Author's Notes: Reflections on Reform UK, Trump's America, and Starmer's Strategic Failure on Europe
After finishing our last Plague Island article on Reform UK’s frontbench, we felt a profound and unsettling cold. It’s a feeling that lingers long after the research is done and the words are on the page. It’s a cold dread that comes from staring into a possible future and seeing not a continuation of the present, but a rupture — a deliberate and gleeful dismantling of the consensus that has, however imperfectly, held this country together for the better part of eighty years. The prospect of a Reform government would be a change in the very character of the nation. Everything would be worse. Every protection, every right, every institution that stands in the way of their radical, extractive agenda would be torn down.
It is difficult to articulate a single good thing that could come from such a government. The only sliver of light in that darkness is the knowledge that such a project, built on such a foundation of hypocrisy and internal contradiction, would be inherently unstable. Like all movements of its kind, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. The champagne bubbles of their victory would inevitably burst. But the damage done in the interim would be immense and perhaps irreparable. We need only look across the Atlantic to see the blueprint.
America is living through the consequences of a second Trump administration, and it is a chilling preview of what awaits a nation that embraces this path. The news from the US is a relentless drumbeat of cruelty and constitutional decay. We see it in the
