Fast-track courts. Pop-up custody suites. “Nightingale” prisons. Mass deportations of foreign criminals. Outsourcing British criminals to foreign prisons. Prosecutions for every incidence of shoplifting or phone theft. Life sentences for people who commit three serious offences. Oh, and cutting crime in half within five years.
Welcome to criminal justice à la Reform UK. Nigel Farage’s party plans to spend the six weeks of the summer recess winning the war on crime with a campaign entitled “Lawless Britain”. It’s a subject which the party already leads public opinion on. And it all kicked off on Monday, with a press conference that epitomises both the opportunities and the challenges for Reform as it moves into this space.
Let’s zoom out. Reform’s first year in parliament has been characterised by its meteoric rise in the polls: for months now, it has led both the Conservatives and Labour by what looks like a comfortable margin. This has persisted, despite a merry-go-round of personnel dramas. First, the party lost one fifth of its parliamentary cohort by expelling Rupert Lowe. Then, it returned to a quintet of MPs thanks to the election of Sarah Pochin in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, only to go back down to four scarcely two months later with the self-suspension of James McMurdock, over loans he took out under a Covid support scheme. In between, we had the 48-hour resign-and-rehire saga of Reform chairman Zia Yusuf. For a party trying to prove it is above personality politics and deserves to be taken seriously, that’s quite a ride.
Reform has also benefited from defections over the past year: former skills minister Andrea Jenkyns (now mayor of Greater Lincolnshire), former Welsh Secretary David Jones, former Tory party chairman Jake Berry. All these, plus a handful of other ex-MPs, were once Conservatives. As my colleague Will Lloyd pointed out, luring Conservatives to Reform comes with prestige but also risk. As well as the possibility of antagonising long-term supporters (“Why should somebody at the coalface of fourteen years of failure be welcomed up into the air of your new party?”), it weakens Reform’s message of standing up to the “Uniparty” consisting of Labour and the Tories.
By welcoming Berry et al, Farage seems to be working out how much of his cake he can have and eat at the same time. It’s a delicate balancing act: drawing credibility from defections without losing your USP as a fresh insurgent.
A similar experiment in cakeism is evident in the crime campaign. The extra prison places the party promises to create don’t come close to covering what would be needed if every instance of shoplifting or phone theft resulted in a custodial sentence. The idea of having the army build makeshift prisons raises worrying questions about security. The notion that crime could be halved for just £17.4bn over the course of a parliament, funded by scrapping net zero and HS2 (savings Reform has already earmarked for other policies such as cutting taxes) is laughable. Indeed, Farage laughed when the first journalist questioned costs (“I was rather waiting for that question”). Just in case the message failed to land, hacks were given helpful handouts of facts and figures.
It’s hard to appear jaw-droppingly ambitious and eminently reasonable at the same time. Even the set-up of the press conference suggested that the party is still deliberating on how it wants to be seen. At first, the Gladstone Library of the Royal Horseguards Hotel was lit in dim red and blue, reminiscent of a haunted fairground. LED screens loomed, displaying “case files” of dangerous criminals serving lenient sentences which then morphed into stats on violent crime, the writing flickering ominously. You almost expected the theme tune of Law & Order to begin playing as Farage walked in – but no, instead the lights came on. It was as though the organisers couldn’t decide quite how gimmicky they wanted to be.
Likewise on the subject matter. When pressed (by the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, hardly a soft touch) on whether sending British criminals to El Salvador as suggested might breach their human rights, Farage back-peddled his most eye-catching proposal, suggesting Estonia or Kosovo instead.
Sarah Pochin, sitting beside him, hadn’t got the memo. “What about the human rights of the women who have been raped and the children who have been subject to sexual abuse?” she countered. Farage remained poker-faced, but there is a clear tension here between riding the outrage train (a sizable proportion of Reform supporters probably would back sending violent sex offenders to El Salvador, whether it breached their human rights or not) and maintaining the air of reasonableness necessary to widen the party’s appeal. Can you have it both ways? Farage was doing his best. But the higher Reform climbs in the polls and the longer it stays there, the more acute this tension will become.
Farage, as I have written before, believes he has “banked” the immigration issue (if immigration is your top concern, you are already likely to vote for Reform), therefore he can branch out into other issues. Crime is not only a hot-button concern for the British public (almost half of us think Britain is becoming a lawless country), but an area where Reform can build its credibility via its stance on immigration. Underpinning the announcements on Monday were a slew of immigration talking points: from accusations of “two-tier policing”, to the number of foreign criminals in British jails, to the necessity of leaving the ECHR in order to restore law and order.
Think of it as implementing different policies from one core political position (that immigration must come down). The upside is that you can present yourself as a serious contender with a plan for government rather than a single-issue protest group. The risk is that the flaws in your wider policy offering (like speed-building prisons which offenders can escape from, or incarcerating so many people the system collapses) make you look ridiculous. More visibility equals more pressure – and more risk. Will this be the summer Reform grows up? And can it handle being treated like an adult if it does?
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