Launching Reform UK’s latest attempt to look like a party of government, rather than a gang of populist rabble-rousers, its Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick shamelessly invoked the unimpeachable liberals John Stuart Mill and William Beveridge.
Neither that effort at intellectual respectability, nor the other highly discriminatory and counterproductive measures announced, were credible. To the extent that they would save as much as intended, they would do so by imposing much misery on the most vulnerable in society; and they would substantially weaken the British economy as a whole, and thus the prosperity of all, by reopening the whole Brexit debate and fracturing trade with the European Union.
