Reform's Handmaid's Tale Vision for British Women...

On my LBC show this Saturday, I spoke about some of the Handmaid Tale style policies and rhetoric which has emerged from the Reform party recently. The hour received a lot of feedback, mainly from people saying ‘thank God you are talking about this’ and ‘why isn’t anyone else?’.

In particular, I weaved together these six things:

- Farage suddenly declaring in the Spring of 2025 that it is ‘utterly ludicrous’ to allow abortions up to 24 weeks, having previously expressed no available public opinions on the matter;

- Farage stating that there would be ‘less divorce and less abortion’ under a Reform government;

- Farage railing against working from home during a press conference last week and claiming (contrary to the available evidence and research) that it makes people less productive;

- Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate for Gorton and Denton, suggesting there should be a tax on child-free people;

- Unearthed footage of Matt Goodwin in which he says that girl children should be given a ‘biological reality check’ and encouraged to have babies young, as well as apparently blaming the state of society on ‘childless women’;

- Reform stating that, were they to get into power, they would reinstate the two child benefit cap in order to make a pint of beer 5p cheaper.

Together, these paint quite the picture. The philosophy of the Reform party is seemingly not only that it’s ideal for a teenage girl to eschew further education in order to get married young (into a relationship she then cannot escape), have babies and stay home to look after them whilst not earning her own income, but that the state should intervene to force as many as possible into this way of living. After all, hybrid working disproportionately benefits working Mums. It’s all wrapped up in vaguely religious language about ‘family values’ to make it seem cosy, but at its heart this is nothing more than common-or-garden misogyny.

This is, of course, nothing new. The Nazis had a policy for women called ‘kinder, kuche, kirsche’ (children, kitchen, church). More recently, in the United States women’s reproductive rights have been attacked, alongside MAGA affiliated spokespeople promoting the trad wife lifestyle and even calling into question whether women should be allowed to vote.

The scary – yet unsurprising – element to all of this is that it’s the same lobby group who are apparently responsible for these impingements on women’s freedoms on both sides of The Pond.

The ADF (‘Alliance Defending Freedom’) played a key role in overturning Roe-vs-Wade in the US. The impact of this has been not only to prevent safe and legal abortion for 63 million people across 16 states, but has also acted as a barrier to women who experience pregnancy loss or complications from receiving adequate healthcare. Women (and others who can conceive) who live in states where abortion is banned are twice as likely to die during pregnancy, or during/shortly after childbirth. Infant mortality rate also increased in these states, with researchers estimating there were 478 deaths of babies which occurred in the year to February 2025, which would not have occurred had the abortion ban not been in place. So much for being ‘pro-life’.

An investigation by New York Times reporters Jane Bradley and Elizabeth Dias uncovered a string of meetings between Reform and the ADF. Bradley later said on the News Agents podcast that the ADF were ‘courting Reform behind closed doors’. Furthermore, JD Vance, who is an ally of the ADF, gave a speech in Munich in which he claimed that the Scottish government had sent letters to houses situated near abortion clinics, asking residents to report their neighbours if they believed they were praying in their homes. The Scottish government later issued a statement confirming that this was absolute gubbins.

This should be the wake up call the nation needs to see exactly where Reform want to drag us to. Quite aside from the terrifyingly authoritarian stance on women, how they should live and what their ultimate purpose is, think about the message being sent to men. It’s impossible for the average family to survive on one income in 2026. Yet with women forced to be at home (where they will not be allowed to earn money), men will have to work even longer hours and have virtually no hand in the raising of their children. The only thing they’ll have to look forward to at the end of all this is slightly cheaper beer (because men’s lives will be so miserable they’ll presumably want to drink themselves into oblivion).

Basically, Reform’s message to working and middle class people is ‘eat shit and die. But have no more than two babies first, please’.