Nigel Farage has declared war on home working. In a speech to Reform UK activists in Birmingham he vowed to get people back to the office full time, saying that Britain needed “an attitudinal change towards hard work rather than the work life balance.”

He didn’t cite any evidence for this, either because he didn’t care or because he knew it would embarrass him. I suspect the former but this is almost beside the point. My working pattern is between me and my employer, it is none of Nigel Farage’s business. That the Reform UK leader disagrees is further cold water on the idea the party will shrink the state.

Farage’s tirade is, in policy terms, pointless. Because if hybrid work were as ruinous as he claims then he wouldn’t need to campaign against it. The market would do it for him. Companies that got everybody back in the office five days a week would outperform, they’d make more money, and they’d hire more people, leading the labour market to churn back towards the rat run.

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The death of hybrid working has been predicted ever since it became popular but around 74% of organisations now offer some form of home working and the proportion of workers in hybrid roles continues to grow. At some point you have to ask yourself whether the profit-maximising companies are all making the same irrational mistake, or whether the guy giving speeches to pensioners might be wrong. And as a brief aside here, allow me to point out the deep irony of complaining about workshy Britain during a rally at 4pm on a Monday afternoon.

I should define terms though, because Farage bemoans home working as if half the country has permanently retreated to the sofa and are lazily triaging emails in their pyjamas. The reality is that only a minority of people work from home full time. The vast majority of what we call “home working” is the two or three days at home, two or three days in the office pattern that’s become popular since the pandemic.

The best study on hybrid work is a randomised control trial published in Nature in 2024, run by Nick Bloom at Stanford on 1,600 employees at Trip dot com. Working from home two days a week had no measurable effect on productivity, performance reviews, or promotions over two years of follow-up, but it did cut quit rates by a third. Managers who went into the trial expecting hybrid work to hurt productivity came out the other side thinking it helped.

Workers themselves love hybrid working so much they value it at 8% of their salary – meaning they’d accept an 8% pay cut to keep it. People enjoy the work-life balance and it doesn’t have a meaningful impact on their performance either way.

You might say that of course the workers enjoy it, these skivers who don’t know they’re born, etc etc. But firms don’t offer these arrangements out of charity. If companies are choosing to let people work from home a couple of days a week, it’s because they’re getting something in return somewhere down the line – whether that’s retaining experienced staff, widening their hiring pool, or just not having to replace a third of their workforce every couple of years.

And this makes intuitive sense. Being able to start your evening as soon as work finishes is great! More time to unwind means starting the next day more refreshed than if you’d spent the previous evening pressed against the window of a late-running train. On the days you are in the office you can do all the collaborative and social things that offices are good for and on the days when you’re at home you can do the focused work that open-plan offices are terrible for.

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I suspect at least part of hybrid working’s appeal is downstream of other policy failures. Many workers can’t afford to live as close to their jobs as they would like. Commuter towns have become more expensive, trains have continued to be both unreliable and expensive, and the result is that millions of people are travelling further, for longer, in worse conditions, at greater cost than they were a decade ago. It’s no surprise they only want to do this a few days a week.

If we had abundant housing and better transport infrastructure I think the cost-benefit calculation would shift, at least for some people, because there really isn’t a one size fits all and it seems logical that – all else being equal – some workers who are currently hybrid would prefer to be in the office more often.

The trouble is that rents have risen sharply since the pandemic; hybrid work is compensating for a housing and infrastructure shortage that Reform have yet to show much interest in fixing. And for people at the longer end of the commute distribution, a difficult journey two or three days a week is manageable, but five days a week becomes hellish or unaffordable. Farage is shouting about getting everybody back to their desks without reflecting on why the journey to those desks has become so miserable for so many.

But is Reform really going to end hybrid working? It would be legislatively difficult and, as discussed, pointless. You only need to take one look at the crowd at Farage’s rally to realise both why he said it and why he was able to hold the event before most of the country had finished work. According to YouGov polling from late 2025, 34% of retirees have an unfavourable opinion of hybrid working, more than triple the number of 18–24 year olds who oppose the practice.

Many of Reform’s most ardent supporters like to claim that young people are increasingly turning to the party but this isn’t borne out by any poll; they are a party overwhelmingly supported by the very same retirees who hate hybrid working.

This was boomerslop politics at its most crude, lambasting hybrid working to a crowd of people with no stake in the outcome of the debate. They don’t have to manage hybrid teams or coordinate anchor days. They have retired. And yet a third of them have strong feelings about how other people should organise their professional lives.

Research from King’s College London looking at World Values Survey data found that older generations are the most likely to say work should be prioritised – even as work becomes less important in their own lives – and that this maps onto a well-documented pattern of generational nostalgia, the sense that younger people simply aren’t as committed as they were. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of the energy in this discussion is coming from people who endured the commute for forty years and feel, on some level, that everyone else should have to as well.

Farage’s attack on hybrid working will come to nothing but it tells us everything we need to know about Reform’s audience and their priorities. It also tells us that those on the right who believe Reform is the great hope for economic reform are going to be sorely disappointed.

The party is a distillation of the worst things the Tories did in office – not being honest about trade-offs, playing the tune of bygone days, and turning the state into a cash machine for pensioners. Reform’s commitment to shrinking the state withers at the opportunity to make a bunch of retirees wet over yesterday’s Britain.

Erstwhile Atlanticist I may be, but the fact the scales have long since fallen from my eyes doesn’t temper my sadness at the state of America. Nor does it make the obvious conclusion after the last year, and in particular the last week, any easier: that Europe (including Britain) must get serious or we are damned.

It should come as no surprise that Trump is threatening Europe over Greenland. The continent, Britain perhaps more than most, spent 2025 acting as if the normal rules of West-on-West diplomacy still applied to America. They do not.

Trump is an evil man who governs in naked self-interest, but far more terrifying than the third-rate mind bullying Europe’s democracies is the fact he is able to do with seemingly no limits.

America’s institutions are supine and its politicians are all – whatever side of the aisle they sit on – cowardly, impotent, or a combination of the two. A robust nation isn’t led by men who are evil or senile; from 2017–2021 the US was led by the former, from 2021–2025 it was led by the latter, and now it appears blessed with both. This is the pattern of a superpower in freefall.

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Trump has the attention span of a gnat; to call him a third-rate mind would be an undue kindness. He may forget about Greenland as quickly as he has turned the island into a crisis; he may move on to the next bout of law-breaking, to cause the next international incident that drives America’s allies into the hands of the Chinese or pushes them onto the warpath of the Russians.

Perhaps we get through the next three years with gentle diplomacy, pretending that Trump is an aberration. But the American people were prepared to re-elect a man who tried to destroy their democracy; who might they invite into the Oval Office next?

As it turns out Trump is not Hitler; he has no grand ideological mission; he believes in “the great replacement” only so far as it serves his ends. Far worse is that the corrupted and enfeebled American polity is ripe for somebody brighter and more principled but no less evil to inflict much greater harm on the world – and the American people.

And then there’s always the chance Trump does follow through on his threats, either today or some other time in the next three years; he is, after all, both stupid and selfish. Either way, this is not a country to be relied upon or that can be gamed into continuing as our security blanket.

Getting Serious

The depth of our defensive reliance on America is staggering. To use Britain as an example: our Trident nuclear deterrent relies on missiles that can only be maintained and repaired by the U.S.; our F-35B fighter jets rely on American data and parts; our air-air refuelling capability is limited; and we lack the munitions or “magazine depth” to keep our guns and artillery firing for more than a few weeks without U.S. industrial capacity. These are just a few examples; there are many more across the continent.

We urgently need to divide our defensive labour. Europe has 178 different types of defence system compared to the 30 used by America. It would be more efficient if the big powers could put aside nationalistic concerns about domestic designs and harmonise around a smaller number of systems. That way, they could benefit from easier repairs and economies of scale.

Similarly, there needs to be a smarter distribution of abilities. Britain and France should take on the burden of replacing the American nuclear umbrella. Maintaining – and realistically improving and expanding – a nuclear deterrent is expensive, so the British and French should focus their resources here, while the other major European powers such as Germany and Poland can focus on conventional forces.

While this would require a radical shift towards a joint Anglo-French nuclear doctrine, the alternatives are more proliferation or continued reliance on America. The former is undesirable; the latter is impossible.

Just as important as defence is the growth needed to pay for it. Europe is a continent making yesterday’s goods, such as combustion engines, when it needs to be unleashing the technologies of tomorrow. The reason it hasn’t done so, and the reason why there is not a single British or European tech giant, is because we have regulated them out of existence.

We have created a continent of conservatives who care more about reducing risk than nurturing talent. The EU should ditch onerous regulations that chase away investment, like the Digital Markets Act, and should implement the reforms proposed by the Draghi Report in full.

The Labour government in Britain should do what it was elected to do and dash for growth, going full speed ahead on planning reform and ditching the Online Safety Act and its onerous workers’ rights legislation.

Shifting the Vibe

To do all of this, we will need three massive things. Firstly, a culture shift: we need to ditch the precautionary principle that has opened up an innovation chasm between Europe and America. If you become experts in banning and regulating, you simply choke off new ideas before they can bring social and economic goods, and in the end, you run out of things to regulate and ban. The free world needs a new leader, but we don’t currently look like we care enough about the “free” bit.

Secondly, it’s going to require flexibility and the acceptance that Europe may need to create new institutions or formations rather than rejigging its current bloated setup.

If Hungary and Czechia don’t want to be involved, they don’t have to be, but they shouldn’t stop others who do care about democracy from standing up to defend it. We should probably revisit Macron’s “Europe of concentric circles” idea – different institutions with different levels of integration. Apart from anything else, no serious defensive framework for Europe can be created without Britain, and we don’t look to be rejoining the EU any time soon.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, our politicians need to grow up and level with their electorates. As long as they keep pretending that diplomacy will win the day and that the America we know and love will return, they will be hard-pressed to justify making difficult choices domestically.

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Leaders can’t act as if Trump is merely misguided while re-arming like it’s the 1930s; they need to tell it like it is: America is in the grips of authoritarianism, possibly irreversibly, and they do not care about us anymore.

The evidence from Canada last year and Denmark more recently suggests that voters do rally around the flag when they see a critical threat to national security, so this may not be as unpopular with voters as European politicians fear. Similarly, many of Europe’s reactionary populists – the forces incumbents are currently struggling to keep out – have spent years tethering themselves to the Trump project.

A crusade for strategic independence could help to keep them out and stop what has happened in Washington from happening in London, Paris, and Berlin – though we shall see; the alternative is that it moderates them, as we have seen from Meloni in Italy.

The transatlantic rift really pains me because I loved the American project: the country of Washington and Lincoln and (Theodore) Roosevelt and JFK. It was, until a few years ago, my ambition to move there. Instead, it seems the best alternative is to help make Europe the new land of the free.

Alas, we need to treat America as a lost cause. The country has triumphed over internal strife many times before, but we cannot gamble our future security and prosperity on the chance it will do so again.

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I have nothing to give Kemi Badenoch but faint praise. Her speech to Tory MPs and activists in Manchester was better than I expected it to be. Her headline grabbing policy announcement of abolishing stamp duty – a terrible tax that clogs up the labour market and discourages downsizing – was a positive one. But like the afternoon I set aside to write about this conference, time for the Tories has slipped away.

I could try and conjure 1000 words on whether the policy agenda unveiled in Manchester is deliverable or desirable but it would be a waste of my time and yours. Because none of it matters, the Conservatives are lost to an era of politics that no longer exists.

It’s become something of a truism that the political battle is now fought on the cultural axis where once it was fought on the left-right one. But I don’t think this is quite right. I believe the contest is now primarily between progressives and reactionaries, a battle the modern Tory party seems uninterested in.

When I talk of progressives I don’t mean damp leftists, the group that brought us Keir Starmer; people repelled by the excesses of socialism but too self-conscious to call themselves social democrats. I mean the term more literally than that; people who believe in progress and human flourishing, who look to the future to shape the present, who reject a zero-sum approach to life.

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You can see it in many of those who back the abundance movement, yimbyism, and techno-optimism; there is a coalition bringing together people from social democrats to pro-market types, individuals whose disagreement on some important issues is transcended by a shared terms of reference about the end-goals of this political moment.

The reactionaries then, take the opposing view. There’s an important distinction between looking to history for solutions and fetishising a false narrative of where our species has been.

A desire for the present to look much more like the past is bringing together groups who would previously have hated each other; socialists steeped in nostalgia for the West’s industrial heyday now sit in an electoral coalition with those obsessed by a fictional poisoning of the bloodstream, whether by modern medicine or mass migration. The reactionaries are a broad coalition too, but all believe there is only so much opportunity to go round, all crave what has already been, they don’t value modern democracy.

This undercurrent has and still is transforming our politics and our societies. Trump’s election in 2016 and return earlier this year were both indicative of it, as was Britain’s journey to exiting the EU. A cursory glance across Europe shows the traditional parties of left and right collapsing almost everywhere. This is happening because they are fighting the last war.

In the UK, both main parties have tried to ride this change. The Conservatives for a time managed to bring the reactionaries into their existing electoral coalition. The Tories could only combine free market ‘global britain’ types with those want to “hang the pedos and fund our NHS” as long as they had a central goal to rally around, once Brexit was done there was no longer such a goal.

For Labour, the coalition looks slightly different, graduates hampered by slow wage growth and high house prices, and the ‘traditional’ working class Labour voter of old. The result is no less incoherent, the promise of growth at all costs set against rising taxes and industrial strategy, complete indecision in the face of Britain’s changing demographics. Labour cannot decide whether it is a party of progress or reaction.

Poor leadership through an unlucky series of global crises hastened the decline of the Tory party, but it would have happened eventually regardless. The coalition was built on sand. Poor leadership in the aftermath may do for Labour, but it is more likely to be death by a thousand cuts.

Unlike the Tories – for whom Reform is the primary threat – Labour’s vote is splitting in multiple directions. As a side note, this is a concerning trend for those of a progress mindset, there is a catch-all party for reactionaries but not yet an alternative for us. In a first-past-the-post system this increases the likelihood of a reactionary government.

The shift we’ve been witnessing has, in Britain, been somewhat obscured by our tendency to let America set the temperature of our politics. Labour have looked to the Democrats for lessons whilst the Tories have looked to the Republicans. But the United States is a proper two-party system in which the barriers for new entrants as so high as to be almost insurmountable. This has forced the change in political battle lines to happen within the mainstream parties rather than without them.

Those hoping the Republican party will return to Romney-ite sanity once Trump leaves office are wishful thinkers. The electoral coalition doesn’t exist anymore. The Republicans have been successful of late precisely because they have adapted to the new battle lines more quickly than the Democrats have.

In Britain, with no such protection, it is entirely possible that in ten years time Labour and the Tories are both almost irrelevant. The problem is that both parties contain authentic progressives and reactionaries, they are both so steeped in their internal history that their turning circle is limited. Any attempt to change will be hampered by loud voices within each party.

And so we return to a Tory conference trapped in the old politics. Where the dwindling band of Conservative activists can snap a selfie with some of Margaret Thatcher’s old outfits. There’s an argument to be made that authentic conservatism – the politics of sound money and respect for institutions – could be the new centrism. A check on breakneck progress, a respect for history rooted in pragmatism about the present. But this was not on display in Manchester.

The ‘conservative’ party promises spending restraint on the one hand but comes forth with unfunded tax cuts and refuses to reckon with the triple lock on the other. It claims to be different, and better, than Reform but also bemoans the lack of white faces and attacks the independence of the judiciary. The Conservatives have stopped being their own thing, they are exclusively defined by other people and other parties, trapped in the past, hoping that the battle lines will return to those they are comfortable with. But they won’t. The world has moved on.

Many of us are worried about the rise of the reactionaries. And with good reason, they threaten to return the West to an intellectual and political dark age. But we should be even more worried about the lack of a coherent party political alternative. There are people to be persuaded, to be won back from the tide of reaction, but there is not yet a new vehicle to do so and the current ones look spent.

In the UK neither Labour nor the Tories seem up to the task. In France, President Macron’s coalition is falling apart, the neo-fascist Rassemblement National look set to take power whether this year or in 2027. In the US the Democrats are more divided and unpopular than they have been in decades as Trump threatens to imprison his political opponents. The enemies of the enlightenment are gathering, for the sake of democracy we badly need something better to confront them with.

Thank you for reading Build Vector, if you’ve enjoyed this piece then please consider subscribing, it’s free and you have nothing to lose except a tiny portion of your life. You can find me on X @Jack_Nostalgic

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Labour will probably feel that was a successful conference given the circumstances. But the bar was in hell. Some thoughts:

In terms of delivery this was Keir Starmer’s best speech as Labour leader, but there aren’t many shining examples of the genre.

It was also filled with the contradictions and drift that have hampered his tenure as Prime Minister so far. He will no doubt hope Tuesday 30th September 2025 will go down in history as the day he took the fight to Reform. Starmer accused Nigel Farage of being a ‘snake oil salesman’ who doesn’t have anything good to say about Britain. He made the point that you need to like your country if you want to lead it. No disagreement from me.

But the Prime Minister stretched credulity when he said that Britain “isn’t broken”. If not then why does it feel broken? And why are so many people deserting his party?

Labour was elected last year on a mandate for change and economic growth. They have yet to deliver either. It is testament to his failure in office that he feels the need to take the fight to Reform so early in the Parliament.

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Nigel Farage should be irrelevant right now, his party has as many MPs as there are years to the next general election. Labour won a historic mandate in 2024, Starmer has a huge majority, he should not be feeling like he is in a ‘fight for the soul of the nation’.

The reality is that he should be behind in the polls at this point of the Parliament. No reforming government worth its salt would be leading in the polls whilst making the difficult decisions required to get the country back on the right path. The polls are not in and of themselves worrying.

By setting up next May’s local elections as “our mid-terms” (gross) he is asking us to define his short term success by how well he holds off Reform and whether Labour can demonstrate it is winning that fight for Britain’s soul or not.

Yes Reform’s policy on indefinite leave to remain was authoritarian and racist. Yes they are a party of cranks and reactionaries. But they are also a party that lots of people currently want to vote for. Focusing on them so much feels like a mistake this early in the Parliament, especially when next year is likely to be epochally bad for Labour councillors, and members of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments.

What’s more worrying still is that, over a year into this government there remains no coherent strategy. Policies are disjointed, messaging seemingly decided on the hoof.

In the run-up to last year’s election there was talk of a decade of national renewal. Then came the five missions replacing the five pillars (or was it the other way around?) then to the island of strangers only to return to national renewal, positive patriotism, and the Britain of ‘painting a fence’.

There was another incoherence in Starmer’s speech. He says the purpose of his government is to return Britain to a state of strong economic growth. Yet he also name-checked the ruinous Employment Rights Bill set to heap risk and compliance costs on British businesses. The Prime Minister had the gall to suggest this would increase productivity – by what method it is patently unclear.

He stood full square behind industrial strategy – which doesn’t work – and raised the spectre of the ‘more muscular state’. Anybody who says the latter will crowd out private investment is wrong according to Starmer – well that’s alright then.

Then there’s the spectre of the budget, the £30 billion black hole in the government finances. Perhaps the most accurate line of Starmer’s speech was this: ‘It doesn’t get easier from here’.

The Prime Minister ruled out a wealth tax, good, but again the prospect shouldn’t have been allowed to fester for so many months, creating more uncertainty for individuals and businesses. At least the prospect of applying VAT to private health insurance was quashed after only a few days of media speculation.

We are still left to speculate on whether Labour will raise the three big taxes – Income Tax, National Insurance, and VAT – in the Autumn budget. We’ve got the best part of two months to work out what “the manifesto commitment stands for now” means. This government has yet to demonstrate its commitment to growth with action, many of its actions in fact suggest it is committed to the opposite.

If the Prime Minister had any sense he would be using his vast majority to push through difficult reforms. Don’t take no for an answer. If you really believe that growth is what the country needs then go and deliver it. Reform welfare, replace our discretionary planning system with a zonal one, take an axe to the ruinous amounts of money we are showering on pensioners (forgive the mixed metaphor, it is late), shatter council tax and put local government funding back together again as something better.

On this and more there are no plans. In the long-term the Prime Minister, as it stands, is screwed.

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So why a successful conference then? Because it looked as if the Prime Minister was likely to be screwed well before the next election. Before Andy Burnham shot himself in the foot and advocated a spending splurge worthy of Liz Truss and a new economic policy of ‘not looking over our shoulder at the bond markets’. I’d love it if we weren’t so in hock to the bond markets, perhaps we should try borrowing less?

The Mancunian Che Guevara slumped back up north not even waiting to watch his leader’s speech. As much as I detest his politics this is better for him and the Labour party. There is little evidence that Andy Burnham can take the tough decisions Keir Starmer can’t.

Manchester is a well-run city but then this long pre-dates Burnham’s tenure as Mayor. He hasn’t had to turn a situation around. If he were to become Prime Minister now he would decimate his reputation and burn through another of his party’s lifelines. Much better to come in 6 months out from 2029 and do a Mark Carney.

Keir Starmer is safe for now. But his policies aren’t working and he still lacks a coherent direction. By defining himself against Reform he has merely kicked his fate a few months down the road. In May of next year, it will be clear he is losing the fight for the soul of the nation, when Reform sweep all before them, when Labour is reduced to ashes in Wales and Scotland.

Then we will be back here again as we have been so many times, guessing which will come first: the last combination of staff and ministers and slogans Starmer can try, or the end of his party’s patience with him. It doesn’t get easier from here indeed.

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Thank you for reading Build Vector, if you’ve enjoyed this piece then please consider subscribing, it’s free and you have nothing to lose except a tiny portion of your life. You can find me on X @Jack_Nostalgic

At the start of the year I wrote that I was sceptical of Reform UK’s prospects. Since then, the party swept the board in May’s local elections and remains well ahead of the competition in national polls.

I find myself in an odd position. On the one hand, I feel more ominous about the state of the country than I did in January. A Reform-induced cataclysm is approaching in the rear-view mirror. On the other, I’m even more convinced than I was then that Reform are overpriced. In light of this week’s immigration announcement I thought I’d revisit this thesis.

The party announced its new immigration policy to much fanfare on Monday. The most important measure was a pledge to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), replacing it with a renewable five-year visa which will be closed to anybody who has broken the law or claimed benefits. The salary threshold for work visas will also increase from roughly £41,700 to £60,000. Crucially, this will apply not just to new arrivals but those who are already here too.

I’m agnostic on the principle of abolishing ILR for new arrivals (I’m tempted but it’s an issue I’d like to look into more). But stripping rights from people who have already been granted them is morally repugnant. With the increase in salary thresholds, people who have followed the rules in good faith, obeyed the law, and are working and paying tax in Britain will, under a Reform government, face deportation.

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I’m always wary of people who throw the word “fascist” at policies they disagree with – there has to be a high bar, otherwise you just end up looking like the boy who cried Hitler. But this is the first time a Reform policy announcement has felt, to me, like a promised assault on democracy.

If the government can void yesterday’s settlements at the stroke of a pen then nobody can have any faith in today’s law. If one set of rights can be stripped retrospectively then the bar is lowered to take other rights away too. It also erodes trust in the UK at a time when the world is unstable and authenticity carries a premium.

It would be naive to think that this just affects immigrants. A government willing to subvert the rule of law in such a way will have no qualms about coming for anybody who stands in their path, native or not. It’s an unconscionable policy that would set a dangerous precedent.

Happily, I think Reform has misjudged things – Farage has overplayed his hand. It’s true that immigration has been too high for too long, and many aspects of our current system are too lenient.

Our government – by which I mean the general institution not the Labour administration – seems to find it difficult to tell the difference between genuine refugees and economic migrants. We’re bringing people to Britain faster than we can manage the cultural change and enforce liberal values.

Too often, we end up stuck with the worst sorts of criminals just because there’s a tiny risk of something bad happening if we deport them. People are fed up and they want a fairer migration system.

But this cuts both ways, and for most this doesn’t translate into the deranged anti-migrant sentiment seen at Tommy Robinson’s rallies. Deporting people who are obeying our laws and paying our taxes won’t wash with voters. It’ll also impact British people with foreign partners.

The rather boring Goodwin types tends to use polling as their weapon of choice when defending such dismal policies. But the more you dig into the numbers the less favourable they seem.

According to YouGov, 45% of people back an immigration system where numbers coming in are radically reduced and requiring “large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave”. That’s certainly enough to win an election if immigration is the most salient issue, right?

Look a little closer though and we see that figure is based on a warped understanding of immigration dynamics – in particular the balance between legal and illegal migration, which people skew wildly towards the latter.

Of those polled by YouGov, some 47% thought there were more illegal migrants than legal migrants in Britain today, while 8% thought the numbers were roughly equal. The actual figure is difficult to measure but, according to Pew Research, falls somewhere around 800,000 out of a total foreign-born population of roughly 10.5 million. Even Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf puts the figure at 1.2 million, only 10% of all the migrants in the UK.

This provides some context for the findings further down the poll because YouGov also asked respondents who they would like to see deported. Of those who wanted any deportations at all, only half wanted to deport low-skilled migrants currently in work. For skilled migrants – which Reform’s salary threshold would no doubt also entangle – the figure falls as low as 19% depending on the sector.

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So the effects of Reform’s latest policy are supported by less than a quarter of the population at best. The party would deport thousands of people that even the most anti-migration segment of the population don’t want to see sent home.

You might say that this doesn’t matter – Reform will lie and people will believe them anyway. But I think this misunderstands the reason for their rise in support. So far, the party has done a great job of appearing more moderate than it actually is, and wanting controls on immigration is a pretty moderate position in the Britain of 2025.

This is crucial to their chances at the next election. Reform’s opponents are constantly calling them a bunch of extremists, but if you can nurture a more mainstream image then it’s your opponents who look full of hyperbole. Of course, there are plenty of dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries who support Reform, but if only those people were supporting the party then they wouldn’t be polling much more than the low teens they were averaging last year.

This is what makes the immigration announcement such an unforced error. The party had been hitting the sweet spot on migration just as it had become the most salient issue with the public. There is no credible force to the right of Reform on immigration. The majority of the electorate are repulsed by figures like Tommy Robinson even if they want to bring numbers right down.

The party is acting like it is heading for power and doesn’t need to care about winning people over (Neil Kinnock in Sheffield circa 1992 much?). Their conference earlier this month felt more like a victory parade than a policy gathering. It gives us a glimpse of what the party might do with untrammelled power, when it thinks people aren’t paying attention.

They are celebrating too soon – the current voting intention polls flatter Reform’s chances. It’s true the party has led for much of this year and on paper those leads of 8–10% look big. But the party is merely the largest player in a fractured political landscape.

Being 10 points ahead when you are on 29% of the vote is nothing to crow about. That’s less than Jeremy Corbyn won during Labour’s historic drubbing of 2019. Right now, with the Tories and Labour in the gutter, it seems like Reform’s rise is irresistible. But in absolute terms their support is both low and shallow, Farage’s large lead is no reflection of enthusiasm amongst the general public.

If they were approaching 40% I might be concerned, but I really don’t think the other parties need to do much to make things at least competitive again. Neither Labour nor the Tories are going to have the same leader this time next year, never mind in 2029. A better Tory leader than Badenoch would still be a long shot to win a majority but would take at least some wavering voters on the right who would otherwise jump into bed with Farage.

This is before we consider the impact of tactical voting. If we get close to 2029 and Reform still look like winning, you can bank on progressives up and down the country throwing their weight behind whichever party is best placed to defeat Reform, just as they backed whichever candidate was best placed to beat the Tories in 2024. The more frightening Reform become, the more likely we are to see mass tactical voting.

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To win in 2029, Reform need to broaden their coalition and continue to hit the sweet spot on perceived areas of government failure. If they tack to the extremes they won’t win new voters and will sow doubt among some of their existing ones.

I’m drawn back to 2024 when Farage seemed to blame NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and stalled his surge in support. The party already has enough vulnerabilities – Farage’s brittle ego and dislike of sharing power, their lack of experience, their ludicrously expensive fiscal policies – this week it added another. Reform UK remains heavily overpriced.

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GLP-1 agonists seem like miracle drugs. They lead to weight loss, slash the risk of heart and kidney disease, and lower blood pressure. The emerging evidence suggests they can go much further; reducing relapse rates in alcoholics and drug addicts, and possibly cutting the risk of dementia and depression too.

But politicians in a climate of fiscal pressure are touting another benefit; freeing up funds currently spent dealing with the consequences of obesity and delivering an economic uplift associated with a fitter, healthier population. I strongly believe we will look back on the emergence of these drugs as of comparable importance to the discovery of penicillin – we just keep finding wonderful new applications. But cash strapped governments looking for a silver bullet will be disappointed. GLP-1s are likely to worsen the acute demographic pressures facing the West.

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Wishful Thinking

The Health Secretary Wes Streeting has touted weight loss jabs as a medicine for Britain’s financial ills. Obesity costs the NHS around £11 billion (about $15 billion) a year, if we could eliminate this problem surely we could then eliminate the associated costs and divert funding elsewhere?

In more horizontally challenged countries the costs are even higher. The US spends some $173 billion a year on the health care costs of obesity. Governments are desperate for a solution but their motivation is largely economic.

There are several problems with approaching the roll-out of weight loss jabs as an exercise in cost saving. Firstly, the expense of the drugs themselves. The British government’s initial roll-out is limited to just 220,000 severely obese people – more than 20 million brits are overweight or obese to some extent – at a cost of £900 million per annum by year three, and this is just targeting a small subset of the population.

Which leads to the second issue. While GLP-1s are mighty impressive at prompting weight loss, the majority will need to stay on them indefinitely in order to maintain it. Those who stop taking the drugs regain, on average, around two thirds of the lost weight within a year and are back to their original weight before the end of year two. This isn’t a reason not to roll the drugs out, but it does mean that they should be approached as a long-term treatment for a chronic condition rather than a cure.

Costs will come down over time as more drugs emerge and existing jabs fall off-patent. The much bigger cost though is more people living for longer. There is an economic irony that healthier people cost more in the long-run. Somebody who dies of a heart attack at 65 doesn’t need anymore help with their health, won’t be around to claim a state pension for 30 years, and isn’t a threat to the hard pressed social care budget.

If GLP-1s work as advertised, and we have no reason to think they don’t, we are looking at millions more people living longer, healthier lives. This is fantastic! But the trend towards longer lives began decades ago and we are already dealing with the fiscal consequences of this before introducing a wonder drug into the mix.

In the next twenty years the proportion of brits of pensionable age will rise by a third while the cohort of people over 85 will almost double. Poorly targeted policies like the Triple Lock and the lack of an equitable mechanism for funding social care mean an ever greater proportion of state spending will sprinkle on the shoulders of the old, funded by the dwindling ranks of over-taxed youngsters.

On the other side of the Atlantic the increase in the median age is rising too, albeit at a slower rate, offset by the greater amount of inward migration – though this too could change if Trump continues to make the US less attractive to external talent.

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We’ve Been Here Before With Tobacco

We can look at smoking as a powerful case where health interventions have already increased long-term costs. The Western world has been phenomenally successful at driving down tobacco use over the last half century+ and the proportion of people who smoke has fallen by more than 70% since its 1960s peak. Then too, a big part of the justification was that it would save money by reducing healthcare spending.

Whilst the health conditions associated with smoking have fallen (yay!) the cost to the state has increased as a result. Treating someone for emphysema may be expensive but less so than pensions, bus passes, hip replacements, and free TV licenses.

One study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that while smokers have a higher cost to the state at any given age, a hypothetical population in which nobody smoked would have higher lifetime health costs. Researchers in Finland similarly found that smoking was associated with lower lifetime health costs and a marked reduction in pension outlays. Their study concluded that the net public finance was some €133,000 more favourable to a smoker than to a non-smoker.

The counter-argument is that we are always told that obesity – like smoking before it – has costs in lost productivity that are harder to measure. If people are less sick they may be able to work more hours, provide more value to the economy, and pay more tax.

Here I would point to East Asia. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all years ahead of us in the demographic crisis, they started ageing before we did. Helpfully, they also rank among the healthiest countries in the world and have obesity rates far below the western average (Japan has an obesity rate of around 6%, compared to 30% in the UK and 40% in America).

These countries still face unsustainable increases in spending on healthcare and pensions despite being much healthier overall. The South Korean pension system faced bankruptcy by the mid point of this century and has only been saved by nearly doubling income contributions. The Taiwanese system meanwhile will be insolvent within the next 10 years without reform. Even healthier populations still cost more as they age.

None of this is to say we should want to condemn huge swathes of the population to an early grave. The cost in interactions unspent and dreams unrealised is great. GLP-1 agonists will deliver a dramatic increase in the number of healthy – and happy – years of life and this is something worth spending money on.

But we shouldn’t pretend that they are going to help ease the fiscal pressures facing western governments or allow their prospect to become an excuse for badly run healthcare systems. They are a wonderful end in and of themselves but they are a medical miracle not a fiscal one.

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Angela Rayner's resignation for underpaying Stamp Duty has triggered a cabinet reshuffle and a deputy leadership contest. My overwhelming feeling is that Starmer has entered 'Phase 2' of his government terminally weakened – and for reasons that reveal much about his failings in office.

An Uninspiring Reshuffle

Only six members of the new Starmer cabinet are in the same post as a year ago. This level of change so early on is unprecedented – all of Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, and Sunak kept their cabinets mostly the same throughout their early years in office. The most striking fact about Friday's reshuffle is how few ministers have actually departed: only Lucy Powell and Ian Murray have returned to the backbenches.

Perhaps the Prime Minister feels he picked the right people last June but gave most of them the wrong brief – which would say something grim about his judgement.

But it still doesn’t feel like Starmer has the cabinet he wants. Few have been impressed with Yvette Cooper’s performance, yet despite her lack of foreign policy experience she finds her way to the Foreign Office. Not a weekend has gone by without briefings against Bridget Phillipson and Lisa Nandy, yet both remain in place.

The less charitable conclusion is that Starmer judged much of his cabinet to be underperforming but, out of weakness, has simply given them other departments to fail in. This reshuffle is the worst of all worlds – radical shifts of portfolio mean more time lost as civil servants train up new ministers, while many who have failed to deliver still remain in power.

The answer is that Starmer has burnt through much of his political capital and built the reshuffle around the moves of Shabhana Mahmood to the Home Office and David Lammy to Deputy PM/Justice. Both have been bright spots in an otherwise troubled ministry. Lammy has been an effective Foreign Secretary in an unstable world and he deserves a lot of credit for the links he has built with the Trump administration, particularly JD Vance – not easy given his political background.

Mahmood has shown at Justice that she is willing to take tough decisions and make trade-offs in pursuit of strategic goals – releasing inmates early to free up capacity, launching the UK’s first prison construction strategy in decades, and authorising the use of tasers to control disorder. Whatever one thinks of the measures, she has acted where most ministers have done little.

She is also determined to deal with illegal migration. Her move to the Home Office suggests Starmer believes his fate is closely tied to stopping the small boats. This is true – public concern about immigration, even amongst liberals and progressives, is at a multi-year high. But Mahmood will need to be empowered to act, and it remains to be seen whether Starmer has the stomach for the fight.

Bright spots aside, the reshuffle left a sour taste – especially coming days after the departure of Starmer's third communications director in a year. It suggests a Prime Minister who believes that if he could just find the right mix of ministers and advisers he will solve all his problems. But this is no substitute for strategic direction from the top.

Politics is the art of the possible. Successful Prime Ministers pick priorities and make trade-offs. Starmer just moves people and policies around hoping something will come up – an approach that hasn't worked for the last year and won't start working now.

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A Factional Contest Awaits

The weekend papers report that the Government wants to put up its own candidate in the deputy leadership contest. Given the anti-government mood amongst the membership – and increasingly on the Labour backbenches – this risks public humiliation for whoever stands. Shabhana Mahmood and David Lammy are being considered, but why risk weakening with defeat, two of the Cabinet's more effective ministers just as they're getting to grips with crucial new roles?

Some have compared the situation to 1981, when Tony Benn's challenge to Denis Healey sparked a bitter fight for the soul of the Labour party. The crucial difference now is that party rules are far less favourable to the left. Thanks to changes Starmer pushed through in 2021, candidates need 20% of Labour MPs plus significant support from unions, affiliates and CLPs – the former being impossible for anybody on the Corbynite left.

What follows is likely to be a battle between soft-left factions. These fans of Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham have little time for Corbyn but were dismayed at the Government's attempts to cut welfare and means-test the winter fuel allowance.

The candidates likely to run are Rosena Allin Khan – who came second in 2020 and was recently stripped of her role as a trade envoy in protest at welfare cuts – Emily Thornberry – Shadow Attorney General in opposition but excluded from Starmer’s first cabinet – and Louise Haigh – who resigned as Transport Secretary last November after it emerged she pled guilty to fraud in 2014.

Of these, Thornberry is the most pragmatic and the best parliamentary performer. Allin Khan has been a vocal critic but lacks ministerial experience. Haigh would surely return with similar baggage to that which Rayner has left with.

Whoever wins, the risk to Starmer is acute. The soft left has been cast out in the dark under him and has little to gain from his continued leadership. While there is no rule that says the Deputy Leader must be in Cabinet, it would be an unpopular decision to leave the victor on the backbenches. The contest will only add to the swelling ranks of Starmer-sceptics inside the administration.

The loss of Rayner also removes something of a shield for Starmer. Had the Prime Minister fallen she would almost certainly have replaced him, such was her support in both the PLP and party membership. Crucially though, there is a high threshold for forcing out a sitting Labour leader – 20% of MPs are needed to trigger a contest and the incumbent is automatically entitled to stand. Starmer could only really be pushed if multiple wings of the PLP withdrew support. While Rayner remained, rivals had a powerful incentive not to trigger a contest they knew they would lose.

Her departure means one less leadership rival for Starmer but it emboldens those who remain.

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Bleak Mood On Housing

The new Housing Secretary, Steve Reed, is a Starmer loyalist with close ties to the PM’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney. For the last year Reed has often been sent on the media round when the government is on the ropes – hence we’ve seen a lot of him.

Reed has faced criticism during his time as Environment Secretary, mainly over the poor state of Britain’s water sector – which he inherited – and for not standing up for farmers on agricultural inheritance tax – a Treasury decision. He did make some progress – announcing plans to abolish the failing water regulator Ofwat and boosting the Environment Agency’s budget through new charges on water firms. But he may not have had the time or money for a fair judgement.

For YIMBYs, Reed’s appointment can be read glass half-full or glass half-empty. He is a loyalist likely to bow to the Prime Minister and Treasury, both of whom want serious planning reform and more building. Unlike Angela Rayner, he has no chance of leading the party and so is more likely to keep his head down and get on with the job.

The negative take goes back to Reed’s time shadowing housing in the early 2019–24 Parliament, when he helped torpedo Boris Johnson’s planning reforms. Concern has centred on a now-deleted 2021 tweet accusing Johnson of pushing a “developer’s charter” that would gag local residents from objecting to applications.

But it’s easy to read too much into this – he was pushing the party line. Starmer didn’t begin to advocate planning reform until late 2022. Ultimately, Reed will do what No.10 and the Treasury tell him. The problem is that even as we enter “Phase 2” of the Starmer Government, the man himself isn’t clear about his priorities or how to achieve them.

This is underscored by the new faces at MHCLG: Alison McGovern – who has opposed building on the Green Belt – and Miatta Fahnbullen – a supporter of rent controls – join as junior ministers. If Starmer is sincere about planning reform, and I believe he is, his choice of deputies suggests he is pathologically prone to self-sabotage.

Appointing a supporter of rent controls to the housing ministry is like putting a climate change sceptic in charge of net zero. The Housing Minister, Matthew Pennycook, is already a NIMBY. The new appointments deliver a blockers’ majority in the department.

Reed leaves me uninspired, the juniors leave me devoid of hope that Labour will solve the housing crisis or get Britain building. Just as much because of what they represent as what they might do in office. They embody the toxic thread running through the last week – indeed the last year – of a Prime Minister with no consistent strategy, no awareness of his coalition, and no ability to make the political weather.

I still think things are better than if the Conservatives had been re-elected (unlikely as that was). The Planning & Infrastructure Bill – despite U-turns – is a step forward, as are “grey belt” and last year’s NPPF changes. But new housing starts in the last year are down 17% and remain 27% below 2019 levels.

Labour have not come close to the radicalism needed to fix Britain’s building crisis: dismantling discretionary planning and replacing it with zoning, revisiting the Building Safety Regulator’s mandate, and ensuring housing targets are highest where demand is highest – not just where Labour doesn’t stand to lose.

There are only so many times a leader can blame ministers, advisers or comms. What if the problem isn’t Starmer’s messaging, but that he doesn’t actually have anything to say?

Thank you for reading Build Vector, if you’ve enjoyed this piece then please consider subscribing, it’s free and you have nothing to lose except a tiny portion of your life. You can find me on X @Jack_Nostalgic