Manifestos Unwrapped 3. The Reform Party: Pledges for the NHS that should alarm us all.
Call To Action
In a way, it feels unbelievable to see polling results showing the Reform Party gaining ground, and yet in another sense there’s nothing surprising about this at all. A huge number of people feel incredibly let down, and a lot of them are feeling politically homeless. Now Nigel Farage is swooping in with his particular brand of charisma; anecdotes and pints and harking back to a time which was dreadful for many, and a false memory for others. Rule Brittania! We were great ‘back then’, weren’t we? No one would be able to pin-point exactly when, or exactly how, but there is nostalgia and the cosy superiority of nationalism to nestle back into when the facts are hazy. Who needs facts anyway, after all, when we have union jacks?
There are flags a-plenty - flags, and bonhomie and the worst political manifesto I think I’ve ever read. It’s not even being described as a ‘manifesto’, in fact. As inews recently reported about Farage at its launch:
“He stressed that the document he was releasing was not a manifesto but a ‘contract’ with voters, arguing there had been a breakdown of trust in politics where manifesto pledges were frequently broken.”
This makes no sense of course, because this ‘contract’ is a document released by a political party during an election period to tell voters what that party stands for and pledges to deliver if they are elected into power. But Farage is clever; he’s pitching himself and his party as the party of true change. Unlike Keir Starmer, who has seemingly printed the word ‘change’ on a million red placards and stood beside them one by one, Farage is ripping up the rule-book.
Some journalists haven’t been taking any of this seriously enough, because while Farage may play the jester, he means business and a lot of people are listening to him now. If we don’t scrutinise his ‘contract’ properly and hold him to account, just like all other political leaders, he will be dealt an unfair advantage on July 4th and we should be really worried about that. Farage is alarming, and a real threat, and should be taken seriously.
So I’ve gone through this manifesto just as I’m going through the manifestos of all the main political parties; taking a look at the details and highlighting some of the key points to tell you what I think about their pledges for the NHS. I probably don’t need to stress to you how important this election is for the NHS; the service is in the worst state it’s ever been in, and millions cannot access the healthcare they need. The NHS is one of the most important issues for the public right now, and the next government is going to have their work cut out if they want to turn the situation around.
OK... so let’s talk about this ‘contract’ from the Reform Party.
The first thing to note is that it’s quite short, and the bits about the NHS don’t have an awful lot of detail, but there are some extremely bold statements. Farage hasn’t promised to tackle dozens of things in the NHS; instead, he seems to have written the document almost like a press release - each of the bullet points could be turned into a punchy headline, the sentences short and memorable.