Is Reform fit to govern the UK? My speech at the Oxford Union.
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Below is my speech, at the Oxford Union, Thursday June 11th. The debate was on the motion: This House Believes That Reform is Fit to Govern.
Madam President. Ladies and Gentlemen.
The motion before us tonight is not really about Reform UK, or Nigel Farage.
It is about Britain.
Because before we can debate whether Reform is fit to govern, we first need to ask a more uncomfortable question.
What exactly has the current governing class been doing for the last thirty years?
Time and time again, we are told that Reform cannot possibly govern Britain because it does not have enough experience.
But if experience alone makes a party fit to govern, then Britain would not be in the dire state that it is in today.
The people who have governed Britain for the last thirty years have been extraordinarily experienced.
They went to the best universities, including this one. Seven of the last ten prime ministers studied at Oxford. They probably sat where you sit today. Many then spent years in Parliament, holding ministerial office, occupying major ministerial positions.
And yet what have they given us, exactly?
Zero growth. Dire productivity. The highest taxes in peacetime. The highest industrial electricity prices in the Western world. Soaring youth unemployment.
A looming debt crisis. Collapsing public services. Not enough prisons. Not enough houses. Two-tier policing. Broken borders. Sectarianism. Rampant shoplifting and sexual violence. Unchecked Islamism. Soaring anti-semitism. Collapsing public trust in politics. And a palpable, growing sense among millions of ordinary people that their country - the country their ancestors built, the country they love - no longer works for them.
If this is what experience looks like, if this is what being “fit to govern” looks like, then I would suggest to you that perhaps experience is overrated.
The question is not whether Reform has enough people with the right degrees, from the right universities, who cling to the same broken Groupthink in Westminster.
The question is whether Reform understands something that the entire establishment seems to have forgotten.
Namely, what is government for?
Reform is fit to govern because it is the only movement that is built around two core principles that once formed the foundation of democratic government but which have now largely disappeared from British politics.
The first is national preference.
The idea, stretching back centuries, that the first duty of government is to prioritise its own people.
Not international organisations. Not supranational, undemocratic institutions. Not unelected, unaccountable quangos, courts, lawyers, and public bodies. Not foreign nationals. Not Davos, the World Economic Forum, or global corporations.
Its own citizens.
The decent majority of hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding, patriotic people who contribute to the country, raise children in the country, whose ancestors built this country, and who look at this country not as a hotel but home.
It is this principle of national preference that not only ensures the social contract remains in place - that people remain willing to provide welfare for others - but is reflected in the very serious programme for government that Reform has put forward.
An immediate freeze on all non-essential immigration. Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and repealing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act so that the people of this country can actually control their own borders and laws.
Deporting millions of illegal migrants and foreign criminals who not only make the lives of our people a misery and are far more likely to commit crime — especially sexual crimes — but are costing our people £15 billion in accommodation costs alone.
Introducing tighter settlement rules. Ending £10 billion in annual welfare payments for foreign nationals. Slashing foreign aid until we have fixed Britain first.
How is it right, I ask you, that we currently treat our own people in NHS car parks and corridors while sending some £13 billion overseas — to support cycling lines in Mexico, eco-farms in Nepal, or buying condoms for Pakistan?
Reform will also remove all social housing subsidies for people who are not British so that our own people are no longer forced to suffer the indignity of having to read about how the First Lady of Sierra Leone, while living in a presidential mansion in Freetown, has a council flat in London as 1.3 million people in Britain, including thousands of our military veterans, sit on the social housing register, or sleep on our streets. This is completely unacceptable.
And protect our home by abolishing indefinite leave to Remain that was given, for example, to that monster from Sudan in Belfast, while ensuring that anybody who does come to Britain in the future must speak our English language to a very high standard, make a net contribution to the economy, and has a clean criminal record.
This is not a lot to ask for - it is the foundation of a functioning, healthy nation-state. It is how a nation survives.
If we do not protect our citizens — socially, economically, demographically — then more and more of them will simply leave, as roughly a quarter of a million are now doing each year —with half of those leaving Britain aged between 16 and 34 years of age. We are literally replacing our best and brightest with goat-herders from Iraq.
National preference is also why Reform will unequivocally and unashamedly prioritise British workers over imported cheap labour. If a nation is reduced to merely helping global corporations keep their labour costs low and profits high then that nation will not survive.
There is more to life, there is more to a nation, than chasing GDP.
Neither the Tories nor Labour believe in workers. Boris Johnson and the Tories completely betrayed them through the Boriswave and even removed the requirement to advertise jobs in Britain before advertising them overseas.
Labour, meanwhile, the supposed party of labour, smashed the working-class apart by choosing to import masses of cheap labour from overseas to serve global corporations, and then smashed them all over again through fanatical Net Zero policies.
What the political establishment in this country has never understood is that you can have mass uncontrolled immigration. Or you have well-paid British workers who are treated with respect and dignity.
You cannot have both.
Don’t look at these policies in isolation. And don’t call them the politics of protest and grievance. Because they are not.
They all lie downstream of that fundamental principle Westminster seems to have forgotten. National preference - putting our own people first.
But this principle on its own is not enough. What Reform UK also recognises — and again what no other party seems to recognise at all — is that proper democracy also requires popular sovereignty.
The overriding believe that power ultimately belongs not with elites but the people, and that it is the people who are the true source of authority and legitimacy.
Not quangos. Not regulators. Not activist judges. Not woke bureaucrats. Not distant, unelected ‘experts’ who have only given us all the managed decline we see today.
The people.
Yet, increasingly, millions of ordinary people can sense that Britain like other Western nations now operates according to the very opposite principle.
They feel they have no influence over the decisions that affect their lives.
Governments change but the direction of travel in this country never does.
They ask for things like lower immigration but then immigration explodes.
They ask for things like stronger borders yet our borders remain wide open.
They ask for tough action on crime and yet shoplifting, phone theft, burglaries, sexual violence all spiral.
They ask why their fellow citizens are being murdered by illegal migrants, beheaded in the street, or their children are being raped on an industrial scale by predatory grooming gangs, and they are told to “stop being divisive”.
And so they ask themselves a simple but fundamental question: who is actually in charge here? Who is this system actually representing and respecting? Because one thing is clear: it is not the people.
This is why Reform has outlined serious policies to reassert popular sovereignty, restore democratic accountability, and put power back in the hands of the people.
We will slash unelected quangos. We will dramatically reduce the size of the Civil Service — The Blob — making it far more accountable to democratically-elected politicians and hence, voters.
We will allow ministers to sack woke civil servants who oppose democratically-elected governments, and reassert the executive to take bold, decisive action on behalf of the people they were elected to represent.
We will reassert our national democracy. We will protect the free speech of our people — including their right to protest, dissent, and ask difficult questions about Islam, the grooming gangs, or immigration.
We will end the use of non-crime hate incidents, unnecessary hate laws, censorship, and speech codes, all of which are designed to undermine rather than strengthen our people’s freedom.
We will root out all Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion policies and programmes that are now code words for anti-white racism. The era of calling for equality while discriminating against whites will end.
And we will root out definitions of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ that are used to try and control what we can say about the growth, role, and compatibility of Islam in Britain.
The history of England, it was once said, is the history of liberty, and yet Reform is now the only party in Westminster that will ensure that tradition continues.
You may agree or disagree with particular policies I’ve mentioned.
But what cannot be denied is that contrary to what you might have heard from the increasingly irrelevant legacy media, there is a coherent philosophy underneath them.
National preference. Popular sovereignty. Putting the British people first. Returning power to citizens.
And ensuring that every Reform policy and government remains firmly anchored in these two core, guiding principles.
Because ultimately, ladies and gentlemen, every political system must answer two fundamental questions. Who comes first? And who is in charge?
In Britain, we used to be able to answer those questions clearly. But today, our politicians have lost their way.
They have become drunk on ‘suicidal empathy’, becoming so obsessed with showing empathy to people who do not come from our country that they are now destroying our country from within.
This is why so many British people feel so utterly exasperated. This is why public trust has collapsed. And this is why Reform is number one in the polls. This is why Reform just won nationwide local elections for the second year in a row. And this is why Reform is on its way into government.
Because what our supporters can see is that we will always put our own people first. And we will always strive to return power to them. These will be the foundations of the next Reform government — national preference and popular sovereignty.
If being “fit to govern” means understanding who government is for and where power comes from, then I would suggest to you, that Reform UK is not merely fit to govern but is now the only party that still understands what and who government is for, and should be for.
Thank you.
As always, I’d welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Paid subscribers at our weekly Live discussion at 2pm today on the Substack App.
A sterling speech that needs the widest possible circulation.
A concise, and precise, assessment of the issues which need action and the failure and incompetence of existing political elites to address them. All the best Matt.