Reform UK: The Illusion of Liberty

They say it’s about freedom. But whose freedom do they mean?

By Sean Ash

Last night, Reform UK celebrated electoral gains. They claimed it as a victory for free speech, for sovereignty, for the so-called silent majority. But beneath the cheering, beneath the slogans, beneath the turquoise banners and bold talk of “taking back control,” something else was quietly happening, a shrinking of what liberty really means.

They speak of freedom, but offer only permission. Permission to speak, as long as your story fits theirs. Permission to belong, as long as you erase the parts of yourself they deem too complicated, too different, too inconvenient.

This isn’t liberty. It’s an illusion, one that too many are willing to believe, even as it tightens around them.

Reform UK claims to stand for freedom of expression. But let’s be honest: that freedom has limits, and they decide where. In their manifesto, they pledge to protect speech from so-called “woke censorship,” yet in the same breath, they promise to ban all transgender education in schools. No mention of pronouns. No discussion of gender identity. No space for children with trans family members. A child who feels “different” will find nothing in the curriculum but silence. That’s not free speech. That’s state-mandated invisibility. That’s erasure by omission.

The contradiction is glaring. If you only defend the speech you agree with, you’re not defending free speech at all. Reform UK isn’t fighting for expression, they’re fighting for dominance. Dominance of a single narrative: conservative, nationalist, exclusionary. And if their policies succeed, other voices, LGBTQ+ youth, disabled people, migrants, educators, anyone who doesn’t fit, are not just debated; they’re eliminated from public view.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen it before. In 1933, under Hitler, Nazi students and loyalists burned books that didn’t align with “German values.” Jewish writers, leftist thinkers, pacifists, scientists, feminists, all went into the flames. It was framed as cleansing the nation of harmful ideas. But what began with books didn’t end there. Education became propaganda. Science became nationalism. The state dictated reality. Where they burn books, they will eventually burn people. We were warned, and we watched it happen.

In Alsace, when it was annexed by Nazi Germany, identity itself was rewritten. French names were banned. German became the only legal language in schools. Children were forced to forget their culture and learn Nazi songs. Even gravestones were altered to erase the past. It wasn’t just about politics, it was about the power to tell you who you are. When you remove a person’s ability to speak, to learn, to be seen, you don’t protect them. You control them.

Reform UK offers Britain a similar vision, dressed in more modern clothes. They speak of sovereignty and pride. They offer slogans like “Take Back Control.” But we must ask: what are we being asked to give up in return? A functioning NHS? An inclusive education system? Legal protections for the vulnerable? Is national pride really worth dismantling the safety net that holds us together? Does the flag offer hospital beds? Does “British values” feed children? Why are people so willing to trade standards of living, quality of services, and social peace for abstract ideas of identity, ideas that, in truth, do nothing to love or protect them back?

The answer lies in the seduction of the simple. It’s easier to blame outsiders than examine systemic problems. Easier to scapegoat than solve. Nationalism packages pain as pride, and repression as protection. It says, “You’re suffering, not because the system failed you, but because someone else took your place.” But nothing of value is built through exclusion. And no nation was ever made great by silencing its own people.

Consider the irony: many of those shouting loudest against globalism are living entirely within its comforts. They rage against foreign influence while using smartphones made in Asia, wearing clothes stitched in Bangladesh, ordering their opinions off Amazon, and eating at McDonald’s. They denounce globalism with the same breath they use to log in to international platforms and consume international goods. But what are they offering instead? Are they growing wheat in their gardens? Forging new technologies? Building alternatives? No. Just words, usually angry ones.

They’re not rejecting globalism. They’re just rejecting empathy, and complexity, and truth.

What Reform UK offers is not freedom, it’s a trap. It’s candy-coated authoritarianism. Like sweets, it looks appealing: pride, control, tradition, clarity. But eat too much, and you rot from the inside out. Repealing equality laws sounds bold until you realise it’s your disabled child who’s now unprotected. Banning trans education might feel comfortable, until a confused teenager takes their own life for not seeing themselves reflected in the world. Attacking globalism may win applause, but it won’t build hospitals, power your home, or pay your wages.

We are being sold a dream of purity. But what’s purity without kindness? What’s a nation without its people, all of them?

Yesterday, I travelled across London using trains and the Underground. As a wheelchair user, I found myself facing infrastructure that simply didn’t invite me. Lifts were absent or out of service. Some stations weren’t accessible at all. But I wasn’t left alone. When I struggled, it wasn’t a political slogan or a flag that came to help me, it was people. A man from Eastern Europe. A man from Russia. Two Indian women. An Asian man. An Australian man. An English woman. All strangers, from all corners of the world, offering kindness while most others walked by.

These weren’t “British values” as a party might define them. They were human values. In a city made up of every kind of difference, I saw what real community looks like, and it wasn’t based on borders or slogans. It was based on people.

And for those who say, “It’s not the same”, who argue that being gay isn’t like being Black, or that being trans isn’t like being in a wheelchair, you’re right. They’re not the same. But that’s not the point.

It’s not about the wheelchair.

It’s not about the skin colour.

It’s not about the pronoun.

It’s about the way society chooses to treat that person differently.

Disability isn’t always about what someone can or can’t do, sometimes it’s about how the world decides to treat them as less.

That treatment, the barrier, the suspicion, the exclusion, that is the true disability.

When you erase someone from the curriculum, when you mock their pronouns, when you pretend their identity is a threat to children, you’re not protecting society. You’re disabling it. You’re making it smaller, meaner, more afraid.

We should be building a country where difference isn’t erased, it’s welcomed. Where freedom doesn’t mean “freedom for people like me,” but freedom for people unlike me too.

Because if you strip rights away from others, you’re only making your own more fragile.

So let me leave you with a question: if a party says they’re defending freedom, but bans discussion, repeals protections, and targets the most vulnerable… whose freedom are they really defending?

If it’s not yours…

If it’s not your neighbour’s…

If it’s not your child’s…

Then maybe it’s time to spit out the sweet.