UK party leaders are clearing out unpopular positions, but Reform's stockpile of divisive ideas will be harder to shed before an election
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rob-hutton. "What essentials to keep, what rubbish to get rid of? Burnham, Badenoch, Farage don’t know either | Robert Hutton | The Guardian." October 24, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
Labour and the Tories are busy ditching their unpopular policies and past mistakes, which leaves them both ready to fight over Thatcher's legacy. Reform, by contrast, keeps piling up nasty ideas about race and religion, and the author thinks they will be difficult to get rid of when an election nears.
Conclusion
Labour under Burnham and the Conservatives under Badenoch are discarding their unpopular or hard-to-defend policies and past baggage, which clears the electoral battleground for a contest over Thatcherism, whereas Reform is hoarding toxic ideas about race and religion that it will struggle to disown at short notice.
Premises
- Burnham's Labour has dropped several unpopular or hard-to-explain commitments inherited from Starmer, including the North Sea drilling ban, EU red lines and digital ID, and has adopted the Conservatives' own energy-security argument.
- Badenoch is disowning responsibility for the last Conservative government, in which she served, by claiming she disagreed with its tax policy but kept quiet, and by echoing Truss's line that everything was someone else's fault.
- As a result of this clearing out, Labour and the Conservatives now agree on the argument they want to have: whether Margaret Thatcher was right.
- Reform's MPs openly voice ideas hostile to minorities, as when Danny Kruger said that Muslims as a group are taught that their loyalty lies with a global Islamic community rather than the UK.
- This reasoning echoes historical suspicion of Catholics and Jews, and Farage avoids saying such things himself while his party's MPs say them for him.
- Ideas that have been stockpiled, such as Reform's, are hard to clear out at short notice, so Farage will struggle to disavow them as an election approaches.
Assumptions
- Dropping unpopular policies is a deliberate electoral strategy rather than a principled change of mind
- Kruger's statement is representative of Reform's views and not an individual's aberration
- Voters will hold Reform responsible for its MPs' statements and will not accept a late disavowal
- Comparing Kruger's remarks to historical anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish arguments is a fair characterisation
- Badenoch's distancing from the previous government will be seen as evasive rather than credible
- The household clearing-out metaphor accurately captures the dynamics of party repositioning