#124 Zia Yusuf: Reform's Plan to Rebuild the Country

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Zia Yusuf returns to the show to discuss where Britain is heading—and how Reform UK plans to turn it around. In this follow-up conversation, we dig into why Britain is no longer investable, the flight of wealth and its impact on public services, immigration and cultural decline, the need for real political power to deliver change, and Reform’s first-principles approach to taxation, debt, energy policy, and economic growth.

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• Transcript

  Peter McCormack

  How you doing very well. How are you? I'm good. I enjoyed your why? Text you. I enjoyed your thing on Question time. It's good to see you

  Zia Yusuf

  there. Yes, yes. Well, it was, it was the first time I think Zach Polanski was on Yes. And I think that a lot of people think the greens are sort of this nice, sort of fuzzy party that you know are just really into keeping the countryside green and making sure that, you know, we've got a lovely habitat for the wildlife, and that's just not the case. I mean, a the man himself has, I mean, fair enough people are entitled to a pass before politics, right? But I mean to be running around hypnotizing women in that way, I thought was extremely strange. And secondly, this is a party that literally wants open borders. That's on their website. Number two, wants to destroy our nuclear deterrent, Vladimir Putin's marauding around in Ukraine, and wants to legalize all drugs, including meth, all methamphetamines, you know, fentanyl, crack cocaine, but also make it illegal to rent out your flat. And so this is I mean, if labor to call them student politicians, would be a massive disservice to student politicians. But as we speak, this party is now polling at 16% according to YouGov today, one point behind labor and one point behind the Tories, so that is actually quite scary.

  Peter McCormack

  Do you think that's a reflection in a similar way to what's happened with reform, in that conservative voters are trying to find a new home. You've got labor voters, especially young people, who are trying to find a new home.

  Zia Yusuf

  Yeah. You know, I tweeted out recently that in some ways what Zach Polanski is doing is quite only use the word refreshing in the sense that what he's at least doing is saying things that he genuinely believes in, right? And he's saying, Look, if you vote for the greens, this is, these are the things that we will do. And so in some ways it is better for a democracy to have opened sort of the globalism in an open way, rather than the kind of open borders globalism in a covert way that the Tories and labor have done. Does that make sense? You know? And so yes, in some ways what greens are doing to labor, there is a parallel to what reform have done to the Tories. It's not, it's not a perfect parallel, because reform has won lots of voters from other parties as well, and a lot of people who disenfranchised and didn't vote at all. This idea that, you know, reform are where we are because we've just taken Tory voters is not true, yeah, but it is true that, you know, the uni party is dead. The uni party is going extinct. I don't think people understand, particularly in the media, even amongst the sort of the pollsters, when you speak to them, I mean, look, you can see this even in the way a lot of pollsters work. So what a lot of pollsters do, and this is why they've many of them do under state reforms, actual level of support is they, if somebody says, I don't know who I'm going to vote for, when they ask in the poll, they then they also ask, who did you vote for last time? And they peg you back. There's like a weighting on a lot of those polls that peg you back to whom you voted last time. Now, that might work in periods of less volatility, but you can imagine when volatilities like this. You know where the two old parties between them win 70% of the vote not that long ago, to winning 13% of the votes in Caerphilly. When you have that much volatility, that kind of polling methodology leads to a real understating of insurgent party support.

  Peter McCormack

  What did you make of Caerphilly? Obviously, there's part of this a disappointment, yeah, but wasn't it still with 35%

  Zia Yusuf

  Growth, yeah. Look, we're here to win, our actions, and so we're certainly not going to celebrate second place, and it was disappointing not to, not to win, but our candidate, Cliff Powell, fought a great campaign. He's a great candidate. I think he will be in the Senate next May, if you look at what's what happened, yes. So number one, this is a seat that's just outside Cardiff, right? So it actually has some interesting urban characteristics, as it were, and it wouldn't be sort of one of the top 10 seats for us by any means, in Wales, but we obviously did an incredible job. We got 36% of the vote. That is up from 1.7% last time and credits applied, you know, they won, and they won by a few 1000 votes, but they were up by less. You know, they're, I think their vote increased by 18 points versus last time. But, you know, we won almost three times as many votes as the uni party combined, almost three times as many votes as labor and the Tories. The Tories down to 2% they're basically extinct in Wales, as they're going extinct in Scotland and soon in England too. And labor, remember, this is a seat that labor had never lost an election in the seat was created in 1918 the parliamentary seat, labor won every single time. When the Senate seat was created, labor won, and they won every single time. And not only did they not win again, it's the scale and the magnitude of rejection. I think even rejection is too kind. Yeah, it's too kind. I mean, if you speak to people on the doors. So I spent some time nudging the campaign, and it reminded me a lot of what happened in Runcorn and Helsby, another labor stronghold, and I kept hearing on the doors lifelong labor voters, or people who voted labor last time. But it was most striking with the lifelong labor voters as they characterized themselves, who said, I've been betrayed. The word betrayal kept coming up and again, going back to your original question, that's a really interesting parallel, because a lot of people felt unbelievably betrayed by the Tories.

  Unknown Speaker

  A lot of people feel really betrayed by labor now.

  Peter McCormack

  Yeah, it's a really interesting time. I was chatting to somebody locally where we live in Bedford, about politics, and he said to me something that I'd never considered before. He said, The thing with politics, it's not what you say, it's what you think. And a lot of people won't say what they think, yeah, but when they get to the ballot box, they vote based on what they're thinking. And it's still in some circles, even if you want to vote for reform, difficult to admit you're going to vote for reform. For some people, it's a quiet conversation. If you work in certain industries in London, you just can't admit even if you want to vote for reform, when it comes to polling, is it similar? Do people worry about being honest in a poll.

  Zia Yusuf

  There's definitely an element of the quote shy reform vote, and I think it's much less than it used to be. I would say the bigger issue with polls these days is the methodology of the pollsters and less the responses of the of the participants in the poll. And look, a really good example of this was on May the first or just a few days prior. So prior to the May the first elections reform was predicted to win about 26 27% of the vote share. We then got far more than that, well north of 30% and then all the polls the day after that moved up into line with the result that you've just seen. That is also partly a result of the incentive structure for pollsters. Pollsters are not trying to be the most correct at any point. That's that's not what they're optimizing for. Remember, they make money by going in. Yeah, someone's got to pay for these polls, right? And usually those people have an agenda. So what they're just trying to do is make sure that they're not ever demonstrably wrong. You know, they're not that Gazelle that sort of left behind from the herd. So, so they all hurt, and they all cluster. And if you actually drill down into the methodology inside the spreadsheets, you can kind of see what's happening there. But look, I don't have a problem with it. I mean, that just is what it is. It's I don't have an issue with us being, quote, understated in the polls, like the reality is what matters is what happens at the ballot box. And yes, we were disappointed with Caerphilly, but we had an amazing May the first but also, if you look at the council by election. Since then, we've won more of those Council by election seats than anyone else, including the Lib Dems, who are normally masters of the sort of local council elections. And if you look at the polls today, so just this morning, YouGov had one out. Now YouGov is one pretty routinely understates reform support, but still, that has us 10 points clear, and that was the one. As I said, there's greens on 16, Tory, 17, labor, 17.

  Unknown Speaker

  There we go. Just Connor's bringing up. So in some ways it's,

  Peter McCormack

  it's waiting for years. Obviously you need time to build out the infrastructure of the party. But in some ways also frustrating, like, how do you strategically maintain that for four years?

  Zia Yusuf

  Well, it's not frustrating, because it's it's great to be in the position that we are, but it is true we are still in there's a long way to go before the next general election. That is absolutely true. And you can use whatever analogy you want. You know seven points clear at Christmas in the Premier League or. Anything, whatever analogy you want to use, the key is that I'm not too concerned a because our leader, Nigel, leads by example. You know, he's just somebody who Nobody works harder than him in politics, and we're always going to be the risk would be, we go into our shells, or you start behaving in a different way. We're going to continue to take our message to the British people. We are also preparing for government. You know, we had a press conference this morning. Danny Kruger, who came over from the Tories, leads that. And that's not out of arrogance or hubris. It's because, given we've led 100 opinion polls in a row, Nigel's a favorite to be the next prime minister. Most MRP polls give reform a majority. Now, it would be criminally irresponsible, would it not if we were not preparing for government in the way you know, labor turned up with 14 years in opposition, and we're like rabbit in headlights. Well,

  Peter McCormack

  that's that's what they do on the US. They have a transition team already in place, ready for if

  Zia Yusuf

  they win. Yeah. But the difference in America is after the the elections, there's then a period where the President doesn't change instantly. You see what I mean. Whereas here you don't get that, you don't got to be ready, you got to be ready. And there's going to be so much, frankly, hostility. There'll be a lot of countermeasures from apparatus of state against our agenda. Now people might say, Oh, well, you're being too pessimistic. No, I don't think I am. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised. But look, we're going to get one shot at this, right? We have a once, I think, in a once in a lifetime of a country opportunity, I would argue, to reboot this country, almost have a rebirth of the United Kingdom, but in a way that restores it and takes it back to the greatness. Take brings back those great principles that has made this country one of the best countries. I think it's the best country in the world. But we're on this really. We're in a very dangerous time in the sense there's a real fork in the road. You know that? Mean, which way Western

  Peter McCormack

  here? By first thing, we're crossroads. If you said it in your love letter to the UK, your speech at the conference, it's

  Zia Yusuf

  why I came into politics, yeah, because I've never seen such a if I thought this was a period where decline was inevitable, but it's just sort of trying to pump the patient with as much morphine as possible keep it as comfortable. I have no interest in that, but that's not what I see. I see a path like that meme, which on the one side there is this shining city on the hill, Britain can regain its confidence. It can heal the wounds that currently exist, it can become prosperous and powerful as it once was. Now that means leaning into our strengths, being proud of our history, being proud of our strengths, investing in those strengths. Right now we have the opposite of those things right, condemning the political class condemn our strengths, talking about reparations and claim that basically, the entire history of this country is just one of slavery and oppression, completely untrue. And also we've the risk is, if we carry on the glide path this country is currently on due to the management, catastrophic mismanagement, the Tories and now labor, we're not just headed to an outcome that's not that outcome I just laid out. We're heading for a dystopian one. We're heading for one with no economic growth, a zero sum economic environment with no economic growth combined with sectarian politics. And any student of history knows that's not like a that's not like a middling, mediocre outcome that is terrifying and it's usually quite violent. And I don't think we should be in any way complacent about that. We already know now there are people who just vote based on ethnicity, vote based on religion. That has already started. Nigel's talked about this for years. We are still at a point where we can arrest that decline. Well, what's the risk there? What are you saying? Well, at the moment you have, you do have a situation where there are some of these independent MPs who basically campaign based on winning the vote of their you know people who share their faith or share their religion. You know we are consistently being told now that, well, these parties, or, as I said, these independents who probably will form their own party at some point, that is, that is their essentially their value proposition, rather than a world where in a democracy, you argue, it's about arguments, and it's about a view on the economy, or the best way, how big should the state be? Or, let's talk about how much immigration should we should have instead, it's already started now, where there are some constituencies where only that sort of a candidate can win, that

  Peter McCormack

  has already started. And are you as a Muslim saying this is a Muslim issue?

  Zia Yusuf

  I think in the examples I'm giving, it is, yes, it absolutely is,

  Peter McCormack

  yeah, there must be quite strange for you to be raising that issue. I

  Zia Yusuf

  don't consider it strange. I mean, I I've always said, you know, my faith I consider to be a private matter, like a lot of religious people, right? Christians and Jews, a lot of people. You're worried about people who don't think like that. Well, I worry about making public policy and advocating for public policy that is in the best interest of the plurality of British people, regardless of their faith. And what I do know is that, clearly, it is not an issue for people to have religiosity and have faith in the House of Commons or. Even for it to have a really meaningful impact in how they see the world, in the kind of public policy they want. What's dangerous and is it is dangerous, and we should be aware of the dangers of it is a situation where in certain constituencies, members of parliament are being elected and councilors are being elected, ostensibly on the on a platform of a single religion, be it Islam or otherwise. How

  Peter McCormack

  do you even stop that? I mean, we don't have rules. Like, is it Pakistan? They have you have to be a Muslim to be president, and they only have 10 seats for minority religions something. Yeah, I think so. So they have controls in a country, in their country to stop it, but yeah, how do you change that in our country where we are

  Zia Yusuf

  well, freedom of religion is a really fundamental tenet of English common law, and it's a really important British value, and that's why these are difficult problems to solve. I think the way that you solve the problem, the problem is as soon as you start trying to demarcate on the grounds of religion a it's actually very difficult to enforce right number one and number two, you start to then potentially cut into the bone of what actually makes this country an amazing country in the first place. So my view is the way we resolve this is number one, getting a handle. I mean, a lot of this has been caused by untreamled mass immigration on an unfathomable scale, with a lot of people coming from countries which have, let's just be factual, a lower propensity to integrate than certain other countries that can be characterized as a binary between EU and non EU migration. That was the real legacy of Boris Johnson. It was not just the throwing open of our borders with the Boris wave and 3.8 million people coming here legally on his watch, it was the fact that we switched from roughly 8020 EU, non EU, to 80% non EU coming in. And this stuff does matter. I mean, we have to be able to talk about these things. I mean, if we're talking about having an immigration policy, regardless of the numbers coming here, numbers are important, and they need to, obviously, much lower, probably net negative, for a period of time now. But it also matters about composition. Like you have to look if you're hiring for a business, I'm sure you consider cultural fit, right when you're thinking primarily, it's a it's a meritocracy. When I hire,

  Peter McCormack

  I have, yeah, when I had my agency in London, we put a woman in the boardroom, because it was all men, and we had women working for us. We had late night parties. There are things we weren't thinking about as a company because we weren't thinking from the perspective of a woman. So we did also put a woman in there. There has been cultural fit. Yeah, I mean this. I think you as a when you run a company without any outside influence, you know what's best for your company. We didn't put a woman our boardroom for the sake of a war. We put it in because we had women staff. We wanted to know the things that were important for them. But I think you have a gut instinct of what's

  Zia Yusuf

  right, yeah. But I think I put it to you that you are sitting across the table from somebody, whoever the candidate is, and considering whether they're going to cohere with the rest of your team. Yeah, right. And I think that's a very reasonable proposition when it comes to immigration policy as well. And so that doesn't mean that you start to discriminate in an inappropriate way, but it is appropriate to be selective. You know, there's so many people who want to come to this great country. That's not something we should take for granted, by the way, that might change if we carry on down the path that we're on, sadly. So we should ask ourselves, why do so many people want to come here? And if there's so many people that want to come, let's a make sure that it's the correct number. And as I said, for now, in reforms view, that probably needs to be not just net zero, but probably net negative for a period of time. But we have to probably the simplest way of putting this is, let's ensure that the immigration policy is solely optimized for improving the lives of people who are citizens of the United Kingdom and nothing and here's how they'd look if humans vanished.

  Peter McCormack

  if we're asking, Why does so many people want to come here, I think we also, at the same time, we now need to be asking, Why do so many people want to leave? Could people want to leave, which is a big problem.

  Zia Yusuf

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think Britain loses more, is losing more millionaires per capita than any other country. And some people want to hand wave that away and say, you know, you see these random left. We don't. Yeah, we do. Don't shut the door on the way out or whatever. The point is that already, you know, 1% of the income taxpayers in this country, the top 1% pay around a third of the total income tax pool that Pareto law expands even more as you get to the point 1% so this really does matter. And you know, you saw this example. Nick staronsky, the Revolut, the founder of Revolut, yep. Gone to is it Dubai? Yeah, gone to Dubai. And probably there's a huge liquidity event coming for revenue, right? That's probably a 70 billion odd event. I don't know exactly what his stake is, but I would imagine that is a multi I'm almost certain that had he been in the UK and paid capital gains tax on that would have been a multi billion pound payday for HMRC. And I don't know him personally, but I do know other people who are in that scenario, and it's not like they're just all going to leave because I want to pay 0% for a lot of people, there's thresholds. Right number one is sort of I might pay 20% but I'm not paying 26 I'm not risking paying 40, 50% totally different. You have to risk adjust that. But there's also one things I hear a lot from people who pay a lot of tax in this country, it's less how much tax they're paying. It's their aversion and utter disdain for the way in which the tax money is spent.

  Unknown Speaker

  I'd say there's there's more to it than that as well. So there is that.

  Peter McCormack

  I also think the way people who've worked hard have been successful have been demonized as greedy, mean, selfish, and also their income, their savings, what they're putting by for their children is now an open tab for the government to just dip into whenever they like. I think it's part of that as well.

  Zia Yusuf

  Yes, I think it's that. It's that it's law and order as well. A lot of people, I mean, if you have yourself or you have someone close to you has been a victim of violent crime or had something stolen. That really does impact your sense of safety, obviously. And so people are leaving for that reason too. Now again, I don't want the reason I'm in politics is because I do believe there can be a really positive outcome, and we can go into a place in this country where our kids and grandkids and great grandkids gonna be really excited to live here. There is still time to change all these issues. We're talking about, the sectarianism, the law and order issue, the tax issue, but what we need is serious people in the cockpit of the country actually making the most important decisions that I just said, there's a reason why we have the opposite of that, right? It's not only like We're close, it's not. It's not as if we're on our way there. Every problem we've just outlined is not just not improving. It is getting worse in an accelerated pace. Now we can reverse that by having serious people in making the most important decisions at the land. So the people making the most important decisions in this country right now are mad Ed Miliband, who might put it to you wouldn't, you wouldn't change the time on the clock. Rachel Reeves, yeah, ostensibly, her key qualification was being in the complaints department at Halifax and then, you know, during covid, we had Matt Hancock as the health secretary. We had Boris Johnson as our prime minister. So again, not only it's in Idiocracy, right? It's not only do we not have the best people, the system optimizes for the worst imaginable people making the most important decisions, the decisions around this country's energy policy and tax policy are actually the most important decisions in the country, because everything else funding for the NHS, our view on the police and law and order is downstream from that and so many of the problems that ail the country. Yes, we get a lot more efficient in the civil service. And yes, we can have much better incentives for the police force so they're actually, you know, preventing crime, real crimes, and not policing. Tweets. You can do all those things, but for most of the problems. If you ask why three times, the answer is, there's not enough money, right? And there's this view now, and it's one, it's one of the reasons the greens are growing so much. There's this view now that economics is zero sum, that the pie is finite, and if my life isn't improving, and I understand this, don't be wrong. I really do understand this and why people think this, that if my lot isn't improving in any way, it must be because someone else is taking it from me. And I do have the view that inequality does matter. I'm not one of those people that just says, you know, you should just be totally laissez faire. And if inequality goes absolutely ballistic, there's the state should just not intervene. History shows inequality does matter. And if we look at you know, why do young people feel so disenfranchised right now?

  Unknown Speaker

  Can't buy a house, can't buy a house, can't get a job.

  Zia Yusuf

  Do you rent a home? Do you mind me asking, do you rent? I pay rent on right? Okay, yeah, so you got a rogue landlord? Well, for a lot of young people now, buying a house is just. So beyond the realm that's not even what they're just renting a home. Now is the new buying a home, in the sense that a third of our young adults, I think it's age 19 to 31 are living at home with their parents because they're unable to even afford renting a home, right?

  Peter McCormack

  So lock can't even get jobs. Now there's a jobs problem.

  Zia Yusuf

  There's a big jobs problem. And so number one, if you've owned assets since the great financial crisis, you've done incredibly well. Yep, right. If you haven't owned assets, I most young people you haven't, you've gotten you've not done well at all. And the gap between that own assets and the people who don't has dramatically widened, as much as I think AI has a whole load of wonderful opportunities for our species. I think AI is going to be a is much more likely to compound that inequality issue and be a false multiplier for people who own assets, right? I mean Nvidia's market capitalization, that's the company that obviously makes the computer chips, the AI GPUs that power these large language models. The market capitalization of Nvidia, which is the CEO, is the founder, you know, Jensen, I think now, is 20% larger than the GDP of the United Kingdom and sadly, I think we spoke again in 18 months time, that number is just as likely to be higher that gap than lower. So we have to ask ourselves, why is it so? So all of this is happening while as a real wages in this country have basically done nothing. They've gone up a little bit, but largely done nothing for 15 to 20 years. And these are absolutely things that we will be considering very carefully as part of our economic and tax policy, because we've got to unleash the potential of the British people, right? We've got to get out, get the state out of the way from good companies who are trying to go and build homes and do really valuable things. We've got to have an energy policy that collapses the cost of energy. I mean, if there was one KPI for an energy secretary, is get energy costs in this country retail and wholesale as low as you possibly can. In this country, we have the opposite.

  Peter McCormack

  Yeah. We just got back from the US. We went out to see an investor in New York with a project to regenerate our town. I'd been working a long time on this presentation. What do I get into? About a minute into it, you didn't even show it. Yeah, I didn't even show it. I just, was just doing my opening speech, and he said, Pete, don't ask me to invest money in the UK. At the moment, you can't invest in that country. He said, I want to, I want to invest in the UK, but you can't. He said, there's too much red tape. There's too much bureaucracy. Your tax rates are too high. I can invest anywhere in the world while I invest in UK. He said, Nothing is going to change until you change the policies in the UK. And he said, Absolutely, 100% you've got to deal with energy costs because they're making you anti competitive with your industry. But also, if you deal with energy costs, it could be a tax break to small to medium sized businesses and citizens. It's just such an obvious thing,

  Zia Yusuf

  100% so one of the reasons we have such high energy costs, I mean, there's a whole bunch of problems there, but one of them is the subsidies, right? And those subsidies are regressive tax, meaning they are disproportionately impactful on the poorest people in society, disproportionately impactful for small and medium sized businesses relative to large ones. And there are ways you can solve that. You can end those subsidies. You can build a lot of nuclear Yes, it takes a few years to come on stream, but we will have absolutely have the duration of time period to actually make sure that we do those things, we've got to look at hydrocarbons as well, at least in the meantime, right? And you're not going to find a more pro nuclear Prime Minister than Nigel if he wins. But as I said, bringing on all of that nuclear capacity, both SMRs and potentially large scale reactors, will take some time, and we've got to look at any and all means to get our energy costs down in terms of taxation and bureaucracy. I mean, we're the only party who are brave enough to come out with a Britannia card concept, right, and actually go and make the case to the British people that says, Look, if you want Britain to be if you want Britain to be prosperous and powerful, that is only going to be possible if there are lots of really wealthy people here helping to create that wealth. There is no world in which Britain, I mean, you look through Britain's history, right? The only way Britain is prosperous and powerful is if it has wealthy people here. So we want wealthy people here instead, this country rolls out the red carpet for illegal migrants like this guy from Epping, comically, was let out of jail and kept trying to get back in, and they gave him pocket money and sent him to the station after having, of course, committed an egregious sex offense against a minor. Of course, roll out the red carpet for people like him, who gets taxpayer funded accommodation and free taxis all the way through. And that's I'm not talking about at His Majesty's pleasure there. I'm talking about the hotels, etc. But we make it incredibly difficult and unattractive for people with lots of money.

  Peter McCormack

  There's a global marketplace now for rich people, and I just think that's one of those economic realities that people have to accept facts don't care about

  Zia Yusuf

  you. You can. But, you know, we're talking a lot about them as being rich people, and that isn't that is an accurate, you know, modifier, but these are fundamentally people who are wealth creators and jobs creators, right? Like there is no, there are no well paid jobs that give employees lots of satisfaction and make them feel good about going home to their families each day without there being really successful companies here doing really well. But it isn't

  Peter McCormack

  just even that. There are, there are fabulously wealthy people who aren't job creators. They're just rich people just live a rich person's life, and they're being rolled out the red carpet in other countries, they're saying, come here. I don't know, is it Milan where it's like, just 200,000 pound Yeah, lots of countries have programs, but there's a global place now, and it's social. It's so easy to move around the world. Why not go and live in Milan or Portugal, and if you want to come back to the UK and you've got a 45 day allowance, just do that. I mean, there was a global market for it now, and there's a reality, and we have to accept that idea of, you know, oh well, we don't need them. We're better. We're not. We're better off with them,

  Zia Yusuf

  no, but we're literally worse off without them. Yes. I mean, in any, on any possible metric. And you know, I think you're striking on a very important point. It's not just but again, I want to stress it's taxation is a huge issue, right? And we've already laid out some of our plans on how we address that, and we'll, we will address more, but it's not just taxation. I mean, look, I would give a counter example, and it's not the rule, but it is an interesting counter example, the richest people in the world generally are in Silicon Valley, California, not exactly a low tax environment, right? Generally, they're not actually in Monaco or in Singapore or Dubai. Now, I will say San Francisco has something utterly unique that I don't think we're ever going to be and no one else in the world has been able to emulate. But we have our own friends, too. And I keep saying this, you know, there are actually, and I speak to a lot of them. I know you speak a lot of them. There are actually really patriotic people in this country who said, some of whom says, Here, some of whom, I think might serve in our cabinet one day, said, I'm never leaving. I'll go down with the ship in this country. Now, these people might be rarer than we would like, but they're extremely successful. They built, I mean, some of these people built some of the most iconic brands in the world as British people. And it's really nice to hear that. And as I said, I hope some of these people might actually end up serving in a reform cabinet under Nigel. But those people do exist. And one of the things that there are so many things that do make this country an attractive place to be that, if we just had a government that wasn't actively self harming, that wasn't actively enacting policies that, as you said, chased these people away. I mean, instead of actually cracking down on crime and stopping people arresting criminals, identifying and arresting criminals with steel smartphones, Sadiq Khan spends taxpayer money. Have you seen these? The snatch zones between the snatch, which is like what you would see at Sea World. You remember Shamu? Is this idea that, well, if you sit here, it's just inevitable that Shamu is going to splash you. If you see what I mean, that you know this sense of well, if you walk around with your phone in London, you should just expect and accept that somebody may well turn up in a balaclava on a mini bike and steal

  Peter McCormack

  it. It's normalizing decline. I don't like it, or we've seen it even just in the supermarkets. You go, you want to go and buy a bottle of wine or buy a steak, and there's all these countermeasures in place, because if people are stealing, it's like, can we just deal with the root cause?

  Zia Yusuf

  It's actually relatively straightforward to do. You are, you have, you arrest people and you put them in jail. But you see, this is where, again, it comes down to catastrophic mismanagement too. So this country does have a massive shortage of prison places relative to the population size. So during the 14 years of Tory government, they shipped in 6 million net new people, 11 million gross. Now, even if you assume those people who arrived in that time to the country have the same propensity to commit crime. Government data suggests that isn't true, but let's just assume that it is for the sake of this argument. Do you have any prison places they built in that 14 years?

  Unknown Speaker

  I believe it was a few 100, 411 Yeah, 411

  Zia Yusuf

  and you know what? The only reason we know that is because a Tory MP actually asked a question in Parliament, so it's on Hansard. So that sort of backfired. Him 411 not 411,411 net new prison places to deal with. 6 million net new people. That's insane. They left the country with fewer hospital beds. That's you can draw a straight line between that statistic and why people feel so unsafe and why people are worried about getting seriously ill. Now it is also true that probably too many, too much of, too many of the prison places that we have are being used up for people doing tweet crimes rather than stabbings. And for example, there was a man who was released from jail early because of prison overcrowding. You know this prison issue, who was an accessory, who had been convicted of accessory to murder with the machete. I was like, Well, how does that make sense, relative to all of the people that I'm sure we can name right now who are in jail because of something they tweeted out, where there's no evidence actually, that anything that they would have written that might have been, quote, insightful, actually incited anything from happening. So I. So again, two things can be true at the same time, but if we're serious about solving this problem, then we do have to go and build prison places very quickly. We do have to then change incentives for police officers so that the way you get promoted is not by, you know, is not by arresting people for tweets. And to your point, end this idea of normalization of decline. That's that's a brilliant phrase, and I think it is. It captures, I think, this moment in time in Britain,

  Peter McCormack

  so there's, there's a lot to do.

  Unknown Speaker

  You talked earlier about

  Peter McCormack

  how people like my son and various young people can't afford to get on housing led and maybe can't even afford to rent, and we've, over the last, I don't know how many decades we've had this mechanism of transferring wealth from the poorest to the richest through deficit spending, printing money, etc. I don't know. I don't know how much they're borrowing this shit, but let's say there's a, there's a difference of about 150 billion between what we bring in and what we spend. Is reforms goal to bring us back to the so we don't deficit spend. Yes, it is, which would be great. But then on top of that, you probably want some tax incentives for companies bring their businesses. Ireland has done a great job. You probably want other tax incentives, so you probably need to cut even more than 150 billion. Like, how tough a job is that

  Zia Yusuf

  it's a very difficult job. We've already started a huge amount of work. Actually got multiple work streams trying to forensically go through government budgets. For example, the quangos hundreds of billions of pounds, basically a black box. You know, the taxpayers Alliance publishes something, and it's good work, but it's just extremely difficult to actually get at where this money goes. And a lot of this is the legacy of Tony Blair, and part of his, in my view, evil genius, but perhaps genius nonetheless, in terms of doing this stuff was he interweaved an enormous amount of what of waste and things that we would want to cut with things that are actually really important. And so you got to be careful we don't throw the baby out with the bath water, to use the phrase. So what we're focused on is doing that work, doing the hard yards, to understand where this money is going, and then finding really significant cuts in public spending that are not going to meaningfully impact people's lives in a negative way, we think there is enough waste in this country, in terms of taxpayer money being wasted that is possible. Do you have an estimate? If you would ask me, I think we can get a. I would like us to get to, you know what? I'm not gonna give you a number right now, only because it would be too speculative, right? People hold you to it. It's actually less that. It's just that the work streams are underway, and I will come on your show, but we'll talk about it as we get more visibility on it. The risk is, if I give a number, then you start optimized for that number, rather than actually doing the work in what I want them to do right now, which is, which is quite a dispassionate way. Let's see where that comes out, but it will be significant. And as I said, I mean, look, a lot of this would be So, for example, net zero, where well north of 10 billion pounds a year is directly inside government budgets. Now, one of the reasons that number is artificially low is because a lot of the money comes from fuel bill. So they don't count that because it's effectively taxation, because you have no choice about whether you pay it or not. But it doesn't, it doesn't count as government spending per se. So they really understate the true cost of net zero, and that's just on the kind of direct cost side that doesn't include anything for the opportunity cost of having low energy costs and what that would have in terms of impact on GDP and tax revenues for the exchequer and everyone living better lives. So I think we'll find for sure, it'll be 10s and 10s of billions of pounds, you know, whether it's north of 100 billion. Let's see. Then what we need to do is work out a way of which tax cuts are going to be most multiplicative to economic growth, right? Because, yes, we want to start paying down the debt, but if your economy basically isn't growing, and I know we get the eek out, like point X percent growth, but if your economy isn't growing, then you're never going to be able to pay down that debt. And so again, it's a which tax cuts are going to make sense to, as we've talked about, attract so first of all, retain the people who are most directly contributing to that tax revenue and to the exchequer, and attract as many people who will be significant additions to takings for the exchequer. That's how we'll think about the economy from a first principles perspective. Again, a big part of that is energy. I mean, so much of what you need to with the economy for government is not doing more stuff. In many cases, it's doing less stuff, right? And a lot of people don't get that, not all of this Freeport stuff and things I don't really buy any. I think that's sort of the state trying to micromanage things. It can't. I mean, this is the same state that is basically now Monty Python sketch and releasing, you know, convicted sex offenders, and then he's trying to go back into prison, and he's been given money and sent to the station and told to go on his way. So I think we need to get the state out of the way in that way. We also need to sort out the regulatory environment for small businesses, medium business and also large businesses. I mean, Brexit gave this country this immense opportunity, and that's what it was. It was, it was an

  Peter McCormack

  opportunity just on that. So let me cut in there, just because I often see people criticize Nigel for Brexit, but he campaigned for Brexit, but he didn't fumble the opportunity. Right. He wasn't in government. Yes. How do people not understand that?

  Zia Yusuf

  Well, I think those people have Farage derangement syndrome, or, you know, just coming at this with a from a bad faith perspective, it is true that Britain has not made the most anything like what it should have of that opportunity. I will say this. I think you judge an event as seismic as Brexit, not on a, you know, on a decade long view, but on, probably on a 50 to 100 year view. And I think judged on those terms, certainly this is the work we're doing. If Nigel wins, then I'm very confident it will be looked back upon as a real turning point for the positive for the country. But it was a Tories. Remember who I think was actually Kemi Badenoch at the time, who had all of this regulation on her desk and could have taken away a lot of it, and she said, I'm not because, I quote, I'm a conservative and not an arsonist. Thus, in one fell swoop, rendering Brexit in many ways pointless, right? Because you then, we then stopped having a say in terms of a lot of things actually happened inside the EU and then, but also said we're going to be rule takers. So Britain is now, you know, just a total rule taker from the EU is unable to impact in a meaningful way. What should be happening is Brien making the most of because look, any anyone seriously looking at Brexit understands that there are pros and cons of being part of the European Union, right? It's not like there's only pros in one direction, only cons. Any serious person understands that Britain has basically left all of the pros on the table. It just refused to embrace any of it because we have incompetent policies. But also, I would argue, a lot of the politicians who are in the cockpit at the time were remainers who didn't believe in it, right? So what reform is saying is, look again, this is actually the corollary to all of this that makes us feel positive, makes them feel optimistic, is we actually don't need to be as good as America on this stuff, right? We don't. We just need to be much. We should be better than the European Union countries. And she isn't hard, right, which? And I promise you, as much as I love, you know, I love France, I love but these countries are also in a horrendous situation. And in my view, in many cases, I mean, I know we got a lot of cultural issues in this country, and we've got sectarianism. It's nowhere near as bad as it is in France, right? The level of political violence in France around. And sectarian lines is much worse than it is. Look at the German economy. The German economy is, I mean, an unmitigated disaster, right? That they have voluntarily, basically laid waste to their industrial economy, and that is going to have serious consequences. Now, some of these countries do advantages over us. France has 70% of their nuclear, General, of their power capacity is nuclear, and they have big energy surplus and their net energy exporters, etc. Germany, very different, but we still have a lot going for us. So what we need to do is focus on, okay, how do we create a regulatory environment that is just so much better than any of these European countries? And that, as you said, that is not hard, as long as you have the political will to do it. Now, we're not going to just slash and burn, because some regulation, market failure does exist, and some regulation is important. A lot of it is also giving people stability. This is a massively underrated thing. If the Tories have like three chancellors in three months, and I speak to you know, Chief execs of companies in the nuclear space, and say, Well, how can we plan anything here when we had like three chancellors in three months, so actually creating some stability and people get some confidence, okay, well, at least for a period of time. This is a government that's not only going to be there for a little while, but also is thinking about what this country would look like in 10 years, which, sadly, do you remember there was a clip of Nick Clegg all those years ago talking about, well, I'm not a big fan of this nuclear stuff, because it's only going to come on stream in like 2017 or something. I can't be exact, yeah, but yeah, we look back on that go. God, wouldn't we love to have that base load capacity, energy capacity today, we could be net zero. Well, that's the interesting thing. Yeah, we're not. No one at reform is religious about any of this stuff, right? We're not psychotically against renewables, right? We're against subsidies, and we're against this insane situation where, you know, we are participating in international energy markets in the most insane way imaginable. You don't need to be a meteorologist or a climatologist to understand that like solar makes more sense in Nevada than it does in Lincolnshire, for example. So do renewables have a place in the British fleet? Of course, yeah, fine. But actually we need a lot more nuclear. We need a lot more base load. We need to be so another chart you might be able to bring up is per capita energy capacity, per capita energy production by country. And you see the UK just sort of trending down, and Germany trending down. Even more, America sort of trending upward, and then China just absolutely vertical, right? And what does powerful country mean? If you sort of start to tee up like what you would think of as powerful countries, it broadly translates to power generation per capita. They match up reasonably well. You know, if reform, if we are in this blue sky world where, you know, reform gets three terms right, I think the UK will have virtually no carbon emissions by then, I really do, because we'll have so much nuclear capacity coming on stream. There's a lot of innovation coming in that space as well. So look, we want clean air for everybody to breathe right? And we want, we want the countryside to look lovely, and we do care about the ecology and all of those things. But it is, there is no doubt that, you know, we have a, we have a situation at the moment where we are, there's this religious obsession with net zero, beautifully encapsulated by the way, that just yesterday, our chancellor, Rachel Reeves was off with a begging bowl in Saudi Arabia, of all places, to fill a black hole too. She was saying, Listen, I need, we need money. Please come and invest in the UK Saudi Arabia. And I was, I tweeted, well, wait till she hears about their net zero policies. They like the odd hydrocarbon in Saudi Arabia. So that's the craziness of this situation. And look, I think I'm really optimistic that we can get a lot of nuclear going very quickly. We will work with companies like Rolls Royce on SMR technology. We'll need to sort the grid out as well and deliver that competently. I think we've got to look at things like fracking as well. I mean, it's any and all means to collapse the price of energy as quickly as possible.

  Unknown Speaker

  So you mentioned that if you had three terms,

  Zia Yusuf

  so I mean very hypothetical

  Peter McCormack

  point turning around a tanker. It's 15 years. But that does mean you need a very good first term, and there's going to be a lot of opposition to what you're doing, ideological from different parties, from different media sources. It could get very dirty during pre election, during the election, post election, when you consider politics, and you consider your role within politics, and Nigel's role and other MPs, how do you consider trying to bring everybody along while at the same time going with your gut instinct of what is right for the country. Because, yeah, I know. I know what I believe is right with regards to economics. I believe in smaller government. I believe in not having deficit spending. I believe in the incentives are going to all those things. I believe in there are a group of people who believe the opposite me, and I've tried. Tried to show evidence and debate. I've tried to bring them along, and I just can't do it. There's certain people I know very well. I just cannot bring them alongside. So is, do you just need to win the argument with the right the center ground and convince those who are maybe non voters last election didn't vote to go and vote, or is this still an effort to try and bring along those,

  Zia Yusuf

  yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, the nature of politics is, you know, there's a somewhat adversarial system of politics, right? That's what you have in these parliamentary democracies. And clearly, now there's a very interesting time in British politics where they, you know, there's obviously multiple parties as a you go poll, really, for the first time in four parties reform is a 10 point lead, and then basically four parties in a dead heat, extraordinary. Now, I think it's both things. So number one, we look there are always going to be people who are never going to agree with us, right, maybe to the left of us, maybe to the right of us on social issues or economic issues, or whatever. There are, some people will say there should be no borders at all here? Yeah, more borders are immoral. Why should we have nuclear weapons? We should lead by example and destroy our nuclear weaponry. Those people are going to exist, and some of those people are now voting, saying that they would vote for the Green Party. I'm pessimistic that we are going to be able to reach such people, but I'm optimistic they don't represent there's not that many people who actually think we should destroy our nuclear deterrent or legalize all drugs and make landlords legal, for example. Now that being said, it is important and incumbent on us to try to make the case to as many people as possible. I sincerely believe that logic is on our side, and that means that the preponderance of evidence is on our side, too. So when we say things like, for example, right, let's give you an example of the quote, Employment Rights bill, Orwellian name, we like to call it the unemployment rights bill, right? Employment Rights don't mean very much if you're unemployed, right? And so I tweeted out the other day that Rachel Reeves has increased the cost and risk in hiring people, and appears to be shocked that businesses are hiring less fewer people, right? That's basically what's happened. They increased national insurance contributions by 2% made employing people more expensive, and then brought in this bill, which means that it's just a lot more risky for business, particularly small and medium sized businesses don't have big legal teams and don't have huge balance sheets to be able to shore them up to go and hire people, and that means that fewer people get hired. What's happened since then, unemployment has risen to multi year highs. Payroll numbers have come down. There are fewer people employed. So when I say logic is on our side, I actually mean logic is on our side. I don't know what it would like be like. Be like. I couldn't imagine being a politician where I was just routinely on the wrong side of logic and how the real world works. I don't if you want evidence, if you want to ask somebody how that feels, you go and speak to Rachel Reeves, right? Because me and you and most people watching the show probably could have told it what was going to happen if you do these things. Well,

  Peter McCormack

  we've, we're, we're about to pull out of a business we're about to launch, because all the incentives of an investor, of a business owner, have been taken away, and all the risk has been put on to us. Yeah, and you know, when you're looking at launching a new business, it's a half million pound investment, and you can't figure out how you can actually make any money, or that you might be able to, you might be able to, within three years, break even. The incentive is all been all but been lost. And so then I look at that, and I go, Well, how did how are these people? How do they not understand this? Or do they understand

  Zia Yusuf

  it look so I have a view that as someone, you know what it's like to be in a difficult economic situation. Your business isn't doing as well as you'd like. Maybe it's doing quite badly at the time, and you've got payroll to make, and you know, you've got employees who are relying on you. They're the breadwinners in the family, and they've got kids, and those kids are therefore, indirectly, relying on you. And you know that burden of pressure that you carry on those shoulders. I know what that's like. I've dealt with that multiple times in my business career, and my view is that unless you I've said this, Nigel too, unless you know what that feels like, it's very difficult to understand how people will respond to your policies. And that doesn't mean everyone in our cabinet needs to be like that. That's not the case. We need some you need a few balance. You need a few labor. Have nobody who've ever made any sort of important decisions at systems level at all. So you know, I think where we are now is we've got to, as we've talked about, sort out the regulatory environment, break this narrative that there is a zero sum situation between workers and employers. And as I said, that bill is a disaster, because what it's resulting in is fewer people having jobs right same with minimum wage once it gets beyond a certain but, you know, we all understand this well. I mean, we're not far away from I genuinely, it's only maybe two steps away Zach Polanski is from just announcing that it's official green policy that they will pass legislation to make everyone in the country a millionaire. I mean, I don't know how much further we go, honestly. That it's that level of sort of childlike naivety and lack of understanding so but, you know, but I do want to preface what I'm saying again, I want to underscore, like, inequality does matter, right? And, but first of all, we got to focus on growing the pie. And that's the vision we have at reform for Britain, and that's what Nigel will work really hard to deliver, which is, again, I keep saying, a country that's, you know, Britain is proud, has confidence in itself, again, is rich and powerful, but then takes everybody with it. Doesn't mean everyone has the same amount of money, but it means that everyone has an equal. There's an extensive equality of opportunity, which is really important to me, and everybody feels like their life is improving, which means real wage is actually going up. So, you know, what's really interesting is, when we announced our policy on ili, you know, basically wedefinite leave to remain, right? And we're going to say, look, either you're going to be here on a renewable work visa, and there will be salary thresholds. So basically, we're just going to ask that if you're a migrant here, you speak English to a good standard, you contribute more than you take from the state economically, and you don't commit crime, you sound like a fascist, I know. And that was sort of, you know, this was sort of an End of Days front page for The Guardian. But what was interesting is a lot of the pushback we got was from business saying, Zia, that's going to cause wages to go up for British word, yeah, it's a good thing. Now, look, I know what inflation is, and I understand inflation is not a good thing. But the flip side of that is, there was interview with Boris Johnson recently, someone who I'm not exactly the biggest fan of. I think he's the worst Prime Minister the country's ever had because of the betrayal in particular. But he said, Oh, when he was up confronted with the Boris wave thing, he said, Well, you know, we didn't know how many were coming at the time, and I was told that wages were going up, so we just had to open the borders. I'm paraphrasing. I'm paraphrasing. But again, this idea that the Treasury has that British workers earning more money is this horrendous and horrific thing. No, it's actually, broadly speaking, you want real wages to be going up. Now, the key issue are the price of goods and services going up commensurately, or more importantly than that, and that's the thing that we got to look at. Now. What is the number one cause of prices going up? It's money printing. Money printing. And that's not an argument most people hear, partly because it's quite arcane and abstract. But how do you stop the money printing by not having to run constant deficits all of the time? And this idea of sort of living within your means sounds really boring, but it's actually the key to, I mean,

  Peter McCormack

  you all have to do it in life. If you run a business or run a home, you have to live within your means. Yeah,

  Unknown Speaker

  and look, there is this new thing, you know, this modern monetary theory.

  Zia Yusuf

  It has been proven to be nonsense. There's a sort of a period where, you know, people thought it was Kelton. Do you know that? Yeah, it's all, it's all, it's all nonsense, but again, we talk about, there are people who believe that. Now you had Andy Burnham, you know this guy who popped up, you know the man of the people, guy who doesn't know what a woman is, or any of these things. He popped up basically, and sort of pseudo challenged Keir Starmer for the leadership, then realized he wasn't an MP and kind of just backed down and went back in his box. Quite funny. But what was interesting is he made some comments about how or Britain has got to stop being enthralled to the bond markets. Do you remember that? And actually, if you look at the movement in the credit markets, Britain's bonds, our gilts, actually moved on his comments, because he was seen as a potential successor, obviously, to get Starmer. He's certainly an analog for whatever comes after Starmer, right? Whatever comes after Starmer will after stumble will not be more rational. It will be less rational, something like that. And here's the funny thing, the bond markets are not these abominable old men in pinstripe suits with a top hat, smoking cigars, cackling in laughter as they make Britain poor. It's just people who lend money to Britain decision making. Yeah, that's it. And so the way you stop being, quote, enthralled to bond markets is by not needing to constantly go to bond markets to borrow new money. It's as simple as that. It is as simple as that. So that's why it's got to be a focus for us to find the savings that we need. The vast majority, I think we can find a lot of savings. We already finding them, ones that, I mean, some of them are not only going to not be negatively impactful, some of them will improve people's lives. You know, scrapping Dei, scrapping the net zero stuff. That's going to improve a lot of people's lives in this country. But there are going to be some difficult choices that we have to make, at least in the short term, in the short run, to give ourselves the space, as I said, and that was the issue with, you know, the Liz truss situation. And I do have sympathy for the idea, you know, it's clear the Bank of England did all sorts of stuff there that was underhand and totally unfair. I will say this too. It wasn't the Bank of England who removed Liz truss, who was her colleagues in the Conservative Party that made a position untenable. So I will make that point too. Is the structure of the Conservative Party more than anything else, which is why our view is that party is why it's gone extinct. Needed to but I will say this, that if it were me, I would have had more spending cuts in there. And, you know, I think announcing a lot of the tax cuts that she did, some of which we'd agree with. I think the. It doing so in a manner that was not commensurate with finding the appropriate savings. Certainly in hindsight, you can see how, you know, how markets reacted to that. And you know, again, we live in the real world, not a fantasy. You know, Jeremy, Corbyn, Zach Polanski, world. So the short answer is, for the economy, is we find really significant savings, certainly hundreds of billions over the course of Nigel's first term. That like, without a shadow of doubt, which will be, you know, that's pretty serious. And then, as a the majority, vast majority of that, I don't think, certainly the majority, will not have meaningful impact, I would argue, on people's day to day lives. And then, and then find the tax cuts, and this is the work we're doing now. Which tax cuts are going to be most multiplicative to economic growth and then focus, you know, our primary KPI economically is not GDP per capita. Yeah, right. Because if you're growing the economy slightly slower than the rate at which you're growing, you know, nobody gets sat down. If you get sat down by your boss at work, and they say, you know, good news and bad news. The bad news is your pay staying the same, but the good news is payroll for the company has gone up 5% that's not good news to you. It's just irrelevant, right? And actually, it's worse than that, because in a country, obviously, there's only so many hospital beds, there's so many so many GPS there's only so many police officers and fire firefighters. You get the point. There's only so many roads, and so we're going to focus on GDP per capita. We've got to, as I said, lean into our strengths, and of which there are many financial services. I think we can be world leaders in New Age manufacturing. I think we can be leaders in biotechnology, in artificial intelligence. That might sound far fetched, given we have, like, virtually no compute capacity. We just don't have data centers relative to other countries. But, you know, it's been proven those can be built pretty quickly. And those NVIDIA GPUs do actually kind of depreciate quite quickly. You know, there are new ones coming out all of the time. So with a, you know, one things that's most exciting about the policy work we're doing at the moment is actually the work we're doing on building. How do we make a country which builds at a speed much more like it did when Isambard Kingdom Brunel was blazing a trail for the world, right? Beautiful architecture we can be really proud of. I actually think that's a really part, a big part, of making people feel good about their lives. Yes, wages and salaries and things matter, but their day to day life matters. And you know, really interesting conversation we've been having recently is about high streets. So people say, well, Zia, you know, how are you going to stop the hollowing out of the High Street? And what you realize is, when you talk to people on the doorstep, it's like having a nice high street really matters to people. And

  Peter McCormack

  I can tell you how you can fix on this right now we've been trying to fix in our town. We've got two businesses in the town center. We base ourselves there. You know about my private security. Look, the problem with the High Street is it has to be safe and clean and tidy. People want to go to somewhere that's just nice. Boss has to have shops. Let's have a reason to go retail. Parks are safe, and they have big national chains, but they don't have boutique, cute little shops, but it is so hard to make money now because of business rates, rents and employment law, I personally, I would scrap business rates within on high streets and in town centers, just eliminate them and provide the opportunity to open businesses. But the bigger problem is the decline in the country. The decay we talked about is, is highlighted in your town centers where we have HMOs. Builders being credited HMOs, because the incentive for the landlords is build HMOs. They've got guaranteed higher rental incomes from the local council. Of course, you've got no risk, by the way, no risk where they've got statutory demands that force the councilors do what they have to do. So our town center has had an issue. There's been plagued by drug addicts, alcoholics, and the issues that come with that, which is shoplifting, which is harassment of shoppers, which is violence, which is crime. If you can eliminate that in the town center and then provide the incentives to go in, you can turn a town center around, but there's a lot of work to be done that. Unfortunately, all the councils are going broke because of all the statutory demands and the cuts in funding. That's a real issue. The connection between Westminster and the councils, it's really hard. Yeah, and that's another thing. Was like, Well, if you that's another tax that if you got rid of the business rates in the town center that's less income for the government as well. So I just, I know the answers, but I see the challenges. Yeah,

  Zia Yusuf

  and look, I think all of those are really interesting ideas and points. And so where I was going to go with this is, you know, the so if we say that actually having a nice high street is just a social good, and it's something people want. And actually, if just left to its own devices, let's be honest, in the world of Amazon, it's just gonna you just get more hollowing out. Yeah, that is gonna so put another way, if there's a plurality of people in this country for whom, no matter where they live, having a nice, vibrant high street that they would enjoy. Boy walking down in the summer, getting an ice cream, getting coffee or going buying something that is something they want to have in their lives, and not having it is a form of market failure. And this is where you get into this whole small state, big state debate, which I think is much less relevant than the practical elements of what people want. Okay, so then that means, if left to their own devices, those high streets would just hollow out because of Amazon and online shopping, and you know, all the reasons that those companies just cannot compete with Jeff Bezos. In that case, the state must intervene. How can it intervene? As you said, By eliminating, or at least cutting significantly business rates, or maybe for small business, or, however you want to think about it. Now, then you think, Okay, well, that's going to cost money. Okay, it'll cost money. So how do you generate enough savings to do that. And this is the point, there's going to be a balance right between finding savings and things that don't add value to people's lives in that way, and then investing in things that people value. Now you also touched on a really critical point too, which taps into the work we're doing with Danny Krueger at the moment around preparation for government and like, re architecting the state. Because, as you've just pointed out, business rates and things, it's like so many of these systems are so dysfunctional and broken and the incentives are totally wrong. So if you don't speak to councilors and officers in the council, all they're trying to do is ruthlessly cut things, including things people really value, like they're basically choosing which Park to cut to close and which library to close to fund Adult Social Care, which they have no control over, the parameters of I, who gets it and who does so? There's a massive we know for a fact what, whether you're left wing, right wing, whatever your views are on these things, whether the more people should get taxis to school or fewer, there's a massive democratic deficit because people vote for councilors thinking they're involved in potholes, and they're going to fix those, and they're going to sort out the parks and actually, the vast majority of council budgets are us, are social care and statutory mandatory things from the government of which the councilors have absolutely no ability to change. So we're already working on plans to fix that democratic deficit, right? So that whoever is it can't you know if whoever is the person at a department making the decision about who gets free taxes to school at the tax at the taxpayers expense, is also accountable for the budget from which that comes, and that is just not the case at the moment. So, so more autonomy for the council well, so we're doing work at the moment. I'm not going to tell you what the prescription is going to be. I think what we're going to need to do is, well, what I will say for sure is, as I said, we're going to close that deficit, right? So if it cannot be, the current situation is insane, where people at local level have the vast majority of their budget they have absolutely no control over, and it's spiraling totally out to control. I mean, if you look at the population of scnd children, for example, in one of our councils, that's compounding it almost 15% a year from a big base, and every single one of those is a tax is a liability in the 1000s of pounds for the taxpayer. Now, let me be clear, there are scnd kids in this country. They absolutely should get help from the state, and that's really important. But the speed at which diagnoses are rocketing, you know, I say this again, if everybody needs help from the state and says they need help from the state, then in the end, nobody gets any help from the state. You know, there's actually no bigger loser from that situation than the people who truly need the help. So that's the work that we're doing at the moment. I'm not saying we have all of the answers yet, but I want to give you a sense of people watching this program, to get a sense of how first principles we are in terms of looking look again. I don't think any other party. I mean, if we achieve our goal of going from like five MPs, hopefully close to 400 MPs in one go, I don't think any party will ever have had, nor will ever have an opportunity to sort these problems out in the way that we have an opportunity to Which is why we started all this work already do.

  Peter McCormack

  It seems overwhelming, but also exciting at the same time in that it seems you have a very clear vision that this can be turned around. It just requires intelligence and backbone, but also must be overwhelming.

  Zia Yusuf

  It is so it is definitely the case that as you peel back the onion, you know, there's just ever more sort of problems that emerge. But I think it was Steve Jobs, and I'm paraphrasing here, where. He talked about so much of solving a problem is being able to really clearly define what that problem is. And I don't think that's really been done very much in British politics, because there's a lot of learned helplessness. And I get that, by the way, because no matter what party you are, if you're sitting there as a councilor and a you're part time, you know. And so you ask, like, who runs councils? Well, if the CEO earns 230,000 pounds a year and the council leader earns a fifth of that, you ask yourself, who's running the council right? And then you ask again, what people's incentives are, and the gold plated pensions that exist, and so there's not really any incentive for anyone to sort of say, well, let's actually look at this, at first principles. But moreover, even if there was no one council has any power to do it. And then to do it at parliamentary level requires a lot of political capital, and basically requires a big majority of people who actually want to do those things. And then you've also got to risk adjust for the fact that it, let's say we were to do all of those things, Peter, you know, if you're not simultaneously, then making those changes that we just talked about, so that councils are empowered with enough autonomy to make the decisions in line with what their local voters want. You know, their local voters want a lovely High Street. They can start to optimize for that, as you've just pointed out at the moment. Again, regardless of the political party, this isn't actually a partisan point. No Council in this country can do the things. They're all broke. They're all broke, but broke because broke in a manner in which they are unable to fix structurally

  Peter McCormack

  before i Is there anything you want to ask on you're a younger voter?

  Conor McCormack

  My only question is that when I think, when people think of reform, or especially me, I see Zia Yusuf as quite a key player. And ever since you stepped down as chairman, I think your role seems a little bit obscure. What is the future? Is it planning for a seat in the next election? Or are you just Batman in the shadows who is doing all the work but has

  Peter McCormack

  no title? Hey, you trying to take my job comes in with the big question.

  Zia Yusuf

  Well, look, the past is in a very different position from when I took over as chairman, you know. So when I to go as Chairman, there basically was no real organization. There were no branches. They were basically lacked anything that would be characteristic, a characteristic of a political party. Since I've come back, you know, I've, I'm now on the board of the party. I've obviously now I'm head of policy and if, and all the work Danny's doing, you know, I'm obviously working with him very closely as well in terms of preparation for government. So it is true that probably still, and this is was the same when I was chairman, the majority of the stuff I do for the party is like, you know, is not in the public eye. That is true. I mean, even before we started filming, you know, working on some detail, on policy and stuff and some things that we announced, I take as much satisfaction as in that, though, maybe even more than I do in the public, from the public facing stuff, because that is the stuff. I mean, that's why I came into politics. And I didn't come into politics because I'm, you know, I like to perform for the camera. I'm quite an introverted person, you know, I came into politics. I love the country. I want people like yourselves to have the same opportunity set that I had as a young person. And I see that going the wrong way. And one of the big problems you've had in politics, I would say, because of the incentive structures we talked about this last time, is the incentive structure in politics in this country is everyone's just optimizing for their own power and on like a 72 hour time frame, meaning, I've seen people in politics incredibly, sort of diminish their own power on, like a seven day view in order to increase it on a like a 24 hour view. Everyone's just trying to win the next news cycle, and that's why there's a total lack of seriousness inside the Commons at the moment. So again, we have this unique opportunity to go and do some incredible things for the country. That's the work that we're doing. In terms of a seat. Yeah, I would like to be. I'm on the record saying, I'm happy to say it. I really would like to be an MP I think, as much as I disdain most MPs that are currently there, I think that you can have more impact as a member of parliament. But we've just got so much work to do, and I just want to help, basically, in any way I can.

  Peter McCormack

  Is it hard? Is it rough?

  Zia Yusuf

  It's really difficult. But I just find I've always wanted to do difficult things. I mean, why would you not? I mean, you know, I've, you know, I studied the LSE. I didn't come for money. I worked at a couple of investment banks, and I left my job at quite a prestigious investment bank and started a company from scratch, which probabilistically did not have much chance of succeeding. Most people at a bank were telling me, See, you're insane. You're making really bad decision. It was the hard thing, it was the risky thing. I did it. It was exactly the same coming into politics. Remember, this was a. Just before the general election, reform had no MPs, and when I took over as chairman, turned really into full time. Reform had five MPs. We were at 14% support levels, right? So it was still a very risky thing to do, and it's kind of a one way street, right, going into the front line in politics. So you know what you're doing. But you know, look at where we are today. We have this incredible, obviously, a long way to go, but we have this unbelievable opportunity. I will say this, I wake up in the morning really early. I don't need an alarm clock. I wake up really early, and at least most days, I'm hugely excited about getting on with the task at hand. And that's despite the online abuse you get and, you know, Guardian journalists sending through, you know, grenades in your in your whatsapp, via the press team every other day, because I know why I'm doing it, you know. And having sold my company a couple of years ago, I said I'm in the blessed position of not needing to work for money anymore, and I really believe this will be the most important, impactful work that I'll ever do.

  Peter McCormack

  Okay, last thing, at some point, I want to get deep into policy with you. I've got pages here with stuff we didn't cover. How's it going to work? Will it be drip feed up until a certain period before the election, or will is there a period in time where we'll have a clear picture of the things that reform will be doing? So

  Zia Yusuf

  a bit of both, in the sense that, I mean, if you talk about policy, you're talking about everything for ministry of defense, procurement, through the housing, through the health, through the tax, through the regulation, and find out, you know, so it is, it is in that sense, it is daunting, right? And you got to create something that's holistic and cohesive. So we will announce things. I mean, tomorrow we're going to be announcing some things on some savings that we found to reduce public spending. So we will announce things like that, like our Britannica policy, our operation restoring justice, mass deportations policy, or the ILR abolition policy. You will get more things like that. But then we will then have our manifesto ahead of the general election. So I wouldn't expect us to throw the manifesto out there too early, not least because it's a moving target. Sadly, you know, you're trying to prescribe the solution to problems which are deteriorating at an accelerating pace under labor.

  Unknown Speaker

  All right. Well, we'll keep these conversations going.

  Peter McCormack

  I think we could have come for hours, but, yeah, keep doing what you're doing. Very interested to see the reform policy agenda and good luck to you. Thank you, and thank you to everyone for listening. You.