How Reform can do levelling up the right way

Resource led economic rebalancing

It has been reported in the Telegraph that Robert Jenrick is about to be made Reform’s ‘Shadow Chancellor’.

Even if this information is misleading, if it is about to be Zia, we can be sure that 2026 will be the year in which Reform’s economic policy is set out for the most part in full. This week also saw Nigel Farage in Davos, where he spoke to Bloomberg’s head of Economics Stephanie Flanders. I will summarise in brief the main points that Farage made:

Reform want to focus on:

· Supply-side reforms including cuts on taxes, a smaller state with less regulation.

· Encouraging young taxpayers who have fled to the country to come back.

· Reducing welfare to balance the books and avoid spooking Markets, as ‘the big lesson from the Liz Truss budget is that they did not propose to cut spending’

· A tax on banks (est £20bn) to clawback QE.

· Put a Brexiteer in charge of the Bank of England, but do not explicitly revoke the Bank of England’s independence’s

· Stop sending 50% of people to University as it is ‘lunacy’.

· Consider getting rid of the Triple Lock as it is too expensive.

· Position Britain as a Brexit Bridge between Europe and America.

My main takeaway from this, apart from warming to the vaguely ‘rise to evil’ sight of Farage getting an audience at Davos to laugh with his jokes, is that this is all solid which will crucially not see Reform immediately crash out from government within a year because they get too excitable about tax cuts or tariffs.

Another important point that Farage makes is that the ‘next step’ of Reform is to appoint a full team so that he does not have to answer questions about Foreign Policy and the Economy and Energy all at the same time, whilst trying to run a political movement. Delegation, basically. Meaning that whoever gets to set the policy direction on the economy for Reform over the next three years will be defining the economic policy of the Parliamentary radical right/ right of centre-right for a generation.

It is a good thing that neither of the likely candidates for the Shadow Chancellorship are post-liberal in their outlook. Nonetheless, I believe that for a variety of reasons ‘reindustrialisation’ – of the sort that Farage was talking about last summer writ Wales – and some form of levelling-up will be part of Reform’s economic platform. The political temptation to secure voters in post-industrial places like Wales will be too strong. Part of the electoral coalition is resentful people living in ex mining pit villages who spend their time driving their children around pointing out which pubs have shut and complaining that there are no longer ships in the ports and rivers. That I must align myself with such people in order to destroy the Online Safety Act in service of my commercial interests is possibly a celestial lesson about Hubris but we are where we are.

Jenrick is also already speaking the language of reindustrialisation and saying that this will distinguish Reform from the Tories because it will not be ‘reheated Thatcherism’, which is a disappointing analysis because what the Tories pursued between 2010 and 2024 was nothing like ‘reheated Thatcherism’.

The Tories bought in completely to the nonsense of the ‘Northern Power House’, later rebranded as ‘levelling up’. What’s more, they pursued a distinctly illiberal energy policy which holds few paralells with Mrs Thatcher’s full steam ahead on North Sea oil. ‘Reheated Thatcherism’, if that means low taxes and very little government intervention in the economy would have left us with a better industrial base in 2024 than the one which we got by virtue of all the various little ‘levelling up pots’ and the relocation of big public sector bodies to Newport and Darlington.

So it is timely to sketch out precisely what shape this should take and how it can be done without the usual pattern of dumping vast amounts of southern taxpayer money into unproductive pork-barrel projects in places like Tees Valley. It is the job of Reform to finish the job of Margaret Thatcher and undo all of the crimes of the Atlee government against the country, and that includes the unending Sisyphean attempts to rebalance the countries economic geography. Below I have sketched out, at a glance, a prospectus for improving Britain’s regional economies without beggaring the South-East in a politically viable way.

Resource led levelling up

When we observe that a place like Blackpool is a dump it is not a moral judgement on the people who live there. Blackpool is a dump because it has no reason to exist, and people can only live there because of the largesse of the public sector. This describes many parts of the country, it even describes nominally wealthy parts of the Lib Dem belt such as Oxfordshire. But the late 20^th century was especially cruel to Blackpool.

Blackpool was slammed economically not only by cheap international flights (which made British coastal resorts redundant) but also deindustrialisation (which meant Lancashire locals had less money to spend on amusements). Blackpool also cannot be explained away as a victim of post 1945 immigration, the city is still 94.7% White. That is not to diminish the importance of that issue, but it is important to understand that even if all the Hamas Bully XLs were remigrated tomorrow we would not wake up in paradise. 25% of the population of Blackpool identifies as disabled. I doubt you would see a single collared shirt if you walked through the city centre on a Thursday morning unless you happened across an Estate Agent. It is not enough just to deport.

The very bleak picture I am painting does not need to be the future of Blackpool. Indeed, it does not even need to be the present of the place. Blackpool is sitting on vast reserves of shale gas which could provide tens of thousands of jobs and totally transform the economic landscape of the area by, giving it a reason to exist.

That is precisely what happened in Aberdeen after the discovery of North Sea Oil. Aberdeen in the 1970s was on the same trajectory as most industrial towns in Britain, its textile and paper industries were starting to wind down. The fishing industry in Aberdeen began to decline precipitously after the late 1950s, long before the imposition of the Common Fisheries Policy, as stocks started to deplete. Conflicts would later take place (the Cod Wars) against fisherman from Iceland, which Britain for all intents and purposes lost. Just a year before the ‘third cod war’, which caused fishing to collapse as a viable industry in Aberdeen, in 1975, BP began to pump oil from the nearby Forties oil field. Instead of turning into another named, resentful slum the city was given a second lease of life, instead of Billy Elliot ‘me Dad was a Minaar’ it became a hotspot helipads and cocaine, with one of the highest concentrations of millionaires in Britain.

Blackpool came so close to a similar revival. Preston Road, a site near Blackpool was the only part of Britain which was allowed to set up a horizontal fracking site whilst the Russians were bombarding us with fake news about the environmental consequences of fracking. The site was shut in 2019 because of the usual suspects, environmental campaigners and ‘local communities’, e.g SCUM.

This is a tiny fraction of the failure which is being multiplied all across the country by the ideological refusal to extract the resources that sit beneath our feet. And it isn’t just about fracking shale gas, although that is very important. Ulster sits atop one of the largest gold and silver deposits in the world (Curraginhalt) which has been subject to endless planning related delays since 2009. If you want to make the case for the Union unanswerable, turn Northern Ireland into a net fiscal contributor which is significantly wealthier than the Republic. Look also to the South-West, to Cornwall, which is again starting to become a patchwork of coastal villagers complaining about Londoners and asking the local authorities to tax us more. Contrary the view that most tourists have of the South-West, towns like Penzance, and Torbay in Devon very much resemble Blackpool, shoddy amusement arcades, grey estates and drug addiction. The good news it that the whole region sits on huge reserves of Lithium and other metals, the potential of which has been described tantalisingly as a ‘White Gold Rush’. Reform can do so much to help these areas without protectionism.

So there you have it. You can give purpose to these public sector money sinks simply by permitting large corporations to drill, dig and frack. There is no need to ‘pick winners’ or spend big sums of money propping up Great British steel, no need for based dirigisme or contemplation about the role of the Nation State in the Economy. Just by doing less – which is, after all Farage’s instinct – we can begin to extract wealth across the country instead of attempting to spread it.

Here is another benefit to resource led levelling up – it gives Nigel Farage an answer to the accusations that he is in hoc to both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Both of these ‘strongmen’ use their natural energy reserves to exert political leverage over Europe, Britain has become extremely dependent on American natural gas following our bonkers decision to outlaw importing LNG from Russia, but across the EU to varying degrees all member states have made some pact with some Devil. It is amazing seeing people who cheered on the Russia sanctions now whinge about America flaunting our subservience in our faces. Lib Dem remoantards who still oppose fracking but wish for us to decouple from the United States and also to sanction Russia are asking us to create energy from thin air. It just isn’t credible. Farage can present resource led levelling up as a means to acquiring parity of Esteem with Putin and Trump so that humiliations like Greenland do not happen again. Peace through strength.

And most importantly.

Money.