As the scale of Reform’s success in the local elections became clear, MP Danny Kruger noted, ‘What is happening is seismic…The public have decided they don’t want the failed consensus of the last 25 years’.

What is this ‘failed consensus’? Here is my take: what the voters have announced this week – in the most unambiguous terms since the Brexit vote – is that they’re calling time on the idea that we have to prioritise other people and other things over what is in the interests of ordinary working British people. The public will no longer allow a discredited, globalist notion of treating national self-interest as a second-order priority – which has found its most devoted proponent in Keir Starmer – to be foisted upon them.

This notion has become the guiding philosophy of much of the bureaucratic class. It found perhaps its most infamous expression in the words of the former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell when he said, in the context of immigration policy and the economy, ‘I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.’ Such an approach was always putting two fingers up to the people paying Lord O’Donnell’s wages. It has now clearly failed. The public simply won’t........

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