Dear Andy Burnham,

If the centre of British politics wants to stop Reform, it needs to stop playing by rules set by the right.

The problem did not start with Reform. It started with Brexit, and with the refusal of Britain’s political and media institutions to properly confront what happened. Brexit is done. But that does not mean the country should pretend the campaign around it was honest, or that voters were given the full truth.

Either the public was misled, or it was not. If people were misled, and there is plenty of evidence that major claims made during the referendum were misleading, then why has there been so little accountability from the institutions whose job was to inform the public? Why has the BBC, our public service broadcaster, not properly reckoned with whether its approach to “balance” allowed falsehoods to be treated as just another political opinion?

How can the public be expected to trust “neutrality” when some of the most prominent political broadcasters are widely perceived as speaking from inside the same establishment that failed to challenge Brexit honestly? Why are Laura Kuenssberg and Fiona Bruce still treated by the BBC as neutral political authorities, while Gary Lineker was bullied out for expressing an opinion outside his role as a sports presenter?

How can it be that the damage caused by years of weak challenge, soft framing and unwillingness to confront vested interests is something the public is expected to accept, while Gary Lineker having a political opinion became a national scandal? To many people, that does not look like impartiality. It looks like one rule for establishment voices and another rule for anyone who steps outside the approved consensus.

The second issue is even more serious. If politicians want the public to trust democracy again, why has there still not been a full public reckoning over possible Russian interference in the Brexit referendum? The Intelligence and Security Committee did not say Russia changed the result. But it did say that the Government had failed to properly look for evidence, and that an assessment after the referendum should be produced.

That matters. Boris Johnson’s government resisted deeper scrutiny. He also appointed Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords, despite reported security concerns around the appointment and despite Lebedev being the son of a former KGB officer. In that context, why should the public simply accept “nothing to see here” as an answer?

This is the deeper reason Reform is gaining ground. It is not just because people are angry. It is because anger has been allowed to grow in a vacuum where lies were not properly challenged, trust was not repaired, and accountability never arrived.

The centre cannot defeat populism by politely accepting the foundations on which it was built. It has to name the failures clearly: misleading campaigns, weak media scrutiny, questions about foreign interference left unanswered, and a political class that moved on while the public was expected to forget.

If trust is to be rebuilt, truth has to come first.

If politicians continue down the passive, “sweep it under the rug” path that Keir Starmer has taken, then they will share responsibility for what comes next. At the next election, millions of people may no longer believe that Parliament, broadcasters or newspapers are willing to tell them the truth. Their only source of truth will be social media and, increasingly, platforms shaped by billionaires such as Elon Musk.

That is a dangerous place for a democracy to be.

The centre does not need to become more extreme. But it does need to become braver.