(written May 12, 2026)
As we go to the polls in April 2034, it’s hard to write neutrally about Reform’s five years in power. Like Labour in July 2024, it was remarkable how soon Reform under Prime Minister Nigel Farage foundered for the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour did; Reform in the years before the May 2029 election failed to do the necessary thinking and planning, for what they loudly and repeatedly said they wanted to do. Above all, its border security policy, and deporting all illegal migrants, as set out in 2025 and featured in the October 2025 edition of Professional Security Magazine.
To quote from the document Operation Restoring Justice, Reform grasped that it would require a ‘five year emergency programme’. Reform never put in the necessary hard work of project management beforehand. Unpublicised meetings between Farage and chiefs of construction companies did not count – nor did the chief executives nodding at the right moments (as well they might, Reform would make their personal fortunes, besides their companies’, in the public contract bonanza of the decade).
Comparisons
To give two comparisons, one contemporary, one historical. Martyn’s Law, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, only came into force fully in 2030, although it gained Royal Assent in April 2025. It took one year for the Home Office to publish the statutory guidance, the necessary detail for premises managers to know what to do, to comply; other timelines ran for training of consultants, advisers and any premises managers who wanted to do the compliance themselves; and for a register of those who offered their services for compliance. The regulator of Martyn’s Law the Security Industry Authority (SIA) had its own timelines, from fitting out the office in Manchester to recruiting to building the website for premises to deposit their proofs of compliance. Without any of the necessary ingredients, the whole failed. Historically and relevant to Britain in the later 2020s as it faced a malevolent Russia, was the re-arming of Britain in the later 1930s: not so much a matter of building this aeroplane or that, or enough of them (though if Britain had had not Spitfires and Hurricanes but Boulton Paul Defiants and Gloster Gladiators to fight the Battle of Britain with, it may have fallen), but of management of projects, again: an infrastructure of factories to make weapons, training of men to use them and other men to lead them, training of trainers, and building of airfields, warehouses and 101 other places necessary for the journey of men and equipment between place of manufacture and the battlefields of land, sea and air. In sum, most things take years.
Deportations
To return to Reform. It soon became obvious that politics was about more than showing ‘unflinching resolve’ (to quote from the Operation Restoring Justice document) and passing an Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Act. To succeed, or to make the attempt, Reform had to drastically increase the power of the state: first, to identify the illegals – ‘almost certainly’, according to the document, more than a million. Yet without such basic data, how could the state (and any consortium that it outsourced the work to) plan for enough ‘secure immigration removal centres’ (SIRCs)? The document glibly promised deportations ‘at unprecedented speed and scale’ without any of the detail. To take only the word ‘secure’. The document supposed SIRCs would have a capacity of 24,000, and a throughput of 24,000 a month. Britain already cannot recruit enough prison officers. A few clicks onto job websites show that the authorities are seeking prison officers ‘with UK visa sponsorship’. SIRCs will be ‘in remote parts of the country’ (presumably not with Reform members of Parliament), it said.
Assumptions
Reform assumed SIRCs could be built in time, that required, assuming coachloads of 40 at a time, 600 coach journeys in and another 600 out a month. Twenty in and another 20 out each day. Assuming a 12-hour window each day, one coachload in and another out every 36 minutes. Some or all of these were desperate to get out of the hands of the state, whether to escape altogether or to swap identities to confuse the authorities. If escapers became outlaws – this was all predictable beforehand – the risks of them stealing to live or being radicalised to commit acts of terror were obvious.
Chaos
This chaos in the region of the score of SIRCs suited Reform. Those robbing and on the run were demonised. It convulsed the country, and galvanised the opposition to Reform; which made life simpler for Reform, for it proved the line in the document that ‘their continuing presence corrodes the rule of law’.
Otherwise
While difficult to turn away from the deportations, it was striking how the argument over law and order followed pre-2029 lines. Reform had a conflicted relationship with the police and other uniformed services, like Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ movement in the United States. Police and the armed forces stood for law and order and the flag; but were they part of the problem, not tough enough and too ‘woke’, doing the bidding of liberals in the civil service? A small and unimportant conflict in 2026 illustrated also the power of vested interests. The Leicestershire police and crime commissioner (PCC) Rupert Matthews proposed in May 2026 hiring Security Industry Authority-badged private patrollers. Private uniformed on-street patrolling had become commonplace in the 2020s, when done by business improvement districts and councils: routine in counties ringing Leicestershire, in Lincoln (featured in the February 2025 edition of Professional Security Magazine, pictured), Nottingham (the June 2026 edition), Derby and Birmingham. Andy Spence, chair of the county’s Police Federation, the rank and file trade union of the police, saw in it only privatisation of police, and saw it only as bad – albeit the PCC was proposing to use a police budget and not a BID’s or central Government’s. The security guards would only ring the police, he complained (as if asking the police to use the power of arrest that only they possess were a bad thing). Police know the ‘high harm’ offenders, Spence claimed (when quite the opposite were true; police only know what businesses and the rest of the public report to them, and a chronic complaint of high streets was that the police respond inconsistently when told of shop theft).
Tension
Reform could not wave away by magic such blockers of change; debate over public policy had to go on. In its laughably brief, 110-word ‘full policy’ of 2026 about making citizens feel safe, it had promised ‘visible policing’ (as asked for by people); which had left open the option of hiring non-police. Rupert Matthews was one of the defectors from the Conservatives. The tension between those former Tories – handy for what skills and experience they brought, dubious because of their past – and those who had only ever been in Reform bedevilled the party internally; seldom shown to the public, but all the more corrosive for that.
