the work of Ministers and the Chief of Staff, there will be a significant increase in the number of Special Advisers. Rather than aspiring young politicians, it is expected that most SpAds will be experienced either in the work of the specific Department or in the challenges of analysis and operational delivery.

Overall, there will be major reductions in the headcount of Whitehall. As described in Restoring Government and Storm and Sunshine, we are confident of cutting non-operations professions like policy, comms and HR by at least 50%. Different operational functions - prison officers, for instance, or Border Force - may require additional staff depending on our manifesto commitments. But overall, we expect significant reductions at all levels of government, not least through the enormous transformation that AI is bringing to clerical and analytic work.

More important than overall numbers is the skills and type of worker in the Civil Service. The current system consists of relatively low pay, low accountability, high job security and high predictability of earnings, including a general defined benefit (DB) pension. This does not attract or retain the type of people the government needs.

Reform UK will introduce radical change to Whitehall remuneration packages. We will explore options for modernised terms for new hires that offer more generous salaries, with a greater performance-related element, at the expense of more modest pensions.

As set out in December, we will offer major performance bonuses, to Departments, teams and individuals. And we will establish prizes, with a significant financial value, to civil servants who crack specific policy, analysis or delivery challenges. (The Government has subsequently announced a limited version of this approach, but one that misses the mark - they will pay limited bonuses only to the highest earning, most senior civil servants. Their teams, those who actually deliver the work, get nothing. This is not Reform’s approach. With us, any official, starting from the most junior grade, can qualify for substantial bonuses.)

Crucially, we will also change the system to allow for pay rises within a single post, subject to high performance, so that an official does not, as they currently do, need to apply for a promotion to a different job - often in a different Department - just to secure a better salary.

These changes will help address the chronic condition of the Civil Service, namely too much ‘role-level’ turnover and not enough ‘organisation-level’ turnover. People constantly change jobs within the Civil Service but too few people come and go to and from the Civil Service itself.

Scrapping the Cabinet Office means losing central coordination of the Civil Service Fast Stream, which the Cabinet Office administers. This is a good thing. While we might retain the Fast Stream brand, Departments should manage their own recruitment schemes, competing for talent and developing strong career pathways for specialists in their field.

A more endemic challenge is the split between ‘policy’, ‘analyst’ and ‘operational’ roles. In an echo of the old ‘Two Cultures’ identified by CP Snow - the split between humanities and science in the British establishment - we have a high-status class of ‘policy’ professionals, usually trained in the humanities and termed ‘generalist’ because of their lack of actual domain knowledge, and two low-status categories of a) analysts who provide the statistical annexes to the submissions written by the policy professionals, and b) operational staff who work somewhere else and deliver the policy on the ground.

We will significantly cut the ‘policy profession’, which has more than doubled in the last 10 years, without any noticeable improvement in policy-making. A key requirement of people advising Ministers on policy in a Reform government will be analytical and project-management (i.e. delivery) skills. The people informing policy decisions should be those who understand - both analytically and empirically - the thing they are talking about. We will always need expert analysts to build complex models and supply detailed interpretation of data; and we will need people whose core job is operational delivery. But we do not need the current large number of ‘policy professionals’ with few quantitative skills and limited understanding of what it takes to execute policy on the ground.

All these changes are designed to induce a new culture - not of risk aversion (no prizes for success, extreme organisational inertia) but a healthy entrepreneurialism, with a more realistic and ambitious appetite for risk.

Co-location of Ministers

“Everything is siloed and [consequently] causing turf wars.”

Official, HM Treasury

Submission to the Reform UK Civil Servant Survey

As outlined above, we intend to return to Departments many of the responsibilities currently exercised by the Cabinet Office, by quangos and external agencies. As this suggests, what is needed is more, not less, ‘politics’, in the sense of a publicly-accountable process of accommodation, compromise and decision-making among competing imperatives.

The same principle applies at the top. A system of more powerful - autonomous and responsible - Departments creates a centrifugal risk, i.e. Ministers pursuing independent lines without proper coordination. This already accounts for the ‘Departmental capture’ that afflicts many Ministers: working all day in their offices, surrounded by officials who assist them to promote the particular line of the team.

Countervailing ‘centripetal’ remedies are needed to balance the empowerment of Departments. One is the reforms to the centre detailed above, which are designed to ensure better prioritisation, coordination and monitoring of government policy. We need to reinforce this by bringing Ministers themselves into the centre.

A Reform Government will ensure that Ministers from across Government Departments can work together in the same space for some of their working week. A Combined Ministerial Office will be established in a central venue - perhaps 70 Whitehall, the Foreign Office, or Government Offices Great George Street (GOGGS) - to enable co-location of Ministers and effective collaboration, including through Cabinet Committees and project working groups.

Importantly - to avoid the emergence of a new Cabinet Office, with all the problems of the current one - the CMO will not employ civil servants. It is purely for Ministers, supported by the OPM.

Department of the Civil Service

“[It is] impossible to bring in obviously talented people who can do the job without months of HR [trouble].”

Official, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

Submission to the Reform UK Civil Servant Survey

The growth of Cabinet Office numbers is partly due to the way the centre mirrors Departments, matching their functions with its own duplicate teams of officials.

Under a Reform government most responsibilities, including the crucial jobs of general recruitment and HR, will be fully entrusted to Departments. As set out above, the Cabinet Office-led Fast Stream will be replaced by Department-level recruitment schemes.

However, there is an important role for the centre with respect to senior recruitment. The Government People Group currently employs around 12,000 people, against a Civil Service headcount of 550,000 - a ratio of 0.02:1 HR professionals per employee, double the ratio of large private sector organisations. This team will be radically slimmed down and entirely repurposed, away from HR - the management of staff, which is properly a Departmental responsibility - and towards elite talent acquisition. It will sit in the DCS and be a top priority for the CEO.

Its job will be to find the best people from outside government to serve the Crown. It will ensure more domain-expert recruitment and develop more innovative approaches to pay.

The DCS will also develop training programmes for senior civil servants, and possibly partner with a leading university to establish a campus, similar to the Defence Academy at Shrivenham, to help senior officials develop the skills they need for leadership. Meanwhile, Labour’s plan for a state-run ‘school of government’ is a backwards step, creating an expensive echo chamber where the Civil Service trains and evaluates itself and which is lacking the external disruption and input that is urgently needed.

The other key function of DCS will be improvement of procurement across Whitehall. As with HR, procurement properly belongs with Departments. We need more domain-expertise and commercial savvy in procurement teams - to avoid being ‘end-run’ in contract negotiations by highly expert suppliers - and we need more flexibility and innovation to ensure that the government buys goods and services that deliver real value as fast as it is needed.

The danger of a delegated and flexible approach, however, is anomalous or even corrupt practice by procurement teams. The DCS will include a ‘procurement hit squad’ empowered to constantly review contract decisions by Departments, to share learning, improve quality and identify possible corruption. It is expected that the CEO and leader of this function in the DCS will be held closely to account by the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons.

A Reform government would take the development of the Civil Service seriously. While we will need to scramble a large number of experts and allies to assist with the ‘emergency reset’ of Britain immediately after the general election, our aim is to build a better state for the long-term. The benefits of a high-performing DCS will not be felt for some years. We need to make the state fit for the crises which we cannot predict, but which are coming.

To this end, Reform is actively looking now for the future leader of the DCS. It is certain this individual will be a non-civil servant. They may have some experience of government, but this is not necessary. What is necessary is extensive experience turning around large organisations, delivering major headcount reductions and improvements in the quality and productivity of the team. If this is you, please get in touch.