Need housing? Reform want you to get married and have a baby

Wait, look – no, stop, hang on, I said: just look. It’s easy. It’s incredibly straightforward. The nice man will explain it to you and you will immediately understand what he means. It’s very simple. Nothing has ever been this simple.

“It’s a very natural, normal thing – has been over centuries – for people to get together, to get married, have children and contribute to their communities,” Richard Tice explained on Times Radio earlier this week. “Everything that we’re doing is focused solely on that.”

Everything? Yes, everything. If you would like to know what this means in practice then yes, sure, the deputy leader of Reform can tell you all about it, in a way that will be unbelievably clear. Asked about the policies behind those nice words, he explained that a married British couple under 35 would get priority over a single British person when it comes to social housing. It is, according to him, “surely preferable” for a child to have two, married parents.

“Families are a good thing,” he explained. “Having British children, British-born children is a good thing. We need to encourage that.” When, later in the interview, he was pressed on the fact that, on occasion, single people may in fact wind up with a small human on their hands, he convincingly argued that “they might. But in an ideal world, it is well known that married couples – children in married couples, for example – will do really well at school.”

Got it? If you didn’t, don’t worry. On Thursday, brave old Tice got interviewed again, this time by Sophy Ridge. The Sky presenter asked him not once, not twice, but multiple times whether he stood by his policy announcement of throwing single parents at the back of the social housing queue. It went… eh.

After some hemming, some hawing and a healthy dose of obfuscation, Tice eventually argued, in a statesmanlike fashion, that well, “you have to start somewhere,” and the “key focus is on prioritising young, British workers”. Capisce?

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Of course, the problem here – the xenophobic elephant in the political room – is that Reform clearly didn’t want “parents” or “families” to be the operative words in their new policy. Instead, they just wanted to make it as clear as possible that anyone daring to bring a new life into the world while having committed the awful crime of having been born anywhere but here should be penalised.

Tice got caught up in the detail this month, but his overlord Nigel Farage managed just fine in June, as he explained that, after a Reform victory at the next general election, all foreigners, including EU citizens with settled status, would be kicked out of their social housing, and face deportation if unable to find another place to live.

The one, small issue with this particular policy, and this way of framing it, is that it’s too obviously abominable. It’s cruel and inhumane. It will only appeal to the most ghoulish within the electorate. Clearly, the bright minds at Reform HQ eventually realised this, and had to come up with some sort of sugar coating, in order not to scare off anyone even an inch to the left of Genghis Khan.

One can assume that they then (correctly) identified that the falling birth rate and cost of living crisis for young parents was one of the issues on everyone’s lips, and voila. Suddenly, the policy stopped sounding vindictive, and instead became a happy, clappy scheme to make sure that everyone can have the babies they wish to have. Well, everyone British and, for some reason, under 35, and no one else. Really, it’s amazing to believe that Tice ended up falling apart on multiple media appearances while trying to sell this new idea, given how airtight it is.