There’s no doubt that Reform UK is a party in trouble. While the recent accusations of financial impropriety and illegality are grave in themselves, they also expose an organisation that’s still amateurish and complacent in its attitude and operations. And while it’s true that there are elements in the establishment, particularly in the media, who are and have always been out to get it, the party still needs to get its act in order – sharpish.

It needs to do so because the issues Reform campaigns on still matter hugely to the public. Many working-class people and conservative middle-class types still don’t like what’s happened to their country and they still want it back. In order for this to happen, these people need a functioning party that can effect much-needed radical reform. And if politicians won’t ‘stop the boats’, then members of the public will, as we saw with the blockading of ports in Dover and Portsmouth.

This undiminished undercurrent of feeling was encapsulated by a retired couple who spoke to Josh Glancy of The Sunday Times at the Reform conference last week. The Crisps, from Horsham in West Sussex, voted Conservative for much of their lives but switched over in 2024. Why? ‘It was the big two’, Mr Crisp explained. ‘Welfare and immigration. We’re losing our identity as a nation. We’re in danger of getting subsumed.’

There remains a vast multitude of ordinary, hard-working citizens who loathe the Labour government, who have sour memories of the last Conservative incumbents, who despise the establishment (the Home Office, the civil service, the universities and teaching unions beholden to a hyperliberal dogma, the BBC, charities with internationalist pretensions, human-rights lawyers and idealistic judges), and yearn for its cleansing and the country’s restitution. They ache for a government that will address their acute and chronic concerns.

No matter how many times commentators have written off Nigel Farage, no matter how many times centrists and leftists have sought to smear him as stupid and racist, the populist wave that has expanded into a broadly conservative bloc has not gone away. Millions remain exasperated at the way this country has been and continues to be misruled, a country that appears to be disappearing before their eyes.

There is a hunger for a party that will wrench this country back from the illiberal left, the bien-pensants and the big state spendthrifts. Yet Reform’s ill-thought-out initiatives outlined at the party conference only point to an outfit that is unfocused and even in disarray. Voters don’t want a period of ‘national emergency’ should Reform be voted into power, and they can see the proposal to make the singing of the national anthem obligatory in schools as the gimmick for what it is.

What they want is for children to be taught rigorous lessons absent hyperliberal dogma – for teenage boys not to be dissuaded from reading the classics because they are ‘racist’ or insufficiently ‘diverse’, as is currently the case. They want a competent and efficient government that will seal the borders, not appease Islamists, stop unnecessary benefits for the neurotic and the workshy, and cut taxes in order that small businesses and the economy may thrive.

That really isn’t too much to ask for.

The post-literate left

Even before the release of his new book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, Times columnist James Marriott had sparked a conversation about the future of civilisation in a present and near future in which no one reads for pleasure, enlightenment or as active citizens.

One of the pressing concerns outlined by Marriott in a recent essay was the debasement of politics in an age when fewer people read newspapers. With people ingesting their politics instead through short-form video, where ‘there is little space for nuance’, this new post-literate settlement ‘seems to correlate with an increased vote share for the far right and populist parties’.

This may indeed be the case, but Marriott overlooks the fact that the biggest dunces in politics today are on the far left, in particular in that intersection between green and left.

The Green Party of England and Wales is perfectly representative of our post-literate society. It’s an outfit run by people who evidently don’t read history or elementary textbooks on economics, and which appeals to a certain younger demographic who similarly lives in a non-literate dreamworld.

The Greens made unprecedented gains in the May local elections largely because they made fantastical promises to a credulous and idealistic section of the electorate. They mooted a universal basic income, vowed to legalise hard drugs and prostitution. A candidate for their sister party, the Scottish Greens, pledged to abolish prisons. The Greens’ avowed position is that ‘migration is not a criminal offence under any circumstances’ and that we should strive for a ‘world without borders’, where ‘the concept of legal nationality [is] abolished’. Their latest illusory wheeze is to abolish private landlords.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are possibly even more brain-dead. They want to abolish the Senate, prisons and borders, replace the presidency and the Supreme Court, and give full voting rights to criminals and non-citizens. According to a poll earlier this year, four in 10 Americans said they would consider voting for a DSA candidate for president.

Vacuous left-green utopianism is a symptom of a society that no longer reads diligently or reflectively.

George Orwell would have had Andy Burnham’s number

For anyone who finds Andy Burnham’s vague, matey ‘northern bloke’ persona increasingly tiresome, not least because it seems to act as a substitute for saying anything meaningful, they may find comfort in the thought that George Orwell would have seen through the act.

‘There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Northern snobbishness’, wrote Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

‘A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is “real” life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only “real” work, that the North is inhabited by “real” people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has “grit”, he is grim, “dour”, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy…’

In a world of seemingly unceasing tumult, it’s reassuring to know that Burnham, who came from an unremarkable working-class Cheshire background and attended Cambridge University, is still tapping into this ancient and dubious ‘authentic northerner’ stereotype.