Grace Lunn: Reform can’t admit that immigration is merely a symptom of Britain’s real problems

Grace Lunn is a Conservative from Lincolnshire who previously worked for a Conservative shadow cabinet minister.

“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” It’s the sort of saying your grandmother would trot out when you were being particularly hypocritical as a child.

Watching Reform UK’s approach to immigration, I can practically hear her voice echoing from the grave. Because if ever there was a party living in a glass house whilst hurling rocks with Olympic precision, it’s Nigel Farage’s latest venture.

As a young, somewhat disillusioned Conservative from a farming background, I find myself in the peculiar position of agreeing with Reform’s diagnosis whilst being thoroughly unconvinced by their prescription. Yes, immigration is a challenge. Yes, it’s politically toxic territory for the mainstream parties given their respective records.

But watching Reform blame every ill on foreign workers whilst tiptoeing around our own British failings feels rather like blaming the lifeboats for the Titanic’s poor buoyancy. From my corner of rural Britain in Lincolnshire, the glasshouse looks particularly fragile.

When harvest time comes and we’re desperately seeking workers, it’s not because some dastardly European plot has materialised overnight. It’s because generations of British workers have been taught that getting your hands dirty is beneath them, that benefits are more attractive than backache, and that a hard day’s graft is somehow less dignified than a hard day’s Netflix.

I know this is speaking generally, and plenty do work hard; however, can you really blame the ones that don’t? We’ve cultivated a culture where shirking has been elevated to an art form, and I am afraid to say this is primarily to blame on the previous Tory governments.

True conservatism champions personal responsibility, self-reliance, and the dignity of work. It doesn’t seek scapegoats; it seeks solutions. It doesn’t coddle people in their victim narratives; it challenges them to be better. Currently, the welfare system, designed as a safety net, has become a lifestyle choice for far too many. Young Brits will backpack across Thailand but won’t venture across the country for employment.

Yet Reform’s solution is to blame the Romanian who’ll actually show up at 6am, ready to work.

I say this with some authority, having grown up in Boston (Lincolnshire); yes, that Boston, the one that voted 75.6 per cent for Brexit and became the poster child for immigration anxiety. I watched my hometown transform almost overnight as Eastern Europeans arrived to work in the food factories and farms that locals increasingly wouldn’t touch.

The fabric of the community genuinely changed, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Walking through the town centre, you’d hear more Romanian than English some days. Once a quaint market town, now a place rife with crime and gangs of men cracking open beers at 7am outside Lloyd’s bank. Putting it bluntly, even in my 21 years, the pace of change was, frankly, overwhelming.

But here’s the thing that Reform won’t tell you about Boston: the immigrants we see owning the corner shops where M&S used to live didn’t create the problems – they filled the vacuum left by our own failures. The housing shortage that pushed rents up? That was decades of under-investment in social housing, combined with a planning system that makes building new homes as difficult as landing on Mars. Those food processing jobs that nobody wanted? They paid poorly because we’d allowed employers to treat workers as disposable.

And here’s where the Conservative Party’s own glasshouse becomes most visible. Rather than telling businesses to stop relying on cheap foreign labour as a sticking plaster for poor productivity, successive Tory governments actively enabled this race to the bottom.

Look across the Channel to Germany, where businesses were encouraged and sometimes forced to invest in automation, worker training, and genuine productivity improvements. Any farmer worth their salt will tell you that German agricultural machinery (your Fendt tractors and the like) represents the gold standard precisely because German manufacturers invested in innovation rather than cheap labour. German manufacturing didn’t solve its labour challenges by importing workers willing to accept substandard conditions; it solved them by making jobs worth doing and workers worth paying properly.

We, on the other hand, created a perverse system where businesses could avoid modernisation by importing largely unskilled workers desperate enough to accept what British workers rightly rejected. The scandal isn’t that foreign workers came; it’s that we never demanded better from our employers. But that would have required backbone, and it’s far easier to let the market sort itself out whilst lamenting the consequences at election time.

But the policy failures are only half the story. This isn’t about sneering at the working class, quite the opposite. It’s about acknowledging that we’ve systematically dismantled the work ethic that built this country. We’ve told entire communities their traditional industries are finished (often correctly), then failed to replace them with either new opportunities or a culture that values adaptability and effort. Instead, we’ve created a benefits system that rewards inactivity and then act surprised when people take us up on the offer.

Reform knows this, naturally. But suggesting that British workers might need to look in the mirror doesn’t win votes from disaffected Labour supporters. It’s far more comfortable to point at the Polish plumber than to ask why British ones charge twice as much and take three times as long to answer their phones.

Immigration issues are a symptom, not a disease. It’s a symptom of our economic failures, our educational shortcomings, and our cultural malaise. Treat the underlying condition, and immigration becomes manageable. Ignore it, and no amount of border theatrics will cure what’s fundamentally wrong with Britain.

This is why, despite my frustrations with the current Conservative Party, I can’t quite bring myself to embrace Reform, yet. They’re peddling comfort food for the picky eaters rather than the balanced diet our country desperately needs, easy answers to complex questions, stones to throw rather than foundations to build.

Of course, Labour’s approach to these issues is hardly inspiring either. Their solution to welfare dependency appears to involve targeting the very people who actually work for a living, like slapping an inheritance tax on family farms, forcing farmers to sell off assets just to pay the taxman.

It’s a masterclass in missing the point: punish the productive whilst the genuinely workshy continue to game the system unchallenged. You’d think a party supposedly championing working people might grasp that farmers who’ve worked the same land for generations represent precisely the kind of industrious, rooted British values we should be celebrating, not penalising.

Until Reform stops throwing stones and starts examining its own glass walls, it’ll remain a party of symptoms rather than solutions. They’ve got the diagnosis right but the prescription wrong; treating the fever whilst ignoring the infection. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But maybe it’s time we stopped asking who’s throwing them and started asking who’s actually willing to rebuild what’s broken.