A bold speech by Nigel Farage. What though can he do in a hundred days that the Tories failed to do in fourteen years? A great deal, if it is actually done.
Bold though it was, the speech was not stunning nor as ambitious as it could have been: his conference address, also centred on the Hundred Days, had much more meat. The tone makes him sound dynamic. At the conference, Mr Farage talked of declaring a state of emergency – which should cause panic. (Our Civil Contingencies Act is a Blairite Labour imposition, and as dangerous and unprincipled as that sounds.) It appears though that Nigel did not mean bypassing Parliament, just getting Parliament to sit 24 hours a day to get things through, which is laudable. There is a lot to be fixed from decades of stupidity, and as soon as possible.
In a hundred days, if a minister fails in his task, he will be sacked, says Nigel. Now – define failure criteria. In fact, defining failure criteria is a good principle for the Civil Service too. Whitehall would never wear it.
Pop-policies were on display in Plymouth: income tax exemptions for reservists (a good, populist idea), expelling Spanish trawlers from our waters, and of course withdrawing from the Convention européenne des droits de l’homme.
Does Nigel Farage actually know what to do to save Britain though? He is walking into the same trap the Conservatives always have: mean good things, make a few token changes to what you can, and wonder why everything is still a bit rubbish.
Pop-policies are window dressing for elections. Actual reforming action is in detail and action that does not ring from the soapbox. That is needed in a Hundred Days, but it needs preparation long beforehand.
When the election is done and the victorious leader goes to the Palace to be appointed to form a government, the system works fast: a new minister goes to his Ministry, is introduced to officials, is told what to do, received a red box full of work, and soon his feet are under the desk and he slips into the routine laid down for him, and two undred days pass. When he presses a policy, he must accept from his officials advice on why it cannot be done, or the endless steps required for it to be done, at each step a possible derailment. That is not to say that ministers do not get their policies through. They do: otherwise how would Labour be able to ruin the country as effectively as they are. It is though quite possible to bumble to the end of the Parliamentary term with nothing done that you had intended.
Danny Kruger, kicking things off, talked of trade unions and civil servants organising themselves to bypass Reform ministers. That would be a ridiculous allegation, except that it is proven and done openly, so it is not a conspiracy theory, but reporting an actual conspiracy. In those circumstances, new ministers will not be able to rely on strong memos and guidance: every action commanded by ministerial fiat or Act of Parliament has to be put into action by officials and the ‘shallow state’ and can end in nothing. To be effective they will need outside contractors, abolition of layers of dulling bureaucracy (and withdrawal of the salary fund that would allow officials to reconstruct it on the sly), and a micro-intervention unit that can reach down through the layers, damning the chain of command, to direct actual action – and to pick out and sack emplaced wokeists.
None of that was in Nigel Farage’s speech, if on occasion he got close, but he focussed on the macro not the micro, and the broad stroke, not actual action. If a Conservative or Reform government is to achieve what it promises, it needs a solid “Project ’29” and a list of actions to be rolled out not in a Hundred Days but in a Hundred Hours.
See also
- Principles of Project ’29
- Privatise the Civil Service
- The Shallow State
- Fixing minutiae
- A cabal of its enemies
- Sir Humphrey’s logic
- The Constitution: mice undermine the wall
- Of the Difference of Manners
- The rule of lawyers
- A Powers and Bodies Act
- Murmuring the judges:
- Wednesbury reform will not reverse the Cherry / Miller decision
Books
- The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham (former senior Lord of Appeal)
- Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics by Jonathan Sumption (former Justice of the Supreme Court)
- Constitutional & Administrative Law by Neil Parpworth
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
