A (small) win on Reform UK, and other reader responses
Following up on my past few Substack pieces
One unexpected benefit of starting this Substack is that I’ve had some constructive and illuminating back-and-forths with readers on my past few posts. I’ve also had some responses from Reform UK to my, and others’, scepticism towards their economic plans—those have also been illuminating, albeit for different reasons.
I thought it’d be valuable to walk through a few of those conversations here, beginning with Reform UK.
Can Reform UK un-Truss itself?
My last post here, based on an exercise I did for The Economist, was on Reform UK’s fiscally disastrous economic plans. After Reform’s local election wins, I figured an extra dose of scrutiny was due.
You can read that article by following the link below. There, I also walk through Reform’s rather unimpressive first wave of responses to my analysis, which largely involved digging through the archives to complain about previous predictions that The Economist had got wrong. Little of substance.
More recently, the response has been (a little) more promising. Other analysts, notably Simon French at Panmure, landed in a similar place to me on Reform’s numbers. After some loud complaining, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice made a meaningful concession to The Telegraph.
“Of course, what we would do is we would make the savings first with a direction of travel to significant tax cuts, right? We’re not going to do the tax cuts before the savings, which is why what he [Simon French] suggested is juvenile claptrap.” (Emphasis mine)
That, in turn, prompted headlines1 like the one below.
Despite Tice’s bravado, admitting that the party would hold off on most of its tax cuts until actual savings2 were made too is an important shift. Liz Truss was undone largely by her refusal to find savings before proposing colossal tax cuts (and, delusionally, hoping that soaring growth would save her). Until this past week, Reform said it would deliver most of its tax cuts within 100 days of taking power.
So far, so good. But where does that leave the rest of Reform’s governing agenda?
The central question for Reform is whether they follow the Giorgia Meloni mould (a radical-right party that seeks to govern reasonably effectively, and mostly within existing institutions) or pitch a tear-it-down operation like DOGE or Liz Truss. Sam Freedman has written recently on similar themes, drawing on some of my calculations. Hopefully, this episode has nudged the party into a moderately more constructive place.
Despite the concession on timing, Reform’s broader economic thinking remains troubling. Around the same time as his climbdown, Tice also wrote up a feisty defence of Reform’s economic policies for The Telegraph. There, he doubled down on even more of the vast unfunded tax cuts from the manifesto. By my reckoning, two-thirds of the tax cuts in the manifesto have now been specifically re-affirmed by senior figures in the party over the past few months.
And moving beyond the spreadsheet-economics of sizing tax-and-spend plans, Tice falls into trope after trope of unserious economic thinking. I listed a couple of the biggest howlers in a thread on Twitter (forgive my questionable aesthetic choice of clown-emoji bulletpoints).
Now, the story to watch on Reform is how they govern the councils and mayoralties they won. I’ve written quite a bit about the near-insurmountable constraints that local governments in Britain operate under, largely due to vast and expensive legal obligations on social care, special educational needs, temporary accommodation and more (see chart below). So Reform will quite quickly run into nasty obstacles. Whether the party identifies the actual issues at hand, or simply blames rampant wokery, will be a helpful barometer of their seriousness.
Winter fuel payments are also a telling litmus test. Reform wants to fully reinstate them. Look behind nearly every line item of British state spending, and you’ll find vast entrenched interests. In a few places, like asylum, Reform is clearly raring for a fight. But cutting tens-to-hundreds of billions inescapably means taking on (a) pensions, (b) health and disability benefits, (c) the NHS. If Reform blanches at taking £1.5bn off mostly well-off pensioners, I struggle to see them breaking the Triple Lock. If even that’s off the table, good luck cutting state spending by any meaningful amount.
Still, the fact that Reform has budged at all speaks to why scrutiny is so important. One happy feature of British politics is that many voters are open-minded. Compare the dug-in trenches of American public opinion, where both parties fight over a few percentage points’ worth of swing voters, to the vast shifts we’ve seen in Britain. Voters can, and do, change their minds.
Following up on ‘equal value’
A month ago, I published a post here on the legal principle of ‘equal value’ in British equal pay jurisprudence: which allows claims of pay discrimination to be made between groups of workers doing different jobs (e.g. warehouse staff and shopworkers, binmen and cleaners).
That, I argued, was a fairly destructive form of judicial central-planning which has already demolished the finances of the Birmingham and Glasgow City Councils, and is coming for the retail sector next.
If you’re interested and haven’t read the first post, do take a look. But I wanted to follow up on the topic in three extra places, which have come up since.
First, Birmingham’s bin-strikes are still running. (For those unfamiliar, these strikes have been caused by that ‘equal value’ principle: council wants to eliminate a better-paid binman role to stave off more equal pay suits, the binmen’s union Unite is objecting, and neither side has been willing to back down.) The strikes are now nearing the three-month mark.
The longer they drag on, the more they illustrate the central issue with equal value: it breaks the ability to find a market-clearing wage that makes both workers and bosses happy (or at least sufficiently not-unhappy). Clearly, the market-clearing offer for binmen, including wages, bonuses, promotion prospects, etc., is closer to the current arrangement—that’s why the council offered it in the first place, and why the binmen were previously happy to do the work.
So the union has a point: their compensation package is getting worse, even though the need for their labour hasn’t changed. But the council also has a point: the risk that the current setup opens up extra legal jeopardy is very real. After well over a billion pounds in payouts, plus effectively declaring bankruptcy, that isn’t a risk that the council can take. Thus, we get an impasse. And the residents of Birmingham—the ultimate victims in all this—get another month of civic dysfunction and un-collected bins.
Second, Britain’s political conversation has done a pretty awful job explaining these issues. I don’t like picking on individual outfits and outlets, but one recent poll from YouGov captured the problem. Regardless of whether you agree that ‘equal value’ is a problematic legal principle, at least as currently applied in Britain, setting up the strike as exclusively a conflict between the unions and the council misses the point entirely.
Or consider the BBC, which has covered the strikes extensively. By my count3, BBC News has published 66 articles so far in 2025 on Birmingham’s bin strikes. Of those, only 20 referenced the equal pay question at all, and none with much more than glancing detail4.
Take, for instance, the piece “Why are Birmingham bin workers on strike?” from the BBC. That has exactly two references to equal pay:
“The council said it was carrying out a "fair and transparent job evaluation process" agreed with trade unions, to comply with equal pay laws.”
and
“A spokesperson said it was not a role that could be reinstated without opening the authority up to a potential equal pay liability.”
Naturally, I wouldn’t expect the BBC to be opining on the merits of Britain’s current equal pay regime. Still, choosing instead to treat the dispute as an entirely ordinary tug-of-war between a union and employer, without explaining the specific circumstances that make it so intractable, strikes me as utterly surreal.
Nor is the BBC much of an outlier. Sky News’s equivalent article, the first piece that shows up when you Google “why are Birmingham bin workers on strike” doesn’t mention the equal pay issue at all. The moral, of course, is to read (or indeed watch) The Economist5.
Third, I wanted to highlight an instructive back-and-forth I had on Twitter with the employment barrister David Green, on how far the “material factor” defence mitigates some of the issues I was grumbling about. David argues that lots of the complaints that I and others have made are already handled by fact that employers can argue a “material factor”, like forces in the labour market, explains pay disparities.
I’m not vastly persuaded, but David is right that I only addressed this issue indirectly in my original piece, so wanted to walk through it. Unexpectedly, Jonathan Haskel, until recently at the Bank of England, also made a cameo appearance in the conversation.
In practice, there are a couple issues worth flagging with this.
At a fundamental level, courts must still decide whether a deviation from a market benchmark is “reasonable”, which necessarily embeds taking a view on what a job is “worth”. For anyone who takes the epistemic limitations of social planning seriously, that’s a big problem. Haskel puts it well. Even if judges thoughtfully weigh up the framework and are open to the fact that the market may have it right, junk is junk.
The spider diagram of mine that he references is here, capturing just how finger-in-the-air some of these assessments are.
My reading of the case law is that a market defence has only worked in fairly specific circumstances—usually highly context-specific market factors applying to a specific individual, versus systemic market forces applying across the labour market.
The specific precedent that David pulled up in our conversation (Ms A Evans v Pure Recruitment Group Ltd) seemed to have limited cross-over to the big mass-claim cases. There, the “market factor” in question was whether a company needed to pay a man more than a female colleague on the basis he had been poached from a competitor and the company needed to match his prior salary.6
There is a good reason for that. The law is specifically intended to accommodate the notion that market outcomes can themselves be discriminatory. So a full-throated market forces defense would undermine the law itself. The judgement against Next in an equal-value case for (mostly male) warehouse workers vs (marginally more-female) shopworkers lays that out explicitly: “for market forces to be a trump card in this way could defeat the objective of the legislation”.
A few more stories of the triage-ward state
Building on my coverage for The Economist of Britain’s ‘broken windows’, I wrote a piece a few weeks ago reflecting on why so few public services, outside genuine emergencies, seemed to work well in Britain any more.
Gratifyingly, The Spectator put a very similar story on its cover the following week, with the slightly raunchier label “Scuzz Nation”. As Gus Carter, the author, put it:
“[Scuzz Nation is] a place where decay happens faster than repair, where crime largely goes unpunished and where the social fabric has been slashed, graffitied and left by the side of the road.”
There are a few places where I’d quibble with the account—I don’t think Carter’s interpretation of the crime stats is quite right7, and my guess is the situation would look pretty similar even if immigration had been much lower over the past few years—but broadly he lands in a place not far off where I did.
Here on Substack, Iain Mansfield also used some polling I commissioned from Public First as a route into a series of pieces on why British governance isn’t working well. He zooms out a bit further8 than I do, but again reaches a not-dissimilar diagnosis. Well worth reading.
Many of the responses to my piece though, were a form of horrified recognition. One Substack commenter wrote about failing to secure an ambulance for a drunk man with a head injury, who was unresponsive and at risk of choking on his own vomit.
“Called 999 and requested an ambulance only to be asked "does he want to go to the hospital" and I explained that as I had already stated he was not conscious and was not responding to any stimulus.
They told me they didn't want to send an ambulance if he would refuse to go to the hospital and I ended up arguing with the dispatcher and demanding her name because if I left and this man aspirated his own vomit I would not be held liable for his death.”
Other readers also challenged me on some of the ideas in the piece. One great push came from Pieter Garicano:
“Is there a 'grand theory' that explains the cross-sectional variation? At lot of the explanations you identify for the UK apply (to a lesser degree) elsewhere in Europe as well, with similar consequences. Why is state functioning trending downwards everywhere?”
I mostly told a Britain-specific story (and maintain that Britain has it particularly badly), but my sense is that Pieter is right that there’s probably a cross-country issue here too. Of what I wrote about, my guess is the most-generalisable dynamics are:
Budgets are increasingly eaten up by a small number of ultra-high-need cases, where the state is bad at cost control (in part because of pretty maximalist legal rules, in part because saying no to needy people in awful situations is hard).
There’s a thicket of principal-agent problems everywhere. Central government dumps responsibilities it doesn't want to deal with on local government, local government has little autonomy over the money it raises so isn't always well-incentivised to spend it well. The sheer complexity of interlocking responsibilities means surprisingly often people in government don't realise the powers they have.
Talent problem: the gap between top-end private and public sector salaries has growth much higher. The bureaucracy can be oppressive even for good people who do make it in. And, no-one likes to be working for a state that isn't doing well.
My main plea, though, is for better cross-country data on people’s subjective experience of the state. Compared to economic quantities like GDP or inflation, getting a proper sense of whether the sort of anecdotes I wrote about reflect a robust trend is tough. Doing so across countries is harder still.
Another came from Herbie Bradley:
“Great analysis, but somewhat perplexing that fixing the most visible degradations would be so cheap if that's the case, why haven't politicians (notorious for optimising for short-term voter satisfaction) done it already?”
That’s a question I also had, and put to quite a few people when reporting this story. My tentative answer is that the politicians who have the money are different to the politicians who can fix things, and getting cash from the former (MPs, the cabinet) to the latter (local councillors and mayors) is something that Britain is quite poor at. Without reform to statutory duties, there is also the real risk that any cash sent to local governments gets swallowed by social care costs.
To some degree, in governance it does also sometimes take a lot of kicking and screaming before people notice the proverbial £20 notes on the pavement.
Then on Twitter, I was also asked repeatedly why I wasn’t blaming high immigration for these issues. The truthful answer there is that, having looked into this all a fair bit, I simply wasn’t persuaded that this was a story where migration was the central issue, at least at the national level.
Certainly, you can see impacts in either direction. Parts of local council budgets would be even more stretched if lower legal migration pushed the prevailing wage down in social care. Conversely, the asylum hotel crisis has made it more expensive for some councils to find temporary housing for people facing homelessness. On crime, thoughtful people have looked into the immigration-crime question in Britain and not found large impacts, at least in aggregate.
But the core drivers of this story—weakening state capacity, an older and sicker population, struggles with cost control, a tendency to push the most intractable problems to local government—are simply separate ones, at least in my view.
And finally… regular readers will know about my ongoing one-sided feud with the City of London police over their habit of spray-painting mock blue plaques about phone theft on the pavement. (More context here, here and here).
An update there: one plaque (but not the other two I walk past regularly) has been resprayed from “A member of the public had their phone stolen here” to “A phone snatcher was arrested here”. I suppose that’s another small victory to be grateful for.
I do wish that newspapers wouldn’t take Reform’s numbers at face value. By my reckoning, that Telegraph headline should read more like “Reform’s £200bn tax cut pledge”. Parties earn the right to have their costings taken seriously. Broadly, Labour and the Conservatives have done so. The fantasy economics coming out of Reform, the Greens, and others, should be treated far more cautiously.
Worth restating that just as the cost of Reform’s tax giveaways was vastly understated, my analysis also found that the size of the savings Reform planned to make was overstated.
I compiled a list by hand, then used Manus to plug the gaps.
The article that covers it best from the BBC, by my reckoning, is this one. But even there the treatment is pretty surface-level.
Last of the linked pieces is mine. The first two articles and the video are by Amelia Wood.
I had a pretty decent go looking through cases, but am very much not an employment lawyer. Anyone reading this who can think of cases that are closer analogues to the mass-claims I’m mostly interested in (Birmingham Council, Asda, etc), do shoot them over.
He writes: “The few remaining optimists might say that despite a general sense of lawlessness, reported crime has actually been trending downwards. They’d be right, but such claims don’t reveal the full truth. A majority of people who witness crimes don’t bother to report them, with more than half saying they believe the police will do nothing.”
That isn’t quite right. Surveyed crime, as in the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which ought to deal with reporting biases, is down too. There is a nuance there, because the CSEW only deals with crimes against persons, and so misses something like shoplifting where there has been a huge boom that the reported stats don’t properly capture.
But broadly, overall crime is almost certainly down compared to a decade or two ago. That doesn’t negate the fact, though, that a few particularly visible and socially corrosive crimes (phone snatching and the like) are up, nor that weak police enforcement means lots of low-level property crimes are now quasi-legalised, so may well rise a fair amount from here.
Partly by focusing more on broad economic-growth issues like housing, which I consciously tried to compartmentalise away from, and partly by going into cultural issues a bit more.