Oh No - Reform Are Here! Debunking their Local Greenwich Proposals

It seems Reform are starting to get organised locally. A few days ago, these dropped through my door!

They are pretty glossy, high quality cards that must have cost quite a lot to print and deliver to every house, so clearly Reform have money available. And them being active is not good news for anyone of a progressive mindset, although I suspect Greenwich is not likely to be particularly fertile territory for Reform – the population here is fairly cosmopolitian, liberal-minded, typical-inner-London. But the leaflets do give a sense of what Reform are thinking in terms of their local message. And unsurprisingly, that message doesn’t look very sensible. To judge from the leaflets, besides being the anti-immigration party, Reform also plan to be London’s motorists’ lobby party (as if London isn’t already choking under too many cars and too much pollution).

So let’s go through their pledges and see what’s wrong with it all.

• Scrap Net Zero to slash energy bills. Shame that Net Zero has almost nothing to do with why energy bills are so high (energy prices are high because of lack of investment in renewables combined with, we don’t want to buy Russian energy while Russia is in the middle of invading one of our European neighbours).
• Unlock public owned land to deliver new affordable housing. The only publicly owned land they could do that on is, our local parks. We need more housing, but do people really want to lose all their green spaces?
• Reverse the expansion of ULEZ. How is that going to help anyone? The vast majority of motorists living in London affected by ULEZ will have already swapped to ULEZ-compliant cars, so scrapping ULEZ now won’t do them any good at all. Besides, ULEZ was introduced because pollution kills people, and there’s an urgent need to reduce it. Personally I don’t think ULEZ was done in the right way, but we needed something to deter polluting cars in London. Just scrapping ULEZ now will mean everyone in London will be forced to breathe more polluted air, harming everyone’s health.
• Introduce free short stay high street parking. Sounds tempting if you don’t think it through. Reality: It will lead to more cars on London’s streets, slowing down journeys for everyone (car drivers and bus passengers alike). Besides, how many town centres in London actually have room to provide free parking?
• Cut NHS waiting lists down to zero. That’s like saying, bring about Utopia tomorrow. Of course, reducing NHS waiting lists should be a priority (but getting them exactly to zero is impossibility). But Reform are offering no credible way to do that. That pledge is just an empty slogan.
• Freeze non-essential immigration. I’m all (perhaps unusually for a LibDem) for lowering immigration– provided it can be lowered in a way that’s fair to people. But freezing it as quite another matter. Does that mean, say, that people will be prevented from seeing their wives and husbands (if foreign?). Will our Universities be prevented from educating foreign students? This sounds like another wild claim from Reform that just hasn’t been thought through.
• Cut VAT and corporation tax. And what is going to be cut to pay for that? I can see the logic of reversing Labour’s national insurance increase because that was inflationary and damaging to businesses – but if you can’t find a way to recoup the lost revenues, you’re in economic Lala-land. Which seems to be exactly where Reform are.

No, London definitely doesn’t need Reform. But this is a Liberal blog – I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted there. The challenge is going to be to find an effective way to counter them. We can argue about what the best strategy for that is, but one thing I’m pretty certain of: We can’t counter Reform unless we’re out there campaigning – and that means we really need to rebuild the local LibDem parties in all the areas where we don’t have MPs, and not just focus on the few areas where we do.