Will Reform be allowed to rule? Taking on The Blob with Danny Kruger
If Reform UK were to get elected (and it’s a big if), would they be allowed to govern? Already, the largest Civil Service Union (the Public and Commercial Services Union) has announced an increase to its financial resources in preparation to counter the election of a ‘hostile’ government. Some might comment that this shows an outrageous entrenchment of the politicalisation of public servants against the will of the people. The so-called Blob has certainly become an infamous bête noire, seen as an unelected network of senior civil servants, quangos, regulators and public bodies which faces frequent criticism for acting as a gatekeeper for the political agenda of Whitehall. Some say even new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has escaped to No10 North to break the stranglehold of ‘you can’t do that Minister’.
In theory, the civil service should work for a Reform government as dutifully as for any other. But, even under the previous Conservative government, civil servants were accused of ‘waiting out the Tories’ through disengagement and aversion tactics. How can a democratically elected government act on behalf of the electorate if it must first fight the very people that are employed to serve it? Some point to other barriers, from international treaties to bureaucratic checks and balances, that hold back any can-do approach to running the country. However, unlike all others, Reform UK faces the additional problem of an all-party, indeed all-system, consensus that Farage and his team should not be allowed close to power, regardless of the electorate’s wishes.
Is this all too gloomy? Yes, the barriers stack up: a civil service that can slow-walk instructions, a House of Lords with no Reform peers to carry legislation through and new bureaucratic layers that could create even more guardrails to protect the establishment from fundamental change at its core. But surely, in a democracy, the people must be allowed to decide? With such serious obstacles for Reform’s plans for radical change, are they prepared?
Let’s ask them. Danny Kruger MP has been charged with Reform’s preparation for government and has started mapping out plans for ‘fixing the centre’. How will he lead such a major structural overhaul? How will Reform handle the House of Lords, where the party has zero institutional presence? What are the plans for an incoming cohort of 300-400 new Reform MPs, arriving with little to no experience of governing, navigating Whitehall or steering Reform through a resistant system? If established parties with decades of institutional knowledge have failed to deliver reforms over the last decade, can an insurgent movement really free us from the Blob? And, if they win, is Reform able to convince those who won’t vote for them of the importance of loser’s consent for democracy?
