Reform UK are blaming lifeboats for the rising waterline

The National

11-05-2025

If the United Kingdom was once a ship built to weather rough seas collectively, too many of its supposed leaders now seem intent on scuttling that ship – only to propose building a submarine that serves the captain and officers, hides from scrutiny and leaves the crew to drown, while they fight among themselves for lifeboats.
Reform UK exemplify this destructive instinct. Their recent local election victories have been marked by performative pledges to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) roles, regardless of their actual presence or cost.
Andrea Jenkyns (pictured), the new Reform mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, vowed to sack DEI officers at Lincolnshire County Council, seemingly unaware that the council doesn't employ any.
Nigel Farage, meanwhile, denounces DEI policies as though they were the root cause of Britain's economic woes, conveniently ignoring the legacy of austerity, Brexit disruption, underinvestment and a public sector on its knees. Blaming DEI for declining productivity is like blaming the lifeboats for the rising waterline.
Reform UK didn't pioneer this model, though, they've simply weaponised it. The Conservative Party spent more than a decade normalising the dismantling of collective provision. From the privatisation of essential services to the chronic underfunding of councils, schools and the NHS, the Tories have reduced public institutions to brittle shells.
The logic is always the same: shrink the state, boost efficiency and let the market work its magic.
However, what we've ended up with is fragmented rail networks, sewage in our rivers and social care systems running on fumes. Far from lean and agile, the UK's infrastructure now resembles a badly patched vessel sailing into a storm with no-one to operate the pumps.
Labour, meanwhile, offer little hope of repair. Under Keir Starmer, the party has retreated from ambitious structural change.
There is no serious talk of rejoining the EU, no pledge to reverse privatisation in utilities or transport and no commitment to comprehensive public sector reinvestment.
Instead, we get a cautiously managerial promise to steer the same leaking ship with steadier hands, but no change of course. It's a politics of low expectations, where even acknowledging the scale of the crisis is considered too risky.
Amid all this, Scotland's Wellbeing Economy offers a different course, championing values like community, sustainability and social justice, framing public policy around human need rather than GDP alone. Though far from perfect, and constrained by the limits of devolution, the SNP's model represents an attempt to retrofit the ship rather than abandon it.
Yet even here, Thatcherite logic bites at the hull. Budget allocations are starved, policy ambitions are trimmed to appease a hostile Treasury and the political centre of gravity continues to drift rightward.The Wellbeing Economy has weathered much, but its effectiveness is being corroded by the very Westminster machinery it seeks to counterbalance.
What unites the Conservatives, Labour and Reform UK is a refusal to confront the real causes of national decline: the hollowing out of public infrastructure, the haemorrhaging of skilled workers and the persistent undervaluing of care, education and community resilience.
Instead of facing these head-on, we are invited to blame migrants, civil servants or equality officers. It's misdirection on an industrial scale.
If we are to restore collective confidence and functionality, we need a different compass. That means negotiating a return to the EU, investing massively in infrastructure and people, and renationalising core services that meet foundational human needs like water, housing, energy, transport and health.
These are not luxuries; they are the ballast that keeps society stable. They must be publicly owned and operated, not because the private sector is inherently evil, but because the stakes are too high to depend on shareholder whim.
Investors are always told their holdings may go down as well as up. If they've built lifestyles around dividends drawn from essential services, it is not the state's job to underwrite that recklessness.
A society that prioritises resilience over returns is one that survives the storm, stays above the waterline, in daylight, with room for all on board.
We don't need submarines built for stealth; we need a seaworthy ship, openly navigated, with the hull patched, the crew properly paid and a course set by the needs of the many, not the profits of the few.
Ron Lumiere
via email