Farage Would Pack the Lords and Review How Judges Are Appointed
The constitutional substance of the Reform leader’s conference speech reached beyond the headlines: under his “national emergency”, Parliament would sit “24 hours a day, for six days a week”; an obstructive Lords would face hundreds of new peers or a referendum — “they would be swept away”; and on the courts: “We don’t want the courts striking down, do we, the will of the people… We will do whatever it takes, and perhaps have to consider how judicial appointments work in the future.” Judges would lose the ability to rely on ECHR conventions.
Strip the conference staging and this is the most radical constitutional programme placed before British voters by a leading party in the postwar era: emergency powers as a first resort, the appointments process of the judiciary reopened because courts might rule inconveniently, the second chamber threatened with abolition by referendum if it performs its function. Each element has a precedent somewhere — peers have been threatened in bulk before, judicial appointments have been reformed before — but the package’s logic is singular: every institution capable of saying no is pre-designated an enemy of “the will of the people”. That is the framework Ms Badenoch reached for with “authoritarian”, and the Bailey speech on institutional legitimacy reads as its direct answer. Watch whether the programme survives scrutiny as polling — or hardens into the manifesto.