What exactly does the Reform party stand for? Helpfully, its leader Richard Tice gave a press conference on Wednesday at which he sketched out some of his party’s principles and policies. The millionaire businessman described the Tories and Labour as ‘two sides of the same socialist coin’, citing in evidence ‘record high taxes’, ‘record high wasteful government spending’, ‘record nanny state regulations’, and ‘mass, uncontrolled immigration on a scale this country has never seen before’.

Sir Keir Starmer, or ‘Starmergeddon’ as he branded the leader of the opposition, was no better than Rishi Sunak. By contrast, Reform had the solutions to the problems bedevilling the country. These solutions were familiar fare. Tax cuts: the personal allowance threshold for income tax should be raised to £20,000. Spending cuts: ‘wasteful government spending’ should be reduced by £50 billion. Cuts to red tape: Tice proposed scrapping ‘thousands and thousands of daft EU regulations’. Immigration controls: Reform wants to see a ‘freeze’ in ‘non-essential immigration’. Net zero: burdensome targets which inhibit growth should be ditched.

This agenda hints at the limitations of Reform as an alternative to the Tories. Raising the personal allowance might be well-received but its fiscal feasibility is another matter, especially when Reform is also proposing to cut fuel duty by 20p per litre; take 1.2 million small businesses out of corporation tax by raising the minimum profit threshold to £100,000; lower the rate of VAT to 18 per cent; end VAT on energy bills; and abolish environmental levies. The party also promises a three-year basic rate income tax holiday for all frontline health and social care staff. Taken in the round, these changes would significantly depleted the Treasury’s resources.

Reform might point to its proposals on expenditure, such as the £50 billion in cuts to wasteful spending, which would be annual according to a policy document on Reform’s website. But £50 billion is equivalent to the annual military defence budget, twice the policing budget, or one fifth of the public sector pay budget. It is difficult to see how significant social fallout – degradation of services, significant public sector redundancies – could be avoided while making yearly efficiencies on this scale. It would mean a fresh programme of austerity every year.

Reform’s other key message for disillusioned Tories is that the Conservatives have presided over unprecedented levels of legal and illegal immigration. As I wrote in November, there is no party to vote for if you believe in immigration control. Is Reform an exception to that? I’m not so sure it is. Tice’s comments certainly sound tough, but so did the Tories’ rhetoric once upon a time. Every election the Conservatives have won in the past 40 years involved a manifesto pledge to control immigration.

On its face, Tice’s ‘one in, one out’ policy would be more restrictionist than the Tories have been in government but, taking the figures for the year ending June 2023, it would have meant 500,000 immigrants rather than 1.2 million. Undoubtedly an improvement if you want to see less migration but still amounting to a choice between different scales of mass immigration. Crudely put, while the Tories allowed a city the size of Birmingham to migrate to the UK last year, Reform would only have allowed a city the size of Liverpool. Since Reform is indexing immigration levels to emigration, it’s worth noting that emigration is on the increase, so in future years ‘net zero’ migration might mean far in excess of 500,000. It must also be said that Reform’s ‘non-essential’ qualification is potentially as elastic as all those Tory promises about ‘highly skilled’ migrants.

We get Trussite classical liberalism dancing awkwardly with cultural conservatism

Reducing Britain’s reliance on mass immigration would involve policy choices at odds with Reform’s tax-cutting, state-slashing orientation. For example, sufficient investment in social care to offer pay and conditions attractive to Britons would lessen the need to import 78,000 care workers, as we did between June 2022 and 2023. That kind of investment is not feasible given Reform’s fiscal policies. If you insist on libertarian economics, be prepared to accept libertarian immigration policies.

This is the crux of the Reform problem. It is good at identifying what right-wing voters dislike about the Tories but it has yet to articulate a coherent alternative platform. Thus we get Trussite classical liberalism dancing awkwardly with cultural conservatism. Reform is trying, as the Tories have on and off for half a century, to be a party of economic disruption and of social cohesion. It doesn’t work.

Tax cuts and austerity might appeal to Reform’s target constituency – Tory-voting baby boomers – but they would produce social outcomes offensive to small-c conservatives. We know this from the experience of Cameron-May era austerity, which was popular with Tory voters but also delivered a 19,000 reduction in police numbers, an outcome anathema to conservatives. In tailoring its policies to those whose political and fiscal instincts haven’t moved on from the 1980s, and those fortunate enough to be insulated from the effects of a fresh round of austerity, Reform is repeating the mistakes of the Conservative Party.

The future of right-wing politics does not lie with boomers but with Generation Z and the generations that come after that. The chief concerns of these generations are not an overbearing state, uncompetitive tax rates and union militancy but financial precarity, employment prospects and housing affordability. Any political party, right or left, that isn’t offering answers to these problems shouldn’t plan on being around long.

The near future will be a time of upheaval for Britons, as AI changes work patterns and eliminates entire professions, low growth drives the young to seek new lives overseas, and mass immigration continues to bring rapid social and cultural change to the country. A party that sincerely wished to be an alternative to the Tories would ditch the hyper-Thatcherism and focus on policies that make it easier for young adults to buy a home, start a family, and secure themselves in well-paid employment. Such a party would not be hostile to the market but it would not be its prisoner either, recognising that there are times when interventionism would deliver better outcomes than laissez-faire. That might be true in migration policy, employment law, regulation, and other areas where the British right remains much more wedded to classical liberalism than centre-right parties on the Continent.

The UK doesn’t need a right-leaning party intoning about the spectre of ‘socialism’, preaching the gospel of Milton Friedman on tax and spending, and talking tougher on immigration than it is prepared to act. We already have a party for this. They’re called the Conservatives.