The rise of Reform

This feels like an almost revolutionary moment. With MAGA in power, and with Reform, AfD, Rassemblement National, etc on the rise across the "western" world, something is clearly happening.

What is the common ideology? What is this in response to? Does it make any sense and how can we understand it all? The next several blogs are my attempts to answer these questions. But to introduce them, I'll say that I think there are four policy pillars of this "movement". These are:

1) Anti NetZero

2) Anti DEI

3) Low tax

4) Nationalism

I think the first is easiest to think about and dismiss: it makes no sense! There is no ideology here, just wilful stupidity. I'll have a look at this in more detail in the next blog, and follow up blogs will cover each of these four items, followed by another looking at why this feels like an almost revolutionary moment. First of all though, it's helpful to define what I mean by ideology here. It's nothing to do with agreed upon facts! Rather ideology is about values: equity vs opportunity; importance of tradition vs openness to change; communitarianism vs individualism; valorising the perspective of workers/producers, or consumers/service users; etc. We can agree on facts but propose different policy based on ideological differences. And none of these ideological differences play a role in this Anti NetZero position.

The revolutions of the 17th, 18th, & 19th centuries were against the absolutism of the divine right of kings, and for rights of the individual, equality before the law, and protections from the predations of the state. The further revolutions of 19th & 20th centuries were against the unequal distribution of wealth and power, and for a communal system of economics and governance. This coming revolution is against something (it is absolutely the case that society is not working well, and we still have those unequal distributions of wealth and power) but it doesn't seem to be for anything other than "common sense", which as I'll show over the next few blogs, seems to almost equate to wilful stupidity. 

Previous revolutions started from high principle, had some success, and then failed when they got stupid. For example, the great liberal French Revolution went off the rails when it started to give in to the demands of the Sans Culotte for price controls on essentials that meant the producers and distributors of these essentials had no incentive to produce or distribute - all the Revolution could do instead of successfully satisfying these demands, was execute anyone who raised their head against them in the Terror. And the great social Russian Revolution took a dark turn when any disagreement with Lenin, in particular that of the SRs, was deemed to be a factional split from the leadership that was to be purged. This current "revolution" however has little principle, and starts from stupid... 

One optimistic point about this though is that this stupidity becomes obvious quickly. So Trump's popularity is fast declining as he oscillates his tariff madness. Perhaps the best thing ever to happen to Reform is to get elected to local government in various parts of England in May 25, maybe they will quickly become hated when it becomes obvious they have no idea how to help people justifiably scunnered with the status quo?