Reform UK Parliamentary Candidate for Salisbury.

1.     Reform UK’s manifesto (Our Contract with You[1]) sets out, in summary form, the policies which, if elected, Reform UK would carry out in government. This personal manifesto, consistent with the above, takes a closer look at the most important steps which His Majesty’s Government (“HMG”) must take to prevent our country sinking yet further into decline in every aspect of our national life and international standing. I do not propose to take pot shots at any of the parties which have held power in my lifetime. That is unproductive. At aged 74, looking back is a mistake. One must always look forward – especially if you have children and grandchildren, as I do. The policies described below are all interdependent. The order in which I address them does not imply any order of importance. Nor have I covered every possible topic. They are all important, but let’s start with the place of the UK in the world, that is our foreign and trade policies.

2.     Foreign Policy & Trade Policy.

Nothing can be achieved unless we are a prosperous country. We depend upon international trade, not just in goods but also in services, including education and tourism. Foreign and trade policies go together. It should be uncontroversial to assert that HMG’s foreign and trade policies should be exclusively based upon what is in the interests of the British people. We are, supposedly, a sovereign nation, after all. But we are not sovereign in those policies. We used to do what Brussels told us to do (and up to a point, still do, - bear in mind that the European Commission and NATO headquarters are both in Brussels and work hand in glove with each other). Now, we just do what Washington tells us to do. That must stop. By following Washington, we have contrived to fall out with the biggest country on the globe, by land mass, and with all the biggest countries by population. The UK invariably finds itself voting in the United Nations with a small minority and against the majority of other countries (193 of them), both in the Security Council and in the General Assembly. Enemies are not born: they are made. It is not in our interests to fall out with Russia, China, India, most of Africa, most of South America and of the Middle East and a large part of South East Asia. We seem to have lost our diplomatic skills. So the first 2 steps would be (1) to summon up a list of all treaties, conventions, security guarantees and any other international commitments, both public and secret and examine them and give immediate notice of the UK’s withdrawal from those which are not demonstrably in the UK national interest and (2) lift all sanctions on everybody. I have personally observed the effect of sanctions in both Cuba and Syria. All they do is to make poor people, yet poorer. Think of the 13 sanctions packages on Russia (over 2000 separate sanctions). All that has done is to make us poorer and Russia stronger. The same will be true of the currently proposed sanctions on China. Take the current threat to confiscate Russian state moneys invested and held in the West. Apart from being theft (which is a crime in all societies), all that will do is yet further damage the City of London as a world class financial services hub. So why have we gone along with all this self-harm? The answer is that Washington ordered us to do all the above. That must stop. So an independent pro UK foreign policy should be (a) to make friends and to restore good or at least co-operative relations with everybody and (b) do everything possible to remove domestic obstacles to international trade and to encourage trade growth for the UK. Of course some sectors of vital strategic importance, such as agriculture, energy and our own defence manufacturing, may need special protection whether by subsidy or tariffs and perhaps some heavy industry as well such as steel production and shipbuilding. But the default position for the UK should be that we are open for trade and business with absolutely everybody.

3.     Constitutional Reform.

We are all democrats. We prefer democracy to all other forms of government known to us. But that is usually the sum total of our thinking about this topic. We should think more deeply. What form of democracy is currently best for us? How is the existing constituency, first past the post, method of electing our 650 MPs actually working out for us? As soon as one thinks more deeply about democracy as applied in the UK (mirrored only by Belarus in Europe), then the conclusion is that for at least this century – and probably for longer – it has failed to produce competent MPs or competent governments, which actually reflected the will of the majority of the people. Think of just a couple of the existing faults. A particular interest group, if concentrated in a few constituencies, will get a voice in the House of Commons. A much larger group with a particular view, if spread across the country, may get no voice at all. The current system results in the 2 main parties having an iron grip on government, simply taking it in turns to occupy the government benches. That was always wrong but it has got worse this century. At least in the 20^th century there were real policy differences between the 2 main parties.  But now they are indistinguishable. There is also the widely held view – not a view held by me, but a real and understandable view nonetheless – that if you are a voter in a constituency safely held by the party which you do not support – then your vote for the party which you do support, is a wasted vote. We must change that.  So that means a new voting system based upon proportional representation. There is no perfect system of proportional representation. Some, such as the Single Transferable Vote system, lead to very poor and in fact, unrepresentative outcomes. So although PR too has faults – they can be mitigated – I favour the whole UK single vote for the party of your choice, system. Then seats in the House of Commons are allocated to each party (with a minimum base vote of 5%) in accordance with the result. Reform UK is in favour of introducing a proportional representation system.  One of the problems of our existing system is that very long term projects – and many necessary projects are 10+ years in coming to fruition – is that governing parties are only really keen on projects whose benefits are visible before the next election. Proportional Representation would at least minimise this tendency. Then there is the vexed question of doing away with the unelected House of Lords. That must be done. Apart from its undemocratic nature, it allows for a corrupting influence upon the patronage of the Prime Minister. But there is an argument for having a revising second chamber. That could be achieved by each party choosing elected MPs in accordance with the proportion of their national vote to serve for that Parliament in the House of Lords (no need to change the name) with the total being say 200 or 250 (making much more space in the Commons) and, if they want, adopting for that Parliament the style of being a Peer. They would still be MPs but for one parliament, serving in the House of Lords, which would retain its existing powers – largely powers of delay and suggested amendments to Bills. This would also do away with those occasions of difficulty and delay when the government has a majority in the Commons but not in the Lords. We must also address the inevitable tensions which have arisen and will only worsen between Parliament and the comparatively newly created Supreme Court – but that is a subject of complexity outside the scope of this personal manifesto. Local and Regional governance, together with governance in Wales, Scotland and London (and other major cities) also need a thorough review. Frankly, it is not working well and has led to much unnecessary expense and bureaucracy. My own view is that purely local matters should be decided locally (one tier of government) and everything else should be decided nationally. More government is not better government nor more democratic. It is merely confusing and expensive. There are also far too many unelected centres of power in the UK – unelected and therefore unaccountable. There is no single unaccountable quango whose work could not be done by a ministry accountable, through the minister, to Parliament. All should be abolished. Finally, but essentially, nothing worthwhile can be achieved on this or on many other topics without reversing the Blair’s government’s destruction of our English constitution. He imported the disastrous French constitutional idea of the separation of powers. This has undermined the sovereignty of an elected House of Commons and it has enabled, among other things, the penetration into all aspects of our national life, of absurd ideas, especially cultural ones, into our national life. This will require a Restoration of Parliamentary Sovereignty Act. By this Act, every piece of legislation which both seeks to bind future Parliaments and which hands over power to other power centres (e.g. The Supreme Court and the many quangos and foreign courts) would be repealed.

4.     Defence.

War is the ultimate evil. It is to be avoided by diplomacy. Only when that fails, do wars come.  In my 74 year lifetime, British troops have been fighting somewhere on the planet in almost every year, perhaps every year, since 1950. Most of those wars were voluntary. Very few, such as in and around The Falkland Islands in 1982 against Argentina were forced upon us – and even that war was a failure in diplomacy in not making clear to the Argentinian government that we would fight if they invaded and meanwhile strengthening the island defences (in fact we did the opposite). Other examples in my lifetime, which were the product of Empire, where war was forced upon us, were the fight with the Chinese communists in Malaya (which we won in 1960) and the confrontation with Indonesia (which we won in 1966). Given that we are an island with, now, very few overseas territories to look after, such wars will be rare. So the first rule in foreign policy must be to avoid war. And the second rule should be, we will not fight voluntary wars. We should only go to war if our island or, conceivably, one of our overseas territories (like Bermuda) or our really vital interests are attacked. As far as war is concerned, I am a Westphalian. With apologies to the historians among those reading, what does that mean?  Here is the short form answer. In 1618, Europe was a patchwork of essentially a multitude of separate states (with a very wide variety of titles). There was the Holy Roman Empire but that was in decline and its authority was weak or non- existent in fact. In all those states there was either a majority of Roman Catholics or a majority of Protestants. In 1618 the rulers of those states observed the persecution of their co-religionists in other states and decided that we must do something – something must be done. In the result that meant war – every Protestant majority state went to war with every Roman Catholic majority state and vice versa in support of their co-religionists. There then followed 30 years of arguably the worst war in Europe so far. Then in 1648, not the sons, but the grandsons of those who had started this general war decided that it had to stop. They met in Westphalia and agreed peace. The essence of that peace was the exact opposite of the we must do something – something must be done principle. The new principle was this: what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas, that is, non-intervention. What happens in Country A, is the business only of Country A, because the alternative is war and war is the ultimate evil.  And if country A attacks country B, country C does not join in to help country B because then country D will join in to help country A and what began as a fight between 2 countries ends up as a fight between many countries. We have abandoned that principle designed either to avoid war or to limit it. Now we are firmly back into the we must do something – something must be done, era.

And in our case, what is the basis of this return to the we must do something – something must be done belief (obviously not, these days, religion)? Is it to support the Rules Based International Order, or is it to maintain the Western (i.e. American) hegemony, that is the Unipolar World (1990 to 2020) or is it to spread democracy or to spread Western Liberal Values or to uphold our view of human rights or perhaps to knock out rivals before they get too strong? Your answer is as good as any. Whatever the answer(s), abandoning the Westphalian principle and re-embracing the, we must do something – something must be done principle, as we have, will inevitably involve the UK in voluntary wars (and it has) and perhaps catastrophic ones. We should return to the Westphalian principle. So that is the first principle of a defence policy.

The second principle is this. We are an island and a trading nation. Our island is difficult to invade (except apparently by thousands of young men in inflatable dinghies crossing the channel from France). Once, we were the tiger in the jungle. That era has gone. The only other animal in the jungle which no other animal attacks, is the porcupine. We must train and equip an army, navy and air force not for the purpose of projecting power into other countries, i.e. attacking them (aircraft carriers are nothing more than floating coffins – even if ours were seaworthy and equipped, which they are not) but so as to make any attack on us, let alone an invasion, both impracticable and likely to result in massive damage on the attacker. That will be a herculean task and involve some bright thinking – which has not been forthcoming from our senior military so far – at least not from those officers or retired officers who have written newspaper articles or spoken in public over the last 2+ years. Their commentary on the origins, causes, progress and likely outcome of President Putin’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been throughout disastrously wrong and on occasions, laughably wrong.

Perhaps the wars of the future will involve massive drone, missile and robot battles with artificial intelligence and electronic jamming of the opponent’s signals and cyber warfare generally, playing a huge role. Some real human intelligence must be invoked here.

But there are 2 other essential aspects of defence policy. The first is this – who is going to fight?   Well, obviously the current generation of 18-30 year old young men and women will be called up to fight. The older generations will be in intelligence and logistics or serving as senior officers or in other vital areas of national life, in any future wars. But why should our 18-30 year old generation fight? They are massively in debt – they have useless and expensive degrees – well paid jobs are very scarce - they cannot find anywhere affordable to live – let alone buy. They see many others, less deserving in their view (and in mine) kept in idleness at the taxpayers’ expense. Why should they fight for a bleak present and a bleaker future? This must be addressed or we can forget about defence. I have 2 ideas here (other ideas very welcome). The first is not only to abolish all interest on student loans, but to abolish all the debt, with tax breaks for those who have already paid back part or all of their loans, going forward. Frankly, spending part of the defence budget doing this, would be of far more use in supporting our national defence than spending yet more taxpayers’ money buying a few expensive, fragile and useless high tech weapons from Raytheon. Without a patriotic army of young men and women, proud of and willing to fight (and in some cases die) for their country, all else is mere froth. The second step to help this 18-30 generation, is to address the housing crisis which I deal with in greater detail below, but which requires a massive reform of property law – at least as far reaching as were The law of Property Act and the Land Registration Act of 1925 in their day.

And there are other crucial aspects of contemplating what needs to be done to be able to fight a war like that in the Ukraine against a serious opponent (not the futile counter insurgency type wars as in Afghanistan). We need, but don’t have, a military weapons and equipment industry in the UK capable of being able to surge production in times of need. At present we import much of our weaponry or essential parts of our weaponry from overseas, for example, parachutes (America) and tank barrels (Germany). And our own defence industries are, (this is required under UK company law) profit driven for shareholders and not purpose driven. This has to change and means taking existing UK defence contractors at least partly into public ownership and setting up new ones to make our own equipment, so that we do not rely upon imports. That is a minimum 10 year project because we no longer have the necessary skilled workforce. That requires a massive shift in the education system away from the arts and into technology, engineering and all the sciences and into project management.

Then there is the fact that our troops are woefully underpaid and provided with lamentable housing (and our veterans are not looked after). Just to take an example. The house in Tidworth in which I lived (aged about 12) was allocated to my father – who was then a major. Now that same house is allocated to a brigadier. That same massive fall in quality of housing has taken place across all ranks from the general to the private soldier. That must be put right, especially throughout all the junior ranks.

We have the smallest army for 300 years. Our air force is inadequate to defend these our island and, frankly, our navy is in such a lamentable state as to be embarrassing. We have no missile defence. More money, in itself, simply is not the answer – indeed without the changes outlined above – it is not even part of the answer. When you hear a government (here or in Europe) boast of increasing defence spending, ask yourself whether that will do any good – because without such changes as outlined above – it will not. It will just make the shareholders of the weapons manufacturers, richer. As a final point, we need to address the over mighty and increasingly unaccountable intelligence services (it is even worse in America). They have become politicised and we need to do something about that – albeit that reforming them (and the police) will be a somewhat scary enterprise.

5.     Energy (and agriculture).

You are entitled to know my views straightforwardly expressed and this is not a discussion paper in which I should rehearse this topic at length – which I have studied. In short, I do not buy the man made climate warming from CO2 emissions thesis. Net zero by 2030 (or at all) for the UK is dangerous lunacy on stilts. Wind and solar power sources for our national energy needs are completely useless. The long term future energy needs of the UK require nuclear generated electricity coupled with, meanwhile, coal and oil fired power stations to generate electricity. That means a complete reversal of current UK energy policies (which affect agriculture particularly as well as everyone else). As to agriculture, I know 2 things. The only experts on farming are farmers. And secondly the UK only produces less than half its food needs. We import the rest. This is unwise and expensive, to say the least. I will support every policy designed to increase food production of every sort. Rewilding and wind and solar “farms” are out. Production, subsidised if need be, is in.  Farmers need low energy costs and low overhead costs, such as fertiliser (there is plenty of potash under the ground in Yorkshire). We must also address the current monopoly stranglehold acquired by the major supermarket chains – which depresses prices for farmers. There is also the fact that far too much of our agricultural land is concentrated in the hands of just a few owners, with the actual farmers being tenants. That is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. We should give those tenants a statutory right to buy. There is also an almost unseen war going on being waged by government against the small independent, often specialist, family food producers, such as mushroom growers. We are on the side of such growers who are being suppressed by regulation. There is an interesting legal fight going on in Pennsylvania where the state authorities are trying to eradicate the Amish people’s farming (their main source of income) which is a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. If that starts to happen here, Reform UK will be fully behind the small and independent farmer. In short, Reform UK will be 100% supportive of farmers – especially family farmers and tenant farmers – and, on energy, 100% committed to ensuring a stable low cost supply of electricity for everybody.

6.     The economy.

Senator John McCain very stupidly described Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country”. So what are we, a hedge fund masquerading as a country? Do not be mislead by figures for our GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The City of London has a GDP of over £500 billion, but it produces absolutely nothing – it is a worldwide financial (and associated professions) services centre and is both fragile and in decline. The GDP of our manufacturing sector is only about the same size as the GDP of the City of London, which is absurd. Where is our heavy, indeed nearly all our manufacturing industry? The answer is – gone overseas. And do not be deceived by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) figures, which is GDP divided by the population size. Published PPP figures are useless because nobody knows what the true population of the UK actually is.  But you know that it is much bigger than the census figures. Cumulative inflation since 2010 (the period of successive conservative governments) is 60%. Think about that. What cost you £1 in 2010 now costs you £1.60 and in sectors that really matter to most people, namely food, energy and housing costs, inflation since 2010 has been worse. HMG will try and persuade you that inflation is under control. That is false. The annual inflation figure takes as its start point, the price of an item 12 months before. If you do that, there is an inbuilt mathematical fact that the rate of annual increase in % terms will go down. A more accurate test for inflation is to look at the relative cost over a much longer period of an item. I have done that above for the 14 years of the Tory government. 60% inflation. Look at your currency: just 10 years ago, your £1 bought you US$1.72. Now it buys you US$1.25. And that decline would be much greater but for the fact that the US$ has itself been in decline against other major world currencies. When I first went to China, £1 bought me 15 yuan. Now it buys 8 yuan. Forget the figures for a moment. We can all sense that the UK economy is in decline and we all have a strong feeling that the decline may be irreversible and terminal.  So what can and must be done?

Restoring the UK’s economy into a stable and robust one is a very long term project, starting with a wholesale switch over in education from teaching useless subjects into teaching useful ones – a project requiring the restoration of our technical colleges and implementing a national apprenticeship system. But the government has tools immediately available. The underlying principle must be: work should be profitable and idleness should be discouraged.  First, the tax system must be ruthlessly simplified.  Whatever the form of income – dividends, rent, corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax or whatever – the rate should be the same. And that rate should stay the same (somewhere between 20% and 30%) whatever the size of the income. Maintaining revenue and supporting policies of encouraging work and investment, can be undertaken by having variable tax start points. On income tax it might be £20,000 (Reform UK policy). But take inheritance tax as a different example. The first £325,000 of an inheritance is currently free of tax but above that figure, the rate is 40%.  Reducing the rate to 20% but applying it to a lower figure (perhaps to zero) would maintain tax revenue and would bring it in line with all the other taxes – though, as always with change, there would be winners and losers. Secondly there has to be wholesale reform of and repeal of inhibiting regulations – this in itself is a huge task for an incoming Reform UK government. But consider – we are not living in a capitalist, free enterprise society. We are living in a corporatist almost monopolistic society ruled by globalist and massive corporations for whom the regulatory nightmare for new and medium sized businesses is the perfect environment for the big corporations to stifle competition. Then there is the size of the public sector which employs 6 million adults – not counting outsourced workers doing government work (from Deloittes to Serco). That is ludicrous. There are also 9 million adults in the UK who are not working and who are not looking for work. It is simply not possible to grow a stable, robust and prosperous economy with figures like that. Reform UK will address those problems. The number employed by government directly or indirectly (i.e. the taxpayer) will be reduced and every incentive and disincentive to get the bulk of those 9 million non-working adults back into work, will be employed. Finally, government spending and borrowing simply must be reduced. We have set out our immediate policies for the reduction in government spending, for the first 100 days, on page 2 of Our Contract with You. My own pet target would be the various government procurement departments (especially the Ministry of Defence) which go into negotiations (with your money) with the private sector, like lambs to the slaughter. Consider that the Ministry of Defence procurement department has spent an average of £50 billion of your money every year since 2000 and with disastrous results. So, in a sentence, Reform UK’s economic policy is to free up the energies of the hard working, law abiding, patriotic and in many cases, entrepreneurial members of our society – who are still in the majority and we must do all this, whilst they are still in the majority, which will not be the case for very much longer.

7.     Transport.

We are geographically a small country. It should be easy and cheap to move freely around. Of course we can all see with our own eyes that the population is too large – though nobody actually knows how large that actual population is – or if they do, they are not saying.  But the fact remains that transport in the UK is not, in principle, a difficult problem to address. Take the roads – full of potholes and on many occasions and in many places, gridlocked with traffic. And what is the response from local and national government? It is to declare endless war on the motorist. Under a Reform UK government, that war will stop. Freedom of movement is an essential liberty. But there are over 40 million cars in the UK with over 30 million on the road at peak times. That is too many, but why? Motoring in 2024 is miserable and expensive. In large part the answer is that the alternative of travelling by train (and bus) is not an attractive or even available option. The railway system (thanks to Beeching) is no longer widespread enough. The track and rolling stock is in disrepair. The service is unreliable, incredibly complex and hugely expensive and, lets not forget, that far too much freight goes by road which should go by rail. A huge programme of restoration of the railways is required and we must abandon absurdly expensive and essentially useless projects like HS2. That means taking all the railway and related railway track and rolling stock owning companies, back into at least 50% public ownership (with the other 50% owned by British pension funds and other British financial institutions). If we make travelling by rail cheap and reliable, many will leave their cars at home. That requires a simple fare structure and a much cheaper one. The London underground fare system, which although still too complex, with too many zones, geographical and by time, can be adapted for a National Rail Network. A simple national zoning system with perhaps 6 zones for the whole country, with single day tickets covering, say from 1 to up to 6 zones, at cheap prices, with heavy discounts only for the young and elderly. If you look now for the cost of a single train ticket from Salisbury to Waterloo, every train appears to have a different ticket price, ranging from around £29 to over £40. This is absurd and even the lowest cost is far too high. A national effort to upgrade the railway network and to make it cheap and reliable will go a long way towards fewer journeys by car. The same approach should be adopted towards freight to reduce the number of HGVs on the roads. As to bus and coach travel, the bus system works quite well in large cities and the intercity coach system works also satisfactorily. But outside the cities, the country bus system is deplorable and in many areas, non-existent. That too has to change. The current government’s approach (both local and national) is to make life miserable for the motorist (partly driven by the absurd end of the world climate change nonsense). That policy is wrong. Reform UK’s approach is to lay off the motorist and to offer more attractive alternatives.

8.     Law and Order & the Civil and Criminal Justice systems.

In my professional lifetime (1972-2024), both the civil and criminal justice systems have gradually deteriorated and are now broken. You all know that the criminal justice system is broken but I can assure you that so too is the civil justice system. Some of the causes and some of the remedies are common to both systems: some apply only to one of them. Let us start with the criminal justice system. What are the purposes of having a criminal justice system? The first is to deter criminal behaviour. The second is to punish the convicted, protect the public and attempt to reform the criminal. The more that levels of crime rise, the more difficult it is to achieve those purposes. At present, the level of criminality in the UK is of crisis proportions. Why? Well, first, rising levels of crime are self-generating. The more crime there is, so the rate of detection falls and the police are unable, for time and manpower reasons, to investigate and catch the criminal. The police have to set priorities. It is a vicious circle. In London, the police do not investigate non-personally violent burglaries at all – they are simply logged. This means that deterrence is non-existent and known by intending burglars, to be non-existent. Secondly, there are far too many people living in the UK who have no loyalty towards, let alone love of their country. I address this elsewhere. Thirdly, many men – and violent crime is largely a male activity – have been brought up in a household with no father to set an example and to impose discipline. Nor do many schools sufficiently demonstrate to the young, how important it is for the sake of living in a civilised society, that you must follow the rules. Then there is the economy. Theft of whatever variety is currently profitable. That is a fact. But in a booming economy, acquisitive crimes fall. But these are all huge social and economic problems which will take years to address. An improvement to the criminal justice system itself can be accomplished now.

Here are some bullet points.

1.               Far too many crimes go to the Crown Court for jury trial. That must be hugely reduced.

2.               No more lay justices should be appointed, for the time being. That system is far too slow. Existing lay justices can confine themselves to and clear the backlog of motoring cases and other offences, like TV licence offences.

3.               Many more professional judges, now called District Judges (Crime) - which are the same as judges previously referred to as Stipendiary Magistrates – should be appointed and with much greater powers of sentence – up from 6 months imprisonment to 5 years, per offence.

4.               Experienced police officers (as was the case in the past) should be able to present the prosecution’s case in lesser offences to the District Judge – theft for example – themselves, without involving the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

5.               The epidemic of shoplifting must be addressed urgently. The police must be ordered to make this a priority. A fast arrest, a fast trial and then on conviction, a 1 month custodial sentence for a first offence, a 3 month sentence for a second offence and then a mandatory 6 month sentence for all subsequent offences. A society which does not defend itself will not and will not deserve, to survive.

6.               Criminal legal aid should be abolished. Those accused of a crime, if they wish to be represented, should pay for their own defence. Those who have no money to do that, can instruct a Public Defender. The CPS should be changed to the Crown Prosecution and Defence Service (CPDS) so that those lawyers now only prosecuting can and should also defend. This has always been standard practice in barristers’ chambers. It is nothing new or difficult.

7.               For the more serious offences – burglary, rape, grievous bodily harm, supplying Class A drugs and many other serious crimes, including major frauds, must attract very long sentences. This will require a major prison building programme but if the fight against crime is to be taken seriously, this must be done.

8.               Many newly introduced “crimes”, particularly those which infringe upon freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, must be abolished and the police ordered to deal only with crimes that actually affect the public.

9.               Now my next proposal is controversial. Criminal Records should be publicly accessible – perhaps on payment of a small fee. In principle, but not in practice, they already are. Criminal cases in Salisbury Crown Court, for example, are public. Anybody can attend and make a note of the names of those convicted and over the months and years, such a member of the public could build up a long list of those convicted of crimes committed in Salisbury and in the surrounding areas. Obviously nobody can do that. If country wide criminal records were available to everybody to search, this would have a chilling effect on criminals and enable law abiding people to know amongst whom they lived or proposed to live. Would you buy a house in a city if you knew that there were 50 convicted burglars living within a 1000 yard radius of the house you were thinking of buying?  Obviously not. You would choose a house where there were only 20 such burglars (zero burglars within a 1000 yard radius of a city house anywhere in the country is impossible). The argument against my proposal is that the rehabilitation of a convicted person into society would be made more difficult. I do not buy that, but even if true, so what? We are fighting a war against crime which, frankly, we are losing. Every weapon available to society must be used if the benefit outweighs the downside.

10.             And, of course, there must be wholesale reform of the police. Many Home Secretaries have tried this and failed. The police have become an “over mighty” subject and have lost the confidence of the British people. This is not wholly the fault of the police. They are plagued by far too much paperwork, they are faced almost daily with new laws and new priorities and they are badly led, having no clear officer corps. And they are faced by large communities in many cities which are openly hostile to them (and by extension, generally hostile to the state) and the police have to cope with widespread serious criminal gangs of a violent disposition. Many of these are tourist criminal gangs and are from places like Albania. And here is a typical absurdity. The Judge, for example, has to treat a 60 year old Albanian criminal as a man of good character unless the Crown can prove otherwise – which with criminals from many foreign countries is impossible.   The burden of proof here must be reversed. It must be for the convicted criminal to prove that this was his first offence. So in short the police need help – such as unrestricted stop and search powers -  as well as reform: a huge task for an incoming Reform UK government.

9.     Civil justice, the legal professions and the Judiciary.

Happily most people avoid getting involved in civil court cases – very wise in 2024 Britain. But a functioning civil justice system is also essential for society. It is also economically important that London retain its position as a major international centre for commercial work. But current civil procedure is far too complex and far too expensive. I have many proposals to improve this state of affairs – too complex to deal with in this manifesto. The aim is to make the process between bringing (or defending) a civil claim and its resolution by a Judge, speedy and cheap. Civil procedure is a classic example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. The legal professions should be restored to being self-governing professions. This involves abolishing the unelected quangos which now govern them and restoring the Bar Council (and no doubt other professions as well) to elected self-governance. Also 2 further reforms involving the judiciary are needed. First, in 2000, the pensionable service for High Court Judges was increased from 15 years to 20. This has resulted in a fall in the quality of the High Court Bench. This change (which was actually a pay cut – a pension is merely deferred pay) must be reversed. In addition, the current rule that full time Judges cannot return to private practice must also be abolished.

Health and the NHS.

We must all agree that our National Health Service is in need to reform. Reform UK has very vibrant and transformative proposals to rescue the NHS from terminal decline – whilst maintaining the principle that health care must be free at the point of delivery. Our Contract with You has (pages 6 and 7) workable and effective proposals which I commend to you.

Immigration.

This is out of control and has been so for many decades. Net legal immigration in 2022 and 2023 was cumulatively over 1.3 million. What the illegal figure for that period is, can only be guessed. This is a catastrophe for the British people. Reform UK will stop it, allowing only essential legal immigration and will deport the illegals. But then there is what might be described as the elephant in the room. There are around 4 million UK citizens, who will always be here, who will never assimilate. Not surprisingly, they congregate into their own communities. There are 4 relevant factors namely (i) ethnicity (2) language (3) religion and (4) culture. Where all 4 factors are different from the existing society, assimilation will never happen. So we have to legislate to integrate.  This means legislation to promote the speaking of English by using both incentives (free English lessons) and disincentives (no public funds to enable non English speakers to live here with no need to learn English). It also means legislation to outlaw any aspects of alien religions and cultures which conflict with UK standards. Free speech and expression on all matters, including religion, must be enforced by law. Animal welfare must be addressed by legislation. Competing legal systems must be outlawed. There are many steps which a Reform UK government can take, by legislation, to protect the British way of life.

Housing.

Reform UK’s proposals are on pages 19 & 20 of Our Contract with You. We are a small country and there simply is not enough open land and, even if there was, there is insufficient house building capacity, to meet the need – which will only increase unless something is done about immigration. We need closely to examine the ownership profile of all UK domestic premises. Foreign ownership of UK domestic premises – whether corporate or individual – is not in the interests of UK citizens. That foreign investment in UK domestic premises (many such premises actually being empty for most of the year), whilst helping to prop up prices in the UK housing market, is not in the interests of UK citizens as a whole. Indeed the benefit of any corporate ownership of UK domestic premises is questionable. All such premises should be owned by UK citizens. Then there is the question of how many domestic premises it is reasonable for one UK citizen to own – 3 or 30 or 100? This must be considered for reform as well. There is also complete obscurity surrounding much of the ownership of both domestic and commercial premises. That is a question of company law and must also be addressed. A Royal Commission to look into all the above issues and to make recommendations, designed to free up both the domestic and commercial property markets, will be needed leading to a new Law of Property Act. What is certain is that the housings needs of the British people over the next 25 years will never be met without some radical new thinking.

The civil service.

Finally – and this is among the most difficult of challenges – there is no point in becoming a minister if you cannot undertake the government’s policies because the civil service obstructs them or does not have the necessary competencies to undertake them – as is now the case. This means recruiting directly into the Senior Civil Service experienced managers from industry and the professions and in some departments like the Foreign Office, from academia. What is the point of having an ambassador in country X, who does not speak the local language and who is ignorant of that country’s history and culture and who in any case will be posted somewhere else in 2 or 3 years? That is largely the current state of our diplomatic service.

So without creating an effective instrument of policy, that is, an effective civil service, all the good policies in the world are just ideas in the wind.

Julian Malins K.C.

Written and published by Julian Malins K.C., Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Reform UK for Salisbury.

125 Temple Chambers

3-7 Temple Avenue

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June 2024.

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[1] At www.reformpartyuk