Reform is rising because trust in politics has collapsed. Economic insecurity, failing public services, unaffordable housing, insecure work and a loss of belonging have created the conditions in which Reform can thrive.

In this video, I argue that Reform is not the cause of Britain's problems; it is a symptom of much deeper failures that have been building for decades.

I explain why so many people have lost faith in Labour, the Conservatives, government institutions and the political establishment as a whole.

I look at the role played by austerity, deindustrialisation, stagnant wages, housing shortages, declining public services and the growing sense that mainstream politics no longer understands the lives of ordinary people.

The video also explores why immigration has become such a powerful political issue, and why it is often acting as a proxy for wider anxieties about insecurity, identity, opportunity and control. Simply dismissing or attacking Reform voters will not solve these problems. Understanding why people are angry is essential if an alternative is to be created.

Most importantly, I set out what that alternative might look like. I argue for a politics of care based on security, dignity, health, housing, opportunity and democratic participation. Drawing on modern monetary theory and resulting policies of full employment, I explain why governments have far more capacity to act than neoliberal economics suggests, and why rebuilding hope is the only effective response to the politics of grievance.

If Reform is to be challenged, the conditions that created it must be changed. This video explains how that might happen, and why the future of British politics may depend upon it.

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

Why is Reform growing in political popularity in the UK? What is driving its rise in political significance, and what can we do about it if we do not like its politics? Those are the issues that I'm going to tackle in this video.

Reform's rise reflects a profound collapse in trust in political legitimacy in the UK. Its rise, and the reasons that underpin it, represent the biggest political challenges of my lifetime. Working out what that challenge is, why it's arisen, and what to do about it is what I'm concerned about now.

Andy Burnham should be watching this video because it looks as if his failure to comprehend these issues is about to wreck his political career and the future of the Labour Party. And he won't be the last politician to suffer that fate if they don't pay attention to what is happening all around us now with regard to the rise of Reform.

Dismissing Reform supporters as ignorant or irrational is both wrong and dangerous. Three interconnected forces are driving Reform's growth.

The first is the economic insecurity that is felt every day in the lives of many people living in the UK.

The second is a collapse of trust in mainstream politics and institutions, partly driven by that first cause.

And the third is Reform's ability to offer simple, emotional explanations for complex failures.

The fact is that real wages have stagnated in this country across large parts of the population. Public services are deteriorating for many people, and housing is increasingly unaffordable. Secure employment has weakened, especially for younger generations, and many people now believe they will never enjoy the stability their parents once took for granted. That insecurity is not imagined; it is real lived experience. And when people lose control of their lives, they always look for explanations and for someone to blame.

Many people believe that Labour and the Conservatives have abandoned them. They are the first people who are being blamed for what is happening. Both parties are now seen as being managed by a professional class detached from ordinary life, and just look at who is populating their benches in the House of Commons, and you can see good reason for that.

That feeling is especially strong in places hollowed out by de-industrialisation and cuts, and in those places, Reform is heard, not because it has answers, but because it at least acknowledges the anger that people have. Reform did not create the conditions in which it has grown, but it is exploiting the failure of the neoliberal model to its own advantage. Austerity, privatisation, and regional inequality long predate Reform's rise, but they all underpin its current success.

So what is it that people are angry about? The financial crisis damaged people's confidence in both economics and banking.

Brexit destroyed their trust in political competence.

COVID exposed the deep administrative weaknesses of government.

And repeated scandals have undermined faith in parliament itself.

All of these represent failures of trust in institutions, and once institutional legitimacy weakens, anti-establishment politics become so much more attractive. Reform is filling the space left by that collapse of institutional trust, and they're doing it incredibly well.

At the same time, Reform is using immigration as a proxy for those deeper anxieties that I've already explained. For many Reform supporters, migration is not only about migration itself; it has become a proxy for anxiety about housing, services, identity, and lost control. Not every Reform voter is primarily motivated by racism. Many of them are expressing reasonable fears about the instability of the world that seems to exist all around them. Simply dismissing those concerns deepens resentment rather than reducing it.

In that case, immigration must be discussed honestly. Pretending the concerns do not exist is self-defeating, but at the same time, it must be recognised that the real problems that are motivating this concern usually lie in underinvestment, housing shortage, and government failure, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that mainstream politics speaks in technocratic language. It talks about frameworks, targets, fiscal rules, goals, objectives, strategies, whilst Reform offers something entirely different. It talks about migrants, elites, woke politics, and bureaucrats. Those explanations are economically incoherent, in my opinion, but you can see that they are emotionally intelligible.

Politics, for many people, is emotional before it is rational. Never forget that fact. And at the same time, social media algorithms reward outrage and conflict. Reform operates effectively in that environment, and no one else has yet learned the tricks of how to do so. Traditional parties still behave as if politics is conducted through policy papers, press releases, and reading the letters page of the Financial Times, Telegraph, or Guardian. None of that makes sense in the world in which we are living now, and in that situation, attacking Reform or its supporters does not work and often makes things worse.

Reform is a symptom. The conditions that sustain it have to be addressed. That is my key point in this video. And the fact is that whilst economic insecurity remains, the politics which Reform is creating will continue to attract people to their cause. Trust will not be rebuilt through good public relations. It requires visible improvements in people's lives. Progressives need honesty in that case to both admit the constraints under which they've operated, and they must have a willingness to admit their past mistakes.

The political parties opposing Reform helped create the very conditions that have given rise to it. The parties in question need to acknowledge that fact if they are to have any chance of challenging Reform at this moment.

Reform succeeds because it offers that simple narrative. Someone else took what was yours. That is what they say, and they do so continuously. Repetition is one of their key weapons, and unless a credible alternative is offered as clearly and repeatedly, that story will win by default.

The real causes of insecurity lie in wealth concentration, rent extraction, and failed housing policy. At the same time, whilst there's underinvestment, weakened labour power, and privatisation, risk is being continually transferred onto ordinary households throughout the UK. Those causes cannot remain abstract. They must instead be explained in language connecting to everyday life. And the political left must acknowledge its own role in creating the conditions that led to this political malaise.

In particular, they need to acknowledge the fact that democracy must be restored, dignity must be granted again, and a sense of belonging must be recreated. Many communities feel things are being done to them rather than with them. Rebuilding democratic participation, strong local government, and civic institutions is essential, and progressive people need to recover the language of belonging because that is vital. Citizenship, solidarity, and collective purpose should be the areas in which the left thrives, but it seems they don't.

Reform speaks constantly about identity, nation, and community, but the left has retreated too often into managerial language. That is where it's going wrong. Speak about the realities of life. Humans are not merely economic actors. They need meaning, recognition, and belonging as well, and that is what the left have forgotten. Hope, and not just fear of Reform, must be the basis of any credible alternative politics that are going to challenge it. Again, that is one of my key messages.

A politics of care, something I talk about often, begins with a fundamentally different starting point to most left-wing politics at present. Most left-wing politics, even much of Marxist politics, appears to be fundamentally neoliberal in its form these days, and it treats the economy as existing primarily to maximise growth or financial returns.

A politics of care says something different. It says the economy exists to support life. Security, dignity, health, housing, and opportunity, those are key, and many people in this country are feeling abandoned precisely because the current model has treated them as disposable, and it has treated them as not being worthy of those five things I mentioned. I'll name them again: security, dignity, health, housing, and opportunity. The shift to put those things at the centre of politics is then not sentimental; it is a structural reorientation of political economy to make people the epicentre of our thinking again. That is the direct counter to the grievance politics that Reform depends upon. That is my core argument of all those I'm presenting in this video.

Neoliberal economics insist that governments are financially constrained like households, and therefore are unable to do many things that are essential, including things like restoring dignity and life in communities. We are repeatedly told there is no money left and budgets must always balance, but modern monetary theory challenges that entire framing. A government that issues its own currency creates money every time it spends, and the real limits on its activity are not financial; they are the availability of labour, skills, energy, and productive capacity. That means that when decision-making is to be undertaken, the question is not where the money will come from, but how should available resources be used? And that is why this reframing of politics is so essential.

Neoliberalism has spent 40 years creating artificial scarcity, persuading people that governments are powerless to meet their needs. But people in left-behind areas know that thriving economic activity once existed in the areas where they live, and that human capacity to recreate it still does. When people believe what they are told about the impossibility of change and that there are too few homes, jobs, and school places, and they will have to put up with it, they become vulnerable to narratives blaming migrants.

A politics of care changes that social narrative. Economic and social security can be recreated collectively, I firmly believe that. Modern monetary theory does, then, restore democratic agency. Governments cease to be passive spectators waiting for the private finance sector to act. Democratic states mobilise resources to meet collective needs when there is the political will to do so.

My point is this: full employment and security can end manufactured insecurity. MMT proposes that the government should act as the employer of last resort through a policy of full employment, something that no government has had in this country for decades. And we are now suffering 5% unemployment, and that is ridiculous when it is possible for those people to go to work. Call this a Green New Deal, if you like, because that is what we need. Anyone who wishes to work should be able to do so, backed by programmes for local economic, environmental, and social regeneration, in turn backed by a strong social safety net. Nobody should be left out, but the politics on which Reform thrives exists because neoliberal economics has allowed people to miss out.

We need the type of policy I'm talking about to stabilise incomes, strengthen communities, and improve labour's bargaining power. All of these are key. They change the political mood, and these plans provide a powerful automatic economic stabiliser effect with significant multiplier consequences. And the fact is that plans of the sort I've described would provide a powerful automatic stabiliser for the economy, meaning that people would not be unemployed, and in turn, that would create significant economic multiplier effects. People who are at work pay tax, people who are at work create spending power. People who create spending power take part in their local economies. As a result, they can thrive. At the moment, we choose that they won't. Most importantly, a focus on full employment delivered locally restores dignity, and dignity matters because much of Reform's appeal feeds on humiliation and exclusion.

In that case, it becomes economically illogical for any government to allow any community to be left behind. This approach would fundamentally change politics.

And where does the funding come from? It comes from cutting out the economic middleman in the City of London, who is at present directing our savings towards useless ISA and pension products, and instead, we would offer direct savings opportunities to people so that their savings could be used as the direct capital underpinning the investment in the world we want, which would be free from fear.

So where are we? Reform thrives on cynicism. The belief that nothing works, that nobody cares, and decline is inevitable. But by making hope structural, as I suggest, people could see society delivering security and fairness. The politics of care rebuilds belonging through security and participation in the places where people live rather than through exclusion and blame. Citizens are members of a shared society with mutual obligations and not merely consumers and taxpayers; decline then is not inevitable.

Public purpose is possible, and democratic action would still matter. The politics of care and the economics of hope that I've described are not just the things that will oppose Reform, but will provide an alternative to the conditions that have created it.

Unless Andy Burnham and the Labour Party take note, they're going to crash onto Reform's rocks and sink their chances forever. Others will have to come and take their places because we need this politics. This is how we avoid the curse of fascism, and that is the route around which Reform is unfortunately taking us.

That's what I think. What do you think? There's a poll down below. Let us have your opinions. Please do like this video if that's what you do, and please do share it because that helps us with YouTube, and if you'd like to support our work, there's a link down below to Ko-Fi where you can buy us a coffee.

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