A radical policy programme could bring the Brexit Party to government

The Brexit Party’s gathering in Birmingham last Sunday was entitled the “Big Vision Rally.” Political parties like to give grandiloquent names to their events, though the reality seldom justifies the fanfare. It is fair to say, however, that at this meeting Nigel Farage’s people displayed a radical and imaginative approach to Britain’s problems, far beyond the gateway issue of Brexit.

From its inception, Farage has been at pains to emphasise that the Brexit Party has a wider purpose beyond leaving the European Union: “to change politics for good”. That implies constitutional change is a priority, but Brexit Party managers are sufficiently shrewd to recognize that parties obsessed with constitutional issues quickly forfeit the sympathy of the public.

Bread-and-butter policies must be addressed and in Britain today these are pressing. The EU referendum outcome was widely seen as a cry of rage from those parts of Britain – geographically and demographically a majority of the nation – that have been left behind, excluded from the burgeoning prosperity of London and its environs. The legacy parties, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, made noises about addressing this problem then turned away.

For the Brexit Party this is incredibly fertile territory. There are hundreds of parliamentary seats, both Labour and Tory, ripe for the plucking simply by doing what moral, social and economic good sense prescribes. Last Sunday the speakers maintained a relentless focus on regional policy. The rally was held not in London but in Birmingham. The chairman, Richard Tice, announced that instead of holding a conventional party conference in September the Brexit Party will host 11 regional assemblies at which participants will voice local needs.

Policy is to be made from the bottom up. There is even an e-mail address to which the public can address policy suggestions for sifting by the party managers. There are signs that the Brexit Party is winning the interest and support of many in the SME business community. Many Brexit Party candidates are drawn from SME backgrounds.

It is arguable that a party only three months old already has closer links with real “business” than a Conservative Party that cannot see beyond the CBI, a body that has historically got everything wrong, including demanding that Britain join the euro. Critics have claimed that since the Brexit Party is a wide, loose-knit coalition it must fall apart as soon as hard policy is hammered out. Farage is well aware of that and is progressing slowly and on tip-toe, consulting his supporters at every stage.

Thanks to the entitlement-based idiocy that has gripped the legacy parties in recent years and their prodigality with taxpayers’ money, the Brexit Party has far more room for manoeuvre than would otherwise have been the case. How will it pay for its policies? By axeing the most absurd Tory extravagances is the answer. No deal means retaining £39bn that had been written off to Brussels. Scrapping the gross white elephant that is HS2 would save £100bn. Cutting Britain’s ridiculous virtue-signalling overseas aid budget by half would save £60bn over seven years.

All those are policies already pledged by the Brexit Party. To those it should add scrapping Theresa May’s infantile “legacy” gesture of a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which would cost £1.5 trillion over three decades and reduce British living standards to Third World levels.

Even without being in government the Brexit Party needs to assemble a body of scientific advisers of all shades of opinion, who have not taken the IPCC’s shilling, to establish the threat level posed by solar (not man-made) climate change and the policies it is advisable to implement. These would cost only a fraction of the suicidal sums being demanded by climate cultists in response to a threat that has not materialised over the two decades they have been prophesying doom.

A significant feature of the Birmingham rally was that the attendance was less elderly than the caricature presented by the Brexit Party’s enemies. Not many millennials, but all age groups above thirty, especially early middle age, were well represented. The old-men-in-blazers narrative is dead. There are not enough golf club bores in Britain to send 29 MEPs to Strasbourg.

The party is devising policies for youth. Tice said that, instead of graduates emerging at the end of a three-year degree already burdened with £5,000 interest on a student loan, the party would reduce loan interest to zero and cancel the historical interest owed by existing graduates. The party also needs to devise a policy to end the facile snobbery that surrounds the concept of a degree and guide promising youngsters away from the futility of a “media studies” degree towards wealth-creating apprenticeships.

The BBC is another “liberal” institution that needs to be curbed. Now is a propitious time, just when it has ended free television viewing for pensioners, while increasing the inflated salaries of its “talent”. The licence fee should be abolished as a first step; thereafter, breaking up the monopolistic monolith and selling off redundant sectors is a long overdue reform of broadcasting.

One thing Nigel Farage is in danger of getting badly wrong is his suggestion of abolishing the House of Lords. Lords reform is a constitutional swamp that engulfs and exhausts all governments that essay it. The present chamber commands little public confidence, but a notional Brexit Party government should have more urgent priorities. Obstruction by the upper house could be neutralised by a mass creation of Brexit peers, while the more urgent task of House of Commons reform proceeds.

An end to unnecessary postal voting, to avoid the fraud with which it is associated, is paramount. So is a curbing of the Commons’ powers and the need to redefine the duty of MPs more as delegates than the concept of “representatives” they have so badly abused. Recall of MPs must be made easier. The Brexit Party has already committed to the principle of more direct democracy, but it must get the system right.

It is very early days, but the grievances of the public are multifarious and must be redressed. Farage and his colleagues have already shown there is plenty of fiscal slack available simply by cancelling half a dozen of the legacy parties’ extravagances.

In the extremely unlikely event of Boris Johnson delivering an acceptable Brexit, Nigel Farage would suffer a temporary loss of support. But he would retain a solid body of voters which would increase as the legacy parties resumed business as usual post-Brexit, rekindling the will to “change politics for good”. The establishment likes to depict Nigel Farage as a “clown”. Farage wants to scrap HS2, Boris Johnson wants to build a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland. What does that say about the clownish condition of the legacy parties?