Reform voters want Farage to give UK 'full-blown factory reset'

Britons are turning to Nigel Farage's Reform UK because they see the country as a sluggish smartphone and they want a "full-blown factory reset", according to one of the country's leading experts on the rise of populism. Matt Goodwin, a political scientist who has addressed Reform conferences and is well-known for his appearances on GB News, lays out why many former Tory voters have deserted the Conservatives in a hard-hitting essay for a major think tank.

He says Reform represents the "New Right" which recognises the "need to not just reform the system but bring about what I call a full-blown 'factory reset' in this country". In his essay for Policy Exchange he describes how many voters now see Britain as like "an old smartphone that has become slow, sluggish, overloaded with apps, and is now a major source of stress". They want to "reset" it by returning institutions to wat they were like before Tony Blair took power.

He argues this would means ending the "experiment with mass uncontrolled legal immigration" and "restoring national sovereignty and regaining control over our borders by fully exiting the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)". He claims the Tory party "may be dying" and Reform is now the "dominant representative of the Right".

Setting out why he believes swathes of voters have left the Conservatives for Reform, he writes: "A party founded as the traditional defender of the nation state, its borders, and people has for too long looked like a party that is actively engaged in the destruction of these things." Laying much of the blame at Boris Johnson's door, he claims the former prime minister presided "over a further loss of control over Britain's borders and the wholesale liberalisation of mass immigration".

The Policy Exchange essay collection brings together thinkers from across the Right who examine at the future of the country, including Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho.

She also highlights issues with the ECHR, writing: "The European Court of Human Rights rulings on asylum and deportation have stymied democratically elected politicians' ability to prioritise national security by deporting foreign offenders and illegal immigrants."

Ms Coutinho adds: "There is simply no democratic consent for the human rights of foreign born rapists, paedophiles and violent criminals to trump the safety of the British public and yet we see this happen time and again."

Conservative peer Lord Goodman, who leads the think tank's "future of the Right" project, presses for government to "help families".

He claims the "treatment of families with children by government over the last half century has been neglectful at best and abusive at worst - with the state treating them as a resource to be atomised, taxed and treated as a means to an end".

Changes in the tax and welfare systems have not kept pace the rise of two-earner couples, he argues, writing: "Family members are assessed by the tax system as individual people, but by the welfare one as household members."

Pressing for the British Right to look to the future, he writes: "There will never be agreement on whether the present is better than the past. But a country that believes the future must be worse than the present has given up on itself."