Populists of the World, Unite!

HERE IN GOOD OLD BLIGHTY we are supposed to be the phlegmatic ones, impervi­ous to political enthusiasm, which we swore off after the unpleasantness of the 17th century. But politics in the UK is now changing on a potentially dramatic scale, as the insurgent Reform UK party challenges the two-party duopoly of Labour and Conserva­tives. Opinion polls have Reform running ahead of the Conservative opposition, and almost level with the governing Labour Party. So, is this a permanent change, or simply a fever that will break?

Reform UK currently has five MPs, and its leader, Nigel Farage, has declared his intention to replace the Conservatives as the centre-right party of choice for the British people. Whether this is realistic or not remains to be seen. Whether Reform UK is re­ally a centre-right party also remains to be seen; its policy platform can be described as rather further to the right than the current Conservatives. But there is also a collectivist feeling about it which recalls something of the traditional left, and many of Reform’s older supporters are exactly the people who would have voted Labour in a previous era.

Reform UK is a complicated beast, but those outside the party agree that it is undeni­ably populist. Political scientists describe populism as a form of politics which seeks to set ‘the people’ against a corrupt, uncaring ‘elite’. Reform is successfully deploying exactly this vocabulary, because a simplistic horizontal division of society becomes credible whenever governments are perceived to be taking insufficient care of their people. This is very much the case all over the Western world, where liberal democracy seems to be stuck in a crisis of underachievement. High expectations and low ‘delivery’ add up to the perfect seedbed for populist parties, and the UK fits the bill.

Not all populism is necessarily of the political right; Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain are both populist movements that are recognisably of the left, but nothing like that has ever appeared in Britain. Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (2015-20), the Labour Party flirted with a ‘sugar buns for everyone’ policy offer, but it was unsuccessful in two general elections. This was probably because Corbyn tried to come across as everyone’s friend, whereas the most success­ful populists rely on a careful choice of enemies. Reform, thus far, has proved much more adept at this. It is angry, anti-state, anti-immigrant, and anti-woke.

The party has ambitions to be a broad church, but most of its leading figures are former Conservatives who have despaired of Tory incompetence, infighting and ideological confusion. Most of its talking points are therefore familiar Tory prejudic­es turned up to eleven, but Reform defies easy analysis. One of its MPs is an ex-miner, and was till quite recently a Labour councillor.

Even more surprisingly, the party has a sizeable following among Britain’s youth. There is something about radical populist solutions that plays into the disillusion­ment of many young people, who see little virtue in democracy, and hold little affection for capitalism as currently constructed. A very recent poll, splashed on the front page of a major national newspaper, showed that some of Reform’s messages are resonating: “More than half of Gen Z believe Britain should be ruled by a dictator with no elections”. Overturning the establishment, which is Reform UK’s most clearly stated objective, seems to fit neatly with a youthful appetite for risk, com­bined with frustration at inter-generational injustice.

This cluster of destructive, aggressive attitudes has only recently appeared in the UK, but it has been central to all the far-right political movements that have recently found electoral success in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and France. We can predict, therefore, that the UK’s populist wave will not be dismissed with the wave of a patrician hand.

The turning point was the Brexit referendum of 2016. This was a black-and-white, in-or-out issue, and dangerously open to simplistic representations. Longstanding opponents of the European Union (EU) had for years deployed a list of intellectual arguments about sovereignty, trade and law, but by 2016 the country was not in a good state eco­nomically, and it became very easy to make the argument that everything wrong with Britain was the fault of the EU. Other people were making our laws in Brussels; the country was flooded with immigrants because of freedom of movement within the EU; we were paying exorbitant fees for membership of a club that did us no good. These non-intellectual arguments won the day, and 17 million voted to leave, a higher figure than any political party had ever polled.

Two things then happened.

The first was that the politicians who had supported the Leave campaign felt obliged to insist that the correct decision had been made, and rhetorical devices, bespoke constitutional interpre­tations, facts and fantasy were bandied about to persuade the doubters. But whether the decision was right or wrong, it took another five years to leave, during which all arguments had to remain to some degree conjectural. Both sides accused the other of mendacity, and the temperature of the debate remained very high, while reality was quietly left behind.

The second was that because the vote had not split on familiar party lines, the mass of pro-Brexit voters looked like a new electoral coalition which might be available to politicians on the right. Leading the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson seized the opportunity and recruited this unwieldy north-south, bourgeois-proletarian alliance in the 2019 general election, which he won handsomely. But the genie was out of the bottle, and the cultur­ally defensive, populist nationalist constituency Johnson had assembled was eventually inherited, not by his two successors as prime minister, neither of whom could pull off the same style of leadership, but by Nigel Farage, who was rather more like Boris Johnson than either man would like to concede.

Political antagonism and unreality are therefore running at a higher level in Britain now than at any time in living memory, and even produced full-blown riots in the summer of 2024, which were identifiably planned, led and celebrated by the far right. The atmosphere of confrontation has intensified with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, which has undoubtedly enhanced the credibility of the Reform UK insurgency. Trump’s sidekick, Elon Musk, decided to get behind the party after the elec­tion of July 2024, and even dared to predict impending civil war in Britain as violent disorder ripped through our town centres.

Musk’s comments caused outrage amongst the liberal estab­lishment, and much amusement in the ranks of Reform. Things got a little more serious when the story broke that Musk was thinking of donating $100 million to Reform in order to make Nigel Farage prime minister after the next election. More outrage followed, but Farage himself laughed off the story, at least until Musk declared that Farage wasn’t ‘up to the job’ of leading the party. Questions then arose about whether the donation would still be made, or whether it was suddenly a condi­tional offer. Farage now says that fences are being mended, and that he and Musk are in discussions.

All this seemed only to enhance Reform’s standing and Nick Candy, a British property billionaire, stepped forward to become the party’s treasurer. He then claimed that there were a number of other billionaires willing to put money into the party.

So, can it succeed?

FARAGE COULD BE our next prime min­ister, but only if Reform UK is somehow rewarded with a straight parliamentary majority in 2029, which seems a little unlikely. He and his party might, however, find themselves in government after some kind of merger with the Conservatives, or via an elec­toral pact with them that produces a rightwing majority in parlia­ment. The current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has ruled out any pact, coalition or merger with the upstart party, but no one knows how long she will last in her position, and the man she defeated for the leadership, Robert Jenrick, is much keener on the idea. But even then, it is unlikely that Reform would be anything other than a junior partner in government, and junior partners generally don’t get to nominate the prime minister. Farage may have to plough his lonely furrow for a while yet.

Such uncertainty means that no one, not even the Reform party itself, is properly setting out and analysing what a Reform UK government would actually look like in practice. It is pos­sible, though, to make some informed guesses, and it doesn’t look as if a Farage-led government would prove to be anything like as beneficial to the party’s main supporters as they might imagine.

Reform doesn’t currently have a proper manifesto; at the last election it only offered a ‘contract’ with voters, which promised a ‘common sense’ programme of tax cuts, massive deregulation,huge reductions in government spending, and an end to immigration, which might even include a degree of ‘remigration’. This is the sort of platform that Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Javier Milei in Argentina have been pursuing, and under current conditions, it commands support from around 25 per cent of the electorate.

But that figure might plummet if Reform voters begin to grasp what life in Britain under a Faragist regime would be like, and who is likely to benefit from all the proposed changes. The immediate winners would obviously include taxpayers, while deregulation would suit employers and entrepreneurs. Immigration bans, and possible programmes of deportation, would certainly please any racists and ultra-nationalists who fear for the future of the coun­try and its culture. But what of the masses, the foot soldiers whose support would be needed to ensure a Reform victory?

Their great hope has been that if migrant workers are removed, wage levels will rise, because employers will be unable to find cheap labour. This might happen in the first few months. But after that? With welfare spending reduced, protections for employees removed, and the pool of cheap labour gone, workers at the lower end of the scale will have to accept whatever wages their employers deign to give them, or starve. This would hardly be the cultural paradise that Farage’s poorest supporters—the Trumpen proletariat—have been fondly imagining.

To be fair, Reform has never actually promised that the lower orders will have more money. Its leaders merely hint that they will impoverish and persecute their nominated enemies—immi­grants, layabouts, and deviants, and that they will fight the power of ‘globalists’. But this doesn’t amount to a more comfortable life for those perched on the lower rungs of the ladder. Populism promises a social and cultural revolution, not an economic one.

The hidden part of rightwing populism, as we are seeing it in both the UK and the US, is that it is a vision of society designed to give freedom to the rich rather than real opportunities to the poor. The poor may vote for this vision, but it is billionaires who are funding the campaign to get it, because they stand to gain enormously from it. The kind of revolution that Reform is offering is incoherent. If there is some magical formula by which tax levels are reduced, the state is rolled back, and the labour force is shrunk, while public services improve, then somebody somewhere will have squared a very old and problematic political circle.

Populism of either left or right is always driven by griev­ances, and grievances can be found in any society. Britain, being more discontented than it has been for nearly a century, is ripe and ready for the plutocratic disruptors. But if conditions improve, the Reform platform could yet collapse.

In a rare flash of honesty, designed to win back voters’ trust, the Conservatives have now admitted that they never had a proper plan to cope with the realities of Brexit. It’s a racing certainty that most of those who intend to vote for a Reform UK government have no idea how they will cope with the realities it promises to bring. But they can dream, for now.

Elon MuskJeremy CorbynKemi BadenochNigel Farageplutocratic disruptorsPopulistsReform UKSir Keir StarmerUK politics