You might think that having had so much time to think about how to make this country prosperous again that it would have been better received than it has been. But no, it went down like a lead balloon. It was a disaster.

From the pre budget scrapping of the winter fuel allowance to the inheritance tax on farmers which could destroy food security here in the U.K., the entire budget was ill conceived and muddle headed.

On top of that, it was tin eared.

She claimed to have found a £22bn black hole in the accounts on day one in the job but the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) have said that any black hole, such as it was, had been created by their day one largesse in handing huge pay rises to train drivers and doctors, astonishingly without insisting on any improvement in productivity. Even the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said that the deficit was there in plain sight for anyone who wanted to look for it before the election, and it was definitely not as big as she makes out.

Despite instructions from Labour’s communications team for everyone to parrot the same tired lines of a £22bn black hole, 14 years of Tory chaos and this being a one off budget to fix the problems of the country, few of my constituents are believing this rhetoric. My inbox has been filled with people who are going to struggle with these new taxes, including lifelong Labour supporters who now regret their vote at the last election.

The headline tax rise was a swingeing increase in employers national insurance which we are told is not a tax on working people (however a working person is defined). Unfortunately, the reality is that it is exactly that. Employers were meant to make up for this tax by increasing prices and reducing future pay rises; so it is a tax on working people as well as business owners, (who are also working people, Chancellor).

Underpinning the budget is a hope, more like a gamble, that inflation remains low, at or around the Bank of England target of 2%. But it won’t, it will rise. It has to rise, in part due to this budget.

Feed in costs from the budget such as increases in employers national insurance will lead to increased prices for goods and services. Raising the minimum wage wage might sound good in theory, but when it happens it forces upward pressure on all wages in a firm as the wage gaps shrink between staff. Eroding differentials mean businesses either lose existing staff who feel undervalued by seeing new starters coming in on not much less than them, or pay them more, leading to wage inflation.

Add to this the truly ruinous green energy policies being pushed by Ed Milliband, and far from everyone’s energy bills coming down by £300 as promised in their manifesto, they will be rising now, and again in the future. In fact I predict that if they continue down this path that energy costs to homes and businesses could become unaffordable for many people.

The entire budget is built on the hope that inflation remains low and that interest payments on the £140bn she’s looking to borrow will remain stable. But they won’t. Interest rates will rise and inflation will rise and no matter how hard she scolds the Bank of England for their inability to control it, they will be powerless to prevent it.

Like a car crash in slow motion, her budget is doomed from the off, and for all the ‘taking the tough decisions’ and it being a ‘one off budget’ meaning she won’t have to come back and ask us for more money, she’ll have to ask us for more money. Probably sooner rather than later.

The Labour government has fallen from grace with such spectacular and unprecedented speed that despite blaming everything on the nasty Tories, 14 years of chaos and a 22bn black hole, even their own supporters are publicly saying they’ve got it wrong.

They had a chance to do the right thing. Despite only getting 20% of the public vote, their mandate gave them a chance to finally wipe the slate clean, and set the country back on a prosperous track once again.

But they’ve failed.

They’ve failed to ‘smash the gangs’ delivering migrants into the uk, they’ve failed to stop using U.K. hotels to house them, they’ve failed to reduce energy bills (they’ve just gone up £300, not down) and they failed to boost the economy.

This budget will be seen as one of the most dangerous ever delivered by a chancellor as it does nothing to address the problems the British economy faces, and simply borrows even more money to hose at an ever expanding public sector that cannot drive efficiency and in many cases, cannot deliver.

What Britain needed was something different. What we got was an acceleration of the very things that drove us to where we are today. Far from solving our problems, it’s going to turbo charge them.

Before this election, people were talking about a two or three term Labour government being elected. If the budget and their performance to date is anything to go by then they’ll be lucky to complete one term. Rising inflation will undermine every ambition this budget has and simply propel us towards the arms of the IMF. It’s like the 1970s all over again.

Despite their attempts to portray themselves as economically prudent, this budget has simply proven that Labour are, as always, a high tax and spend party, despite the fact that it never has, and never will work.

Come the next election, I have a feeling that the public won’t be quite so generous.

The post Rising inflation will kill Labour’s budget appeared first on Emma Guy Reform.

The big problem is that if people are ill informed and gullible enough, then they can easily be convinced that what they are hearing is not a lie, it’s the truth, and that they should spread the word to let everyone else know. 

It doesn’t matter to them that the truth is something different. They are so consumed in their own little bubble that even if they are shown their belief to be false, cognitive dissonance kicks in. And at that stage, they will literally swear black is white rather than accept they have made an error. 

This current election campaign has thrown up several examples of this, but none so stupid at the lie that if we leave the European Convention to Human Rights (ECHR) we won’t have any human rights in this country, which is apparently gaining traction on social media. 

That I should even need to write this is disturbing, as it highlights just how unhinged people can become when social media algorithms feed them a constant reinforcing narrative. 

To clarify, we already have a Human Rights Act in this country which was enacted in 1998 and which guarantees our rights in a huge number of areas. These include: 

The right to life

The prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment

The right to liberty and freedom

Protection against slavery and forced labour

The right to a fair trial and no punishment without law

Respect for privacy and family life and the right to marry

Freedom of thought, religion and belief

Free speech and peaceful protest

No discrimination

Protection of property

The right to an education

The right to free elections

What people seem to miss is that before this piece of legislation was introduced we already had human rights; in fact we’d had them since the 1689 Bill of Rights, so we did not need another Act to confirm our rights. We weren’t suddenly gifted human rights in 1998 and when the Act is repealed, we won’t suddenly lose them either.

The problem that Reform U.K. has with the current U.K. Human Rights Act is not to do with the rights enshrined in this Act, these are, after all, basic rights that we enjoy and frankly, sometimes, take for granted. The problem is to do with how they are currently being ruled on and applied by the ECHR.

The current Act makes it clear that any judgement made using this Act must incorporate any “…judgment, decision, declaration or advisory opinion of the European Court of Human Rights”. In other words, our Act is subjugated to the European Court of Human Rights. In short, the ECHR is enshrined into U.K. law and it doesn’t need to be. Even the Lords were debating this in 2022 as there was already a clear understanding that this needed to be changed.

When the Act was first introduced, there were very few instances where the ECHR and British law clashed, but over the past 25 years there has been a clear divergence and now, we find ourselves at odds with them in several areas. 

And it’s not only Britain. As neatly summed up by the House of Commons Library “In April 2024, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that the Swiss Government’s climate policies violated human rights. The judgment said that the right to a private and family life meant that states are obliged to protect their citizens from the “serious adverse effects” of climate change”.

That the ECHR felt able to dictate to an elected government sent a shockwave through the political system. The Swiss response; they’ve decided to ignore the ruling. Their view is that as a democratic country they don’t need to be told what to do by an outside court.

Did the world come to an end when they did this? Did the skies fall? No. Nothing changed. Apart from the fact that the Swiss people were supported by their democratically elected government against a handful of environmental protesters who felt that ‘lawfare’ was their best option. 

In the U.K. we have an existing courts system of magistrates, crown, appeal, and supreme courts to decide on our law. They should be sufficient to ensure that the law is applied fairly in this country. However, when claimants have exhausted our legal system and are still being told no, they currently have the right to take their case to the ECHR.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, the ECHR through their recent decisions, have led some to question whether they are making the right decisions. Their rulings have become more and more detached from the original aim of the legislation they are ruling on. 

Instead of simply ruling on the application of the law as set down by Parliament, they have shifted to a position where they are interpreting law; in other words, changing the law to what they think it should say rather than what it does say, without any reference back to the Parliament who made the law in the first place.

The end result is a handful of unelected individuals, sitting in a court that is not based in this country have assumed the right to make new laws for us, without oversight, nor the chance to debate and decide whether these laws are correct.

The current U.K. system of government was deliberately designed to prevent this from happening. Parliament debate and agree laws, the justice system applies those laws. They should not be open to interpretation, and certainly not to create precedents that prevent the country from carrying on its lawful business.

The Rwanda flights brought into sharp relief exactly how far this system has moved away from its original intent. Despite the fact that no one other than the government thinks these are a good idea, the courts prevented them from fulfilling an essential part of any government responsibility, that of keeping its borders secure.

Which brings us back to the original lie.

As a sovereign nation, we have a long tradition of giving our citizens rights and protections that are so well regarded internationally, that much of the world now has the same or similar rights.

We set the benchmark for human rights and have fought wars to protect them, not only in this county, but across the world. We helped create the ECHR based on the rights that we already enjoyed back in 1950. To suggest that suddenly we are going to remove them all because we leave the ECHR is not only a lie but betrays an ignorance beyond comprehension.

To be clear, the Reform U.K. Contract with You states clearly that once we leave the ECHR we will introduce a British Bill of Rights. A bill that will codify the rights we all correctly enjoy and ensure we can continue to enjoy them without interference from unelected foreign courts.

So, if anyone tells you that Reform U.K. policies are dangerous because we will lose our human rights, feel free to enlighten them. It’s not the case, has never been the case, and will never be the case. A vote for Reform U.K. is a vote to restore the sovereignty of the country and to reaffirm the rights of every citizen in the land.

The post In a campaign full of lies, this one is possibly the most ridiculous appeared first on Emma Guy Reform.

‘We want change’ they shout. ‘Time to get the Tories out’ they cry.

Whilst there may be general agreement that the Tories have done a spectacularly bad job over the past five years, and most people are eager for something to change, there has been little in the way of hard policy from any of the other political parties. 

This is a real problem.

All the candidates are shouting for change, using it as a rallying cry and hoping to get people to march behind them, but there’s one big elephant in the room.

Change to what?

It’s great that so many people want change, but what change do you want? And how can you be sure, even if you do know what changes you want, that those changes are what the country needs?

Wishing rid of the conservative government is a change that a lot of people desire, but what do they think any incoming government will do to improve their lives? 

We’ve seen very little detail over the past couple of years, just a set of vague ideals and promises from Kier Starmer and the shadow cabinet. Even now there is a lack of willingness by him and his party to commit to doing anything if they are elected. There’s a vacuum of policy ideas from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, still reeling from their leaders’ involvement in the Post Office scandal, seem bereft of original ideas.

None of them actually offer change. They all appear to be offering a tinkering around the edges with a guarantee of continuity, slightly left of centre socialism. 

Reform UK are different. We’ve had fully costed proposals available for people to read for the past three months. Policies that get to the heart of the problems facing the U.K. today. Policies that are radical in some respects, but necessary to ensure that our society and way of life can continue.

Because one thing is crystal clear to anyone who stops to think about it for a moment. If we carry on along the path we currently occupy, things will only get worse.

We need to find a new path, a new trajectory for Britain. 

Remember, Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting a different outcome. We’ve elected the main parties in and out of office for the past quarter of a century and they’ve brought us to this point. To do so again would simply be insanity.

Something needs to change, and that something is Reform UK.

The post Change they all cry; but to what? appeared first on Emma Guy Reform.

It was a wonderful event. We sat and chatted amicably, shared ideas, and had a great time whilst also raising money for Christian aid.

I was fortunate enough to meet the conservative candidate, Charles Fifield, Green Party candidate, Mark Green, and Independent candidate Helen Clawson. We all stood around and chatted for twenty minutes whilst others ate their curry, and truth be told, we found lots of common ground.

What struck me was that there was more that united us than divided us. Every one of us desperately wanted to make a difference in the local community and to effect real change that would help people. What also struck me was that we were all human. Gathered as we were in St Helen’s church it seemed fitting that we had all attended with the single aim of helping people, not knowing that the other candidates would be there.

It was a great evening, and we all enjoyed not only the food but also each other’s company.

But now the starting pistol has been fired on a general election we need to retreat to party lines and appear to be partisan to our own cause, despite the fact that this masks the real people we all are.

So, as we enter this crazy six weeks of campaigning before the general election, I thought it worth saying, publicly, that all of us, irrespective of our party affiliations are human beings. We might disagree with each other on matters of policy but I know that whoever is elected as MP, we will represent everyone’s views, not just our own.

And whilst we are expected to debate with each other publicly on matters of policy and promises, none of us would wish the other ill. The parties and policies we stand for are our own, and none of us want to see each other being attacked, besmirched, or harangued on social media.

Whoever you support, whichever party you have an affiliation with, remember that candidates are human beings and are simply standing up for what they believe. So before you write or comment on any social media posts, remember to be kind online. We are all just human beings.

The post Politicians are human too appeared first on Emma Guy Reform.

Is anyone else fed up with the narrative ‘vote Reform, get Labour’?

We heard it so often in the run-up to the polling that it even became a hashtag in its own right, and was used extensively, predominantly by conservatives, to try and stop their voters defecting to Reform.

What never seemed to cut through on social media was the fact that this is nonsense. A vote for any party is a vote for that party and that party alone. It’s not a proxy vote for anyone else. We don’t currently have proportional representation and none of the votes were transferrable, so whether people thought this a ‘clever’ thing to say or not, it was factually incorrect. 

As a statement, it also fails on a second point; namely that it is rooted in the belief that we are stuck with a two party system in this country which will never change and moreover, cannot change. This, of course, is also nonsense.

The Mayoral and local elections demonstrated quite clearly that almost 40% of all the available seats went to anyone other than conservatives or labour and that, apart from anything else, should give all of us hope that we can change the system.

In the Blackpool South by-election, where Mark Butcher stood for Reform and gained the highest percentage vote we have seen in any by-election to date (16.9%), the turnout was just 32%, meaning a full two thirds of everyone eligible to vote simply didn’t bother. Had more people turned out, would we have been able to win a greater vote share? That much is unclear, but it still leaves the question of why people stayed at home.

Why don’t people vote?

In researching this I came across a post on social media suggesting that more women than men failed to vote in the recent elections, and that struck me as strange. As many of you may already know, I often turn to Emily Pankhurst for inspiration and in this case, I went down a little rabbit hole on when women actually got the vote. I ended up on this Wikipedia page which contains some astonishing facts

I’m willing to bet that some of these dates surprised you. Would you have known (or guessed) some of the countries that didn’t grant women the vote until relatively recently? I was shocked. Whilst some countries were not a surprise, I hadn’t realised that before women were granted the right to vote in the U.K. in 1918, they already had the right in what were former U.K. colonies such as Australia and New Zealand. Even the Pitcairn Islands seemed more advanced, granting suffrage to women in 1838!

Digging a little deeper in my research it turned out that those who failed to vote split broadly equally between women and men. The low turnout was not determined by biological sex.

Looking back at the last set of fully analysed data from the Electoral Commission, their report on the 2023 local elections confirmed that overall the turnout for these was just 32%, almost seven in ten people, women and men, eligible to vote, simply didn’t bother.

The reasons they gave varied, but fell broadly into four groups.

1. A lack of time or being too busy at work (15%)
2. A lack of interest or being fed up with politics (13%)
3. Medical reasons (8%)
4. Being away on polling day (8%)

Lower down the list, 6% simply forgot and 5% said they didn’t trust politicians. Alarmingly, another 4% said the parties didn’t represent their views and a further 4%, that there was no point in voting as it wouldn’t make a difference to the outcome. And if proof were ever needed that the current two party system is long past its sell by date, it’s there in black and white. On top of this, a further 3% didn’t vote because they don’t possess any I.D. and 1% because they objected to being forced to show I.D. to prove who they were. Given the current question marks over postal voting fraud, it begs the question of whether voter I.D. was a solution looking for a problem.

Both Labour and the so called Conservative Party have failed to properly govern this once beautiful country. They have wasted the last quarter of a century and have presided over a slow decline into mediocrity. They have created an environment where minority groups and minority views garner all the headlines and normal rational people are sidelined and left to wonder what has become of the society they grew up in and fondly remember.

We are slowly losing our way as a society. Our values seem to be eroding by the day, our laws are turned against us and violence stalks the streets of our capital. 

Something needs to change and change urgently.

Before the next election, we need to carefully examine the policies, ideas and plans of each of the parties standing and encourage people to vote for the one that most relates to them and their families. The policies that will bring jobs, prosperity and a stable society in which to raise our children and grandchildren.

And by the time the election is called (come on Rishi, get on with it…) we should be able to put to bed the myth of voting reform and getting Labour. In fact, come the next election we should be promoting:

Vote Labour, get Labour

Vote Conservative, get Conservative 

Vote Reform, get Reform 

The post Vote Reform, get Reform appeared first on Emma Guy Reform.

Simon was incredibly generous with his time, and spent it taking me through the thought process behind producing a document like this. Unsurprisingly, he told me that it had taken considerable time and debate to come up with a series of policies that not only would the members back, but that the rest of the electorate could back as well. Narrow, insular policies focusing on particular hot-button topics will never be enough to convince the majority of people that you’re the right party to govern.

In turn, this got me to thinking about how similar the process is to running a business. In business you have a mission and vision, followed by a series of strategies, tactics and targets: precisely what had been unveiled to us at the conference.

Policies are the backbone of every political party. Every manifesto is littered with them and every party hopes they will provide:

1. Guidance – to help and advise the principles for operations and decision making.
2. Accountability – if you set a target, you should be accountable for your performance to that target.
3. Consistency – Policies give clear guidelines of what is expected or acceptable to any organisation. 
4. Risk management  – by outlining the issues you are trying to solve and the solutions you propose, you are also demonstrating an understanding of the risks inherent in your course of action.
5. Supporter confidence in the party – policies that not only the core of your support, but others outside of your party can get behind, give you a solid platform to gain consensus amongst the majority of people.
6. Continual improvement – some of the goals may be aspirational and policies help to codify these and provide a framework for measuring continual improvement towards resolving the policy issue.

Above all, they foster a sense of trust and fairness and demonstrate your ethical approach to solving the problems that face the country. Moreover, they set standards by which you can expect to be measured and set a culture based on values and consensus.

Without policies, how can you convey all of these things to the whole of the country?

As in business, they provide a framework and give everyone an insight into the mission, vision, values and culture of any organisation. This is what we have done with the draft ‘Contract with YOU’.

Currently, it is in draft format as the party are actively seeking feedback on the policies and plans contained within it, and a lot of feedback has already been sent. But we want more. If you can spare some time, please read it for yourself (download a copy here) and let us know your thoughts?

After all, without your support we can’t make the changes we know are needed to restore the fortunes of the United Kingdom.

The post The importance of policies to a Political party appeared first on Emma Guy Reform.