Polling, focus-grouping, door-knocking, everyone’s own personal experiences confirm the problems with Britain in 2025. Nothing works properly. It’s impossible to build anything. The streets are dirty and unsafe. Taxes and prices are far too high. Immigration is changing our country for the worse and far too fast. Mad dogmas get adopted by our national institutions, while we are chronically exposed to multi-factor threats including economic collapse and foreign attack. We are becoming poor, sick and unhappy. There is a malaise over Britain.

These problems are complex but the effective cause of them is simple. Since 1997 we have had governments that, firstly, don’t respect let alone share the attitudes of the country they govern and, secondly, aren’t properly in charge of the state. From Blair to Sunak our Prime Ministers have succumbed more or less enthusiastically to a raft of ideas – internationalism, identitarianism – that are alien to the instincts and wishes of the British people; and at the same time, in the service of these ideas, they have performed the most extraordinary abdication of power since Parliament handed control of the Army to Oliver Cromwell in 1645.

The Self-Denying Ordinance actually improved the effectiveness of the military, getting aristocratic amateurs out of command and allowing Cromwell to create the New Model Army and win the Civil War. Our generation of leaders have done the opposite. They have created a vast new class of inept decision-makers who, unaccountable to Parliament or even to the Government, have progressively snarled the country in a spaghetti of bureaucracy, ideological nonsense and vested interests – all under the pious rubric of ‘due process’, ‘operational independence’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘the rule of law’.

These sonorous slogans, the shibboleths of the lanyard class who really govern Britain, are put into the mouths of politicians and commentators to denounce anyone, like Reform UK, who want to actually change the way our country works. Yet the reality is these good and important principles – the principles of good government – are themselves betrayed by the lanyard class and their leaders. We have stupid decisions made by unqualified amateurs and second-rate bureaucrats; the plain tolerance of law-breaking; and a system that openly serves the interests of foreign citizens and even foreign regimes rather than our own.

I was at a street stall for Reform UK this weekend and one of our activists said to me, about the Labour government and the Tories – ‘they call themselves the grown-ups but they’re not. They’re just playing at being in government. We need to be the real grown-ups and actually take charge and make things better.’ 

He is right. 

This is the British malaise: our leaders despise the ordinary instincts of ordinary people, and our purported leaders – the ministers elected by the public – are not the real leaders anyway. By contrast, Reform UK will be a government of national preference – preferring the ideas, the institutions, and the people of the United Kingdom over the ideas, institutions and citizens of elsewhere – and we will restore the basis of our democracy, putting ministers properly in charge of the government and answerable to Parliament for their decisions.

That’s the path to prosperity for our country – to make this amazing nation thrive again, with all the natural talent and pent-up passion that is in our communities and our businesses; the decency and industry that still, despite everything, characterizes the British people; the huge opportunities to grow our economy, unite our country and make us happy, healthy and wealthy once again.

The precondition for all that – indeed, the only part of our plan that is totally out of our control – is to get a majority of MPs elected to Parliament who are committed to the principles of national preference and political restoration.