Joe Shalam

It is a fact curiously overlooked by many Conservatives today that Margaret Thatcher did more than almost any European leader to embed the free movement of people across the continent. In 1988 she told British business to seize the opportunity of a Single Market with ‘direct and unhindered access’ to more than 300 million consumers – underpinned by the four freedoms of goods, services, capital and people. To Mrs Thatcher, and to Lord Cockfield, its great architect, the project was a machine for competition, growth and enterprise. That view was not shared by much of the old Labour movement. For many trade unionists, the Common Market looked like a bosses’ project: a way of exposing British workers to the relentless march of multinational capital.

Nigel Farage told Radio 4 this week that he had ‘made a mistake’ in trying to pursue pro-family policies, concluding that this is simply ‘impossible in modern Britain’. The Reform leader might be forgiven for thinking so. The moment Reform moved into this territory with a pledge to end the two-child limit (among working British families it was later clarified), the politics curdled. Britain has, in practice, built a ‘hostile environment’ for family life Voters have long suspected any proposed softening of the cap introduced in 2017, and quite rightly on the grounds of fairness. But still more so at a time when welfare budgets are running away and working Britain is creaking under the weight of the largest tax burden since the 1940s.