So the day has come. Credit where it’s due: Reform have published their Welsh manifesto—and fairly early, too. It’s a relatively slim document, just nineteen pages, clearly laid out and easy to navigate. I had a quick skim through it this afternoon, and these are my initial impressions.

For a party that looms so large in public debate, Reform has always been curiously hard to pin down. Critics accuse it of being far-right. Supporters insist that’s nonsense and name calling. But Reform has often operated in a kind of ideological fog: broad gestures, sharp rhetoric, and just enough vagueness to allow plausible deniability. When a movement stays vague, people inevitably project onto it whatever they most fear—or hope.

Their Welsh manifesto is, in some ways, a clever document. Yes, there are the expected hard lines on immigration, the reversal of net-zero and other expected talking points. But much of it is fairly standard right-wing conservative: tax cuts, infrastructure, NHS reform, support for farmers, less bureaucracy. In many places it reads like a conventional policy programme, very vanilla!

Yet running quietly through the whole document is one unifying phrase that comes up eleven times: “common sense.”

The manifesto repeatedly promises to restore “common sense” to government. It’s a powerful rhetorical move. “Common sense” sounds like a law of nature—something obvious, undeniable, beyond debate.

But of course, “common sense” is not a law of nature. 

But, appealing to it allows political claims to be presented as self-evident truths rather than contested moral positions. Disagreement can then be dismissed as foolishness or ideological blindness. Debate is short-circuited, especially online.

More importantly, the manifesto’s version of “common sense” appears to be grounded almost entirely in material reasoning: efficiency, security, control, economic outcomes. That is not in itself a problem—politics inevitably concerns the economic arrangements of our shared material life. But politics is never only about the material. It is also about what it means to live well together as human beings, and we are more than the sum of our material interests. What the manifesto ultimately lacks is a clear moral framework.

Without a deeper moral framework, “common sense” becomes a kind of political magic trick. It can be made to justify almost anything. That family from Kharkiv seeking refuge? A pound diverted from the NHS. A public EV charger in a rural car park? Another pothole left unfilled. A group of young Welsh Muslim mothers helping their toddlers into Welsh-medium education? An indulgence.

The instincts it appeals to are recognisably human: protect your interests, prioritise your group, retaliate against injustice. But for Christians, those instincts should sound familiar for another reason—they are precisely the instincts Jesus confronts in the Sermon on the Mount.

“You have heard that it was said…” he begins.

But then comes the reversal.

Turn the other cheek.
Give more than required.
Love your enemies.

From the perspective of the Kingdom of God, the values of the world rarely look like common sense. In fact, the gospel itself has always appeared foolish in the eyes of the world.

That is the danger of building a political vision around undefined “common sense.” It pretends to sit above ideology while quietly smuggling one in.

Reform is right about one thing: many ordinary people feel alienated from politics. But responding to that frustration by turning communities against each other—or by dismantling institutions meant to foster equality and inclusion—in the name of “common sense” should alarm us.

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