Annabel Denham

When I last interviewed Nigel Farage, he told me a new divide was opening in Britain. The country was being cleft in two: workers on one side, workless on the other. He was in no doubt whose team his insurgent party was on. Robert Jenrick's welfare reforms are the fullest expression yet of that argument. Reform has today promised to cut a whopping £50 billion from the benefits bill – a little under half of all working-age welfare spending.Whilst the plausibility of this scale of saving may be debatable, the diagnosis is hard to dispute. In the past two decades, Britain has created a workfree lifestyle which barely existed before.

Few things could make Nigel Farage squirm, but a question from Jordan Peterson at this week's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference seems to have done the trick. During a fireside talk, the Canadian psychologist asked the Reform leader whether long-term, monogamous, heterosexual, child-centred marriages were the foundation stone of a civilised society. After conceding that, having been divorced twice, he might not be the best advocate for stable unions, Farage, a father of four, responded that 'we need higher birth rates' and emphasised the importance of our 'Judeo-Christian' culture. 'Of course we need higher birth rates,' Farage said. 'But we’re not going to get higher birth rates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism.

Anyone surprised by leaked documents showing smoking may soon be banned in beer gardens, small parks, outdoor restaurants, open-air spaces at nightclubs and outside football stadiums hasn’t been paying attention.  For a start, the UK has been on the slippery slope towards tobacco prohibition for nearly two decades: Tony Blair banned smoking outdoors, Theresa May set a target of going ‘smoke-free’ by 2030. Rishi Sunak – a man whose opposition to some of the tougher lockdown measures gave a glimmer of hope that liberalism hadn’t been entirely extinguished in the Tory party – attempted to make a generational ban on tobacco sales his legacy. All of this is a death by a thousand cuts, our freedom slightly curtailed with every stroke.

Britain is so beset with immediate problems that major issues, ones which could drastically alter our society and the way we live, are being sidelined. One of these is our plummeting birth rate. The number of deaths in England and Wales could this year exceed the number of births. Our total fertility rate, at 1.49 children per woman and falling, is far below the 2.1 required to sustain population growth. Ultimately, we don't know how to get people to have more children The economic implications are obvious: in the late 1970s, there were four workers for every dependent person. There are now only three and, all other things being equal, this could drop to two by 2050. Welfare is already ballooning; we are spending £138 billion on the state pension, almost £2,000 per UK citizen.

It takes some brass neck to cross the floor, but to do it in the manner of Natalie Elphicke also requires considerable levels of delusion. A year ago, the Dover MP warned Labour were not to be 'trusted' on immigration because they 'really want open borders'. Yet a deciding factor behind her defection, she writes in her parting statement today, was the 'safety and security' of those borders – a matter on which Keir Starmer's party has yet to convince anyone. Elphicke objects to the ousting of Boris Johnson, yet her new colleagues wanted him out on day one Elphicke also lambasts the Tories' housing policy, although even Angela Rayner would struggle to articulate just what Labour plans to do to alleviate the crisis.

Labour is desperate to come across as business-friendly. Last week, the party said it will no longer reinstate a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and that it will ‘unashamedly champion’ the financial services industry. But how to square that with the party’s new Race Equality Act? Most people understand equal pay to mean exactly what was intended when it became law in 1970: that remuneration must be the same for two identical jobs within an organisation, regardless of who is in post. But since the EU’s 2006 Equal Pay Directive it has taken on a new meaning: now, it covers ‘like work’ (where the job and skills are the same or similar), ‘work rated as equivalent’ or ‘work of equal value’.

Of all the reasons why the Conservatives deserve to lose the next general election, their nonsensical childcare policy is among the most convincing. Labour had needlessly meddled in this sector, with little positive effect on affordability, accessibility, or maternal employment. The Tories could have taken on the vested interests and trades unions, scaled back the state’s involvement, and created a competitive environment with lower costs and greater parental choice.  Instead, on assuming power in 2010, they introduced 15 free hours for all 3-and-4 year-olds in England and maintained strict regulatory requirements, including cumbersome record-keeping and mandatory targets. By 2023, government spending on childcare and pre-school had swollen to around £6 billion.

Doctors haven't always been keen on the NHS. A former chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) said in response to the 1946 National Health Service Act, that: ‘It looks to me uncommonly like the first step, and a big one, to National Socialism as practised in Germany.’ In 1948, the BMA claimed that only 4,734 doctors, just over 10 per cent of those polled, were in favour of such a system.  At one point, the Minister for Health and father of the NHS Aneurin Bevan described the BMA as a ‘small body of politically poisoned people’ who had decided to ‘fight the Act... and to stir up as much emotion as they can in the profession’. Among his adversaries was the secretary of the BMA, Charles Hill, who argued healthcare should be paid for by insurance, not taxation.