YOU won’t find a more patriotic paper than The Sun. But let’s be honest. Britain is in big trouble.
Our decline looks terrifying. But it is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
What it will take is a complete change of approach and direction, a new blueprint for government, by this one or the next.
For too long, our politicians have taken precisely the wrong paths, drifting to the Left, obsessing over “social justice”, diversity and Net Zero fantasies when a world changing at dizzying speed thanks to AI is already presenting vastly greater challenges . . . and huge opportunities.
That’s true both of this Labour Government and the Tories before them.
Labour seems far keener on reversing its 1980s defeats than retooling a nation for the 2030s amid probably the greatest economic upheaval in two centuries.
And the Tories spent 14 years in power driven less by the goals of prosperity, freedom and happiness than by the desire for “likes” on social media.
Do any of our main parties, Reform included, really grasp the scale of what is needed now?
A bold plan is crucial.
Here’s ours.
First, much lower energy prices.
Prosperous nations are not built on the most exorbitant electricity in the developed world.
How can we expect families to thrive with bills this high?
How do we expect to lure major new employers from abroad — or keep our existing ones afloat?
That is especially true of the AI data centres, on which so much may soon depend.
Yes, Britain is currently the third biggest AI power on Earth.
But how long for, if other countries offer energy at a fraction of the cost of ours?
Imposing Net Zero edicts and levies so rapidly has been a suicidal folly.
We must scrap them, postpone these ludicrous and unachievable eco targets — and extract ALL our North Sea oil and gas.
Cheap energy is the priority.
Next we must lower taxes.
They are at their highest since World War Two and still rising, to fund welfare spending which is wildly out of control.
Even the Work and Pensions Secretary admits: “Every meeting I have is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’ ”
More than half of British households take more from the state than they pay in, and many are given zero incentive ever to work.
Skivers are prioritised over strivers.
Spending on mental health claims is off the charts.
And the past two years has also seen an explosion of public sector recruitment, with staff on salaries and guaranteed pensions the private sector can only dream of.
Your taxes fund it all.
This MUST be reversed.
Our National Debt has topped £3trillion.
We now pay £109billion a year in debt interest alone — that’s more than 80 per cent of our annual overdraft.
How can we possibly continue down this disastrous road?
We must spend less — and tax less.
Young people who are fit to work must be made to do so.
Paying NEET 16 to 24-year-olds to do nothing is economically and morally indefensible.
We must finally get serious about defence.
National security is the first duty of Government.
We must rapidly bolster our dangerously depleted fighting strength and reach the spending targets demanded by our Nato allies.
The Cold War is long over. Russia and China are threats, among others.
Our people’s safety — and our economy’s stability — rely on robust defences from conventional and hybrid warfare, including cyber attacks.
The White House rightly demands we and other European nations spend FAR more on our own defence if we still want America’s protection.
Instead we delay, delay, review, review again and then put billions more into benefits instead.
“We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget,” says Lord Robertson, ex-Labour defence secretary and Nato chief.
He is dead right.
We must revolutionise planning.
Our archaic and paralysed system ensures next to nothing gets built.
That, combined with the enormous population growth of the last 25 years, is the cause of so many of our problems . . . from stratospheric, unaffordable house prices to jam-packed prisons, even to routine hosepipe bans.
We need a bonfire of planning law, with a radical replacement to overrule Nimbys and get homes, roads, prisons, reservoirs and much else built.
Labour talked a good game on that.
So far, it’s come to nothing.
We must get a grip on immigration.
For years we have failed to stop illegal migrants — and the “small boats” are getting bigger and bigger to carry more and sail from more distant spots across the Channel.
Almost none of these arrivals, overwhelmingly young males fleeing nothing, will ever be deported against their will because their asylum claims will be nodded through even when transparently bogus.
The sole deterrent, the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, was killed at birth by Labour as ideologically unsound.
It must be revived.
After all, even the threat of it was enough to deter some migrants.
Aside from the vast cost to Britain of the small boats crisis, nothing better exposes a government’s failure to voters than an inability to control our borders.
The influx of arrivals from countries with values very different to our own has caused significant social upheaval and unrest.
It is shocking that the Home Office has seen fit to publish a leaflet informing illegal migrants they must not rape or sexually harass British women and girls.
We need to champion our businesses: Turbo-charge them, not treat them as the enemy.
Too many on the Left see them as rapacious oppressors of working people.
What guff. They are the lifeblood of the economy, creating the jobs that raise families.
The only result of this Government’s raft of anti-business levies and suffocating red tape, aside from firms going bust, is that unemployment — that rare Tory success story — is soaring again.
Graduates leaving uni with £60,000 debts are having to sign on the dole.
Our firms need lower taxes and less regulation.
Our entrepreneurs need Government to get out of their way, not control their every move and tax them into bankruptcy.
Politicians’ only role should be to champion our businesses, especially as they adapt to AI.
We are only now being hit by the first waves of that tsunami, so the Government must have a massive training and retraining programme to reskill those made redundant by AI and teach them, along with school or university leavers, to use it.
That goes too for the whole of government.
If, as predicted, AI proves to be a new industrial revolution, our country’s success or failure will be determined by how rapidly and efficiently the civil service can harness it.
Yes, the same civil service that mostly seems mired decades in the past.
Is it even remotely ready?
These are the radical ideas we need to pull Britain out of its slumber.
The sort of plan we want from Andy Burnham, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage.
It’s hardly revolutionary.
It is common sense.
The country is over-taxed, under-defended, economically stagnant and a Shangri-La for the bone idle.
Putting that right is not rocket science.
Nor is it right-wing — though it probably sounds like it to a country whose two main parties have drifted to the Left over the past 25 years.
At the turn of the century, the Blair government had moved on from Labour’s dismal past and was running an economy in surplus.
Now it has reverted to its 1970s comfort zone of student union protest, virtue signalling, crippling taxes and vast spending.
But even the Tories succumbed to this leftwards drift.
Some of them in Government seemed confused as to whether they were Conservatives or lightweight Lib Dems.
Kemi Badenoch has at least established her party as Conservative again.
And yet our politicians are still so easily sidetracked by absurd online debates over whether Britain is “racist” or “imperialist”.
Whether Gaza represents a “genocide”.
Whether we should pay other nations trillions in “reparations” for the slave trade we spent a fortune in blood and treasure ending centuries ago.
They still bicker over the rights and wrongs of Brexit and whether to “reset” our relationship with the EU, or rejoin it.
Some MPs genuinely believe “taxing billionaires” would raise game-changing sums.
These are left-wing frivolities indulged in by unserious politicians — distractions to avoid confronting our real challenges.
Are those simply too gargantuan for MPs to face?
The point of any government is not to posture, play to the gallery and stick rigidly to party dogma.
It is to get things done: to identify major national problems, work out the answers and dedicate its time in office to putting them into practice.
Politics, left or right, should not matter.
Britain is in a dire state.
It will take a radical plan like ours to extricate us, and a brave leader to put it into effect.
We need serious people for very serious times.
Who will step up to save our country?