Read It Back To Them

Don't let the Tories pretend they were not responsible for where we are.

Every party in trouble prays for the same miracle, which is amnesia. The Conservative Party’s entire strategy for the next four years rests on the hope that the British people will misremember the last fourteen. Kemi Badenoch has said as much, remarking that it is unhelpful to churn over every incident of those years. Unhelpful to whom, one might ask. Yesterday Reform UK answered her with a website, and I want to spend a few paragraphs telling you why donotforget.co.uk matters rather more than a campaign microsite usually does.

Do Not Forget is a single scrolling page, organised into five chapters, one for each Prime Minister from Cameron to Sunak, with poor Liz Truss allotted a chapter of forty-nine days and one entry, which is about right. Down the side runs the net migration figure for every year like a taxi meter that nobody thought to switch off. You scroll, and the years accumulate, and the numbers climb, and by the bottom of the page you have relived the whole sorry pageant. The tone is forensic rather than shrill. Every entry is drawn from the public record, Hansard, the ONS, government statements, the national press, and linked to its source. That discipline is the whole point, and I shall come back to it.

Let me pick out some of what the team have assembled, because the range is the story.

Start where the site starts, with immigration. Cameron’s 2010 pledge to cut net migration to the tens of thousands sits at the head of the page like a text above a church door, and beneath it the record, twelve million arrivals over fourteen years, and a scorecard reading nought from fourteen. Not one year. The site then walks you through the machinery of the failure. The 2011 family reunion route that let refugees import spouses married after they fled. The Modern Slavery Act of 2015, Mrs May’s proudest achievement, which opened a deportation loophole so generous that four in ten migrants now earmarked for removal claim to be trafficking victims. People who go to the trafficking gangs, pay them vast some of money to be trafficked, and then claim that they were trafficked. It’s like me claiming that the Tate Gallery made me go and see the Whistler exhibition, after I had paid the membership and walked willingly through the Millbank building.

The 2018 decision to end data-sharing between the Home Office and the public services, which made illegal migrants harder to find on purpose. Then the Boriswave, the post-Brexit visa system of 2021 that threw the door open wider than Blair ever managed, care-worker routes and dependants driving the totals to 1.17 million, then 1.47 million. And beneath it all the Channel, the crossings declared a major incident in 2018 and then allowed to compound, 828 in a day, then 1,185, then 1,305, records falling like England’s lower order batsmen.

But the genius of the site is that it refuses to be a single-issue document. The second great thread is money, yours, taken. The VAT rise to twenty per cent in 2011. Tuition fees nearly tripled to nine thousand pounds, a betrayal absent from any manifesto, followed by Plan 2 loans that lashed interest to RPI plus three and built a student debt mountain now past £266 billion. The inheritance tax allowance frozen at £325,000 in Osborne’s first Budget and never moved since, a fifteen-year stealth raid on the modest estates of the thrifty dead. The dividend allowance introduced at £5,000 and whittled to £500. IR35 pushed into the public sector and then the private. And crowning the lot, Hunt’s freeze on income tax thresholds, extended to 2028, which has quietly dragged three million people into higher bands without a single Chancellor ever having to stand up and announce a tax rise. The Conservatives will tell you they are the party of low taxation. The site simply lays out the receipts.

Thread three is energy, and here the site does something genuinely useful, which is to show that the bills crisis was not weather but deliberate construction. The Energy Act 2013 locked in the renewables subsidies through Contracts for Difference. The fracking ban of 2019 made it illegal to touch the gas under our own feet. The UK Emissions Trading Scheme of 2021 domesticated the Brussels carbon market rather than escaping it. And the Net Zero target itself, a trillion-pound commitment by the Treasury’s own estimate, passed the Commons in 2019 after ninety minutes of debate. Ninety minutes. Parliament has spent longer on the regulation of pedlars. The result, industrial electricity prices that went from a quarter above France’s to nearly two-thirds above, and household energy up two hundred and five per cent on 2010. The site charts it, sourced to the ONS, the ratchet visible year by year.

Then there is the entry that made me sit up, because almost nobody else remembers it. In 2010, among the coalition’s first creations, came the Behavioural Insights Team. The Nudge Unit, established to put psychological manipulation at the service of public policy. It sat there for a decade, a curiosity for the Sunday supplements, until Covid, when the apparatus was weaponised in earnest. The fear messaging, the looming billboards, the choreographed podium terrors, all of it was nudge theory taken off the leash, applied by the state against its own citizens to secure compliance with the largest confiscation of civil liberty in our history.

The site pairs it, correctly, with the lockdown ledger. Twenty-eight thousand criminal convictions for breaches, some for eating a takeaway in a parked car. A hundred and twenty-five thousand fixed penalties. A bill somewhere between £310 and £410 billion. A Conservative government did that, and a Conservative government built the psychological plant that made it possible.

And while the country was confined, the friends of the party did rather well. The VIP procurement lane that handed Baroness Mone’s consortium £200 million for gowns the NHS could not use. Four and a half billion lost to fraud across furlough and Eat Out to Help Out. Seventeen billion gone on Bounce Back Loans. The site sets these beside the peerages the vetters warned against, the £250,000-a-year donor club with its regular access to the Prime Minister, the £160,000 tennis match, the two million in donations from Russian-linked money. Sleaze is a tired word. Read the entries in sequence and a better one suggests itself, which is capture.

Defence gets its due as well, and not in the way the MoD would like. The site records the Werritty affair and the fall of Fallon, but the sharper entry is the RAF recruitment scandal, the leaked 2021 memo warning that hiring on merit would have huge implications for the Air Chief Marshal’s diversity targets. An air force, in a dangerous decade, ranking the pigmentation of its pilots above their aptitude. That sits within a wider seam the site mines patiently, the Public Sector Equality Duty of 2011 with its licence for racial preference, the College of Policing and its two-tier Race Action Plan, the Civil Service gender policy, the City’s boardroom quotas, all of it built, signed and defended by Conservative ministers who now tour the studios lamenting wokery as though it were the weather.

Two more, because they are the sharpest politics on the page. The Afghan data breach, in which an official leaked twenty thousand names, ministers hid it behind a superinjunction, and the whole cohort was quietly invited to Britain. And the running Badenoch file, assembled without comment, her Hansard thanks for the lifting of visa caps, she lobbied for both, her Inclusive Britain report, her retreat on retained EU law, her retention of the donor access club. The current leader of the Opposition is not collateral damage on this site. She is a load-bearing wall.

Now, why does this matter beyond the delicious detail. Because it is the sort of thing Reform has lacked, and I say that with affection and some history. The party has never wanted for instinct, for platform courage, for the gift of the moment. What it has lacked is institutional memory made usable, the filing cabinet, the dossier, the patient unglamorous work of evidence assembled to survive contact with a hostile interviewer.

Do Not Forget is precisely that. Every claim footnoted, every link live, nothing that cannot be defended at the despatch box or in a studio. It is opposition research turned into public infrastructure, and it marks the growth of a movement into a serious party of opposition, one that opposes not merely the Government of the day but the settlement behind it, the consensus that both old parties administered and neither will disown.

The team behind it deserve real applause. They have understood that the coming election will be fought over memory, and they have built the national memory a home. The Tories will ask for another chance. The site’s closing line tells you what to do when they knock. The record is written. Read it back to them.