Farage threatens to overhaul Lords and judges to meet his pledges

The leader of Reform UK has said he would deliver on key priorities in the first 100 days of a government led by his party, including an overhaul of the House of Lords and changes to the role of the judiciary. Nigel Farage told the BBC that if Reform wins power, it would move quickly to reshape institutions he believes stand in the way of the political programme he wants to see implemented.

A promise to act fast

In an interview given as Reform gathered for its party conference, Farage set out a timetable that leaves little room for the kind of prolonged consultation that typically accompanies constitutional change. He said the party’s first hundred days in office would be used to begin dismantling what he described as barriers to democratic accountability, with the upper house and the courts at the top of the list.

The promise to overhaul the Lords is not new for Reform. The party has long argued that the upper chamber is unelected, unrepresentative, and an obstacle to the will of voters as expressed through the House of Commons. What is new in this latest intervention is the suggestion that such changes would be among the very first acts of a Reform government, carried out at speed and with limited scope for the kind of cross-party negotiation that previous attempts at Lords reform have involved.

The challenge to the judiciary

Alongside the proposal for the Lords, Farage indicated that he would revisit the relationship between the government and the courts. He said that judicial decisions had at times frustrated the implementation of policies that he believed had a democratic mandate, and he suggested that a Reform government would look at ways of ensuring that elected politicians rather than judges had the final say on key policy questions.

The remarks are likely to be interpreted as a challenge to the principle of judicial independence, a cornerstone of the UK’s constitutional arrangements. Critics will argue that any move to curtail the role of the courts would weaken the checks and balances that protect citizens from overreach by the state. Supporters of Farage’s position will counter that the current system allows unelected judges to override the decisions of elected representatives, and that this is incompatible with democratic accountability.

The BBC’s report noted that the party’s conference was being watched closely by political opponents, who are eager to see whether Reform can convert its polling strength into a coherent governing agenda. The combination of an attack on the Lords and a challenge to the judiciary will be seized on by those who believe the party’s constitutional vision is incompatible with the norms of British democracy.

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Why it matters

Constitutional change of the kind Farage is proposing would have far-reaching consequences for how the UK is governed. The House of Lords, for all its faults, plays a significant role in revising legislation and holding the government to account. Any attempt to reshape or abolish it would require a careful examination of what would replace it, and of the consequences for the legislative process. Similarly, any move to limit the role of the judiciary would raise profound questions about the protection of individual rights and the rule of law.

The fact that these proposals are being presented as immediate priorities, to be implemented within the first hundred days, adds to their significance. It suggests a party that is not merely critical of the current constitutional settlement but is prepared to act on those criticisms at speed, potentially before the full implications have been debated in public.

What happens next

The immediate next step is the Reform party conference itself, where these themes are expected to be elaborated and where the party’s leadership will be looking to demonstrate that it has more than just criticism to offer. How the other parties respond will be telling: if they treat the proposals as a serious constitutional threat, that will shape the political debate for months to come; if they treat them as election rhetoric, they may be underestimating the party’s ambition.

For voters, the proposals raise questions about what a Reform government would actually look like in practice. The party has shown it can mobilise support and generate media coverage; the harder task is setting out a workable plan for the kind of constitutional overhaul it is now promising. Whether it can do that will determine whether the conference is remembered as the moment Reform moved from protest to prospectus, or as the moment it revealed the gaps in its programme.