In the Telegraph, Douglas Carswell outlines his plan to reverse Britain’s decline by radically reforming governance, slashing regulations, cutting taxes and spending, securing borders and realigning foreign policy toward the Anglosphere. Here’s how his article begins:
Britain is in a pitiful condition. Our economy is faltering, burdened by high taxes and excess regulation. Public services no longer serve the actual public. Culturally, we are coming apart, strained by mass immigration, a crumbling sense of identity and a demographic transformation so swift it risks making our country unrecognisable.
None of this is inevitable. It is a consequence of abysmal policy, inept leadership and an administrative class that has lost all accountability to the people it claims to represent.
But putting Britain back on the right path will take much more than merely a Parliamentary majority.
The policies needed to renew our country will face fierce resistance from an administrative state determined to prevent their implementation. Unless we have a plan to overcome opposition from unelected officials and activist judges, national recovery will not be possible.
We don’t just need a change of government in Britain. National recovery means that we must fundamentally change the way Britain is governed.
The Leftist Revolution
For the past three decades, Britain has endured an ideological onslaught, a revolution cloaked as progress.
Men, we have been told, can become women. The ancient legal principle of equality under the law has been cast aside, with those holding certain “protected characteristics” treated preferentially.
Today, state bodies are required to tilt the scales against white Britons under the guise of “equality”. People have been sent to prison for their privately expressed opinions.
Our history, once a source of pride, is being rewritten. The country that produced Shakespeare, Newton, Brunel and Austen is not allowed any claim to exceptionalism, other than exceptional wickedness. Young people in Britain, a nation that led the fight to abolish to slave trade, are taught we were its chief practitioners.
Films and books are no longer produced to entertain but to lecture and scold.
Over the past generation, our elites have not just politicised culture and our past but turned our democracy into a technocracy, with power devolved to unelected “experts”.
The Bank of England, granted independence, presided over a banking crisis and lost control of inflation. The Climate Change Committee shapes energy policy, advising on measures which drive up costs and ruin what remains of our manufacturing. The Environment Agency halts development, Ofcom restricts free speech, the Information Commissioner dictates how businesses handle customer data. Judges decide whether we tap oil and gas reserves, while courts, not the free market, set wages.
The Leftist revolution began with Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide victory. Though Blair himself served as Prime Minister for only 10 of the past 28 years, every administration since he left Number 10 – Labour and Conservative – has held essentially the same core assumptions. They have governed in the belief that experts are infallible; that our rights are not the distinct product of our Island inheritance, but are universal. The core Blairite belief is that human nature is itself universal, people from any background interchangeable.
This is why they opened our borders, allowing millions of immigrants in, believing that anyone can become British – or even English, Scottish or Welsh.
None of this was chosen by us. None of it is based on what is good and true. It has not served us well.
Lamentable Decline
Britain has been run into the ground. We might imagine dispassionate bureaucrats crafting public policy for the common good, but the truth is grimly different: we have suffered a catastrophic decline.
Living standards have stagnated for the best part of two decades. Between 2008 and 2022, median income rose 7.2%. Over the previous 14 years, median incomes rose 38%. The UK per person output was once comparable to that of the United States. Today, UK per capita output has fallen behind that Mississippi, the poorest state in America.
High taxes and regulation have produced economic sclerosis, despite masses of monetary stimulus used to try to generate growth.
The UK now has £2.97 trillion of public debt, equal to about 100% of the value of all goods and services that the country produces each year. Three decades ago, our public debt was a modest 25-30% of GDP.
Since creating an Office of Budget Responsibility, we have squandered public money irresponsibly on Covid lockdowns, green energy boondoggles and, before that, bank bailouts. Public spending is rising to 45% of GDP, compared to a mere 37.6% when Tony Blair began as Prime Minister.
The NHS, run by its own unaccountable bureaucracy, is failing. Waiting lists reached 6.24 million by February 2025 – one in 11 Britons – while A&E delays spiral, with over 60,000 forced to wait over 12 hours in January, 21 times pre-Covid levels.
One in 27 people in Britain today is an immigrant that has arrived in the past two years – a staggering 2.5 million newcomers in 2023 and 2024 alone. Far from the “brightest and best,” too many are low-skilled, poorly educated and with a high propensity to commit crime. Many non-Western immigrants offer little economic benefit to our country, as data from the University of Amsterdam suggests, yet some will bring with them issues of cultural incompatibility.
20 years ago, Muslims made up about 3% of the UK population. Since then, their share of the population has risen to over 6%, and it is expected to double again over the next 20 years. While the vast majority of Muslims live peaceful, law abiding lives, the risks of extremism among some needs to be confronted.
Britain’s Armed Forces are a shadow of their former selves. The Royal Navy’s fleet has shrunk from 79 vessels in 1995 to a mere 28 today; the Army’s tanks from over 400 to 100; the RAF’s aircraft from 800 to 265 combat aircraft. Personnel have halved from 300,000 to 136,000 since the mid-1990s. Quality may have risen, but quantity has collapsed.
In recent years, almost every public body in the country, no matter how ineffective at delivering on its core mission, has found the time to promote a “woke” ideology, prioritising social justice and historical revisionism. Police forces have found the time to promote inclusivity but not to catch criminals. The NHS spends millions on diversity, equity & inclusion directors while millions languish on waiting lists waiting. Museums funded by British taxpayers present exhibits that take every opportunity to show Britain in a bad light. It is no surprise that patriotism among young people has been in precipitous decline.
Carswell goes on to outline nine ‘milestones’ (under which are grouped 34 specific policy steps) to turn the country round:
1. Securing Control Over Public Administration
2. Securing Control Over Borders
3. Undoing the Blairite Legislative Legacy
8. Strengthening Defence, Realign Foreign Policy
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: In Episode 32 of the Sceptic, Laurie Wastell sat down with the former UKIP MP to discuss what the Right really needs to do to reform Britain…
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