Cock Conquers Compost Heap

The General Election has concluded and Keir Starmer’s Labour has swept in authoritatively… by the skin of its teeth. The vagaries of Britain’s electoral system mean that, despite scoring fewer votes than in 2019 - when it suffered one of the most catastrophic defeats in its history - Labour has won one of the greatest victories in its history. Such is democracy.

These results are much to the chagrin of many, not least Nigel Farage, the leathery little gnome whose personality cult (now in its third incarnation as the saplessly-named “Reform UK”) garnered 15% of the vote, but only 5 parliamentary seats. His irritation is understandable, but what’s he going to do about it?

Much ado has been made about Farage and the alleged “surge” of his far-right movement. In the midst of a number of fascist successes in Europe, the question has been put: is Britain next? Will a middling and unpopular Starmer government enrage the British public with its inevitable inaction and failure to deliver change, thereby ushering in a far-right regime?

The answer is that: no, it won’t. Neither Britain, nor Farage, have the constitution for such things. Farage’s “Reform” scored only 2% more of the vote than UKIP managed in 2015. A close inspection of the organisation will reveal that it is a political party on paper only. In fact, Reform is even more lightweight than UKIP was. Farage has distilled it into a lean brand for his self-promotion, stripped of the unnecessary headaches which come with running a British political party: things like central party officials, constituency parties, local government officials, activists, policy experts. 

Farage is an inveterate snob and reckons (perhaps fairly) that his activist base are racist, ruritanian halfwits who are more likely to create hindrance than help. He will not trust them with a single decision. Every little thing Reform does is managed centrally by a small team close to the leader, or contracted out to a faceless professional third party. There are no real written rules or anything resembling Labour’s NEC. The party runs on the führerprinzip. The only rule is: what Farage says or thinks at any given moment, goes.

This is very lean and effective if Reform’s only job is the promotion of Nigel Farage and his media profile. But it’s no way to run a political party. Without an organised and dedicated activist base, or a strong presence in local government, Reform will not be able to build real political power.

So Britain finds itself in the strangely serendipitous situation that, while far-right sentiment is doubtlessly growing, it has no political wagon to hitch itself to. The Conservatives might take up the mantle, but they would have no luck. Without a total redrawing of the electoral map, they would face oblivion on a hard-right ticket. Their biggest losses this election were not to Farage, after all, but to the Lib Dems, who drove them out of their exurban bourgeois heartlands in the South. They even lost a likely seat (Waveney Valley: a new seat carved from 5 Tory safe seats) to the Green Party! 

Speaking of environmentalism, Farage’s party has another critical weakness: its ideological ties to the American right-wing. Among these ties is, of course, its commitment to anti-science crankery around climate change. The vast majority of British people, including conservatives, want the government to take action on climate change and protect the environment. Environmental issues are generally popular and increasingly salient in elections. The Green Party managing to take a seat in the Tory shires is testament to the importance of the environment to voters. Yet with Farage & Co. still rattling off climate crank talking points from the 2008 blogosphere, Reform will struggle to make headway with voters who care about things besides immigration. Reform and their fellow travellers spent considerable political capital trying to oppose ULEZ expansion in London, to no avail. They are now hell-bent on stopping the government’s various “net zero” commitments. I don’t know who this anti-environmentalism is supposed to be for. Perhaps a wealthy fossil fuel donor or two? Or Russia, which wants the UK to continue buying its gas? Because it’s not for the British voting public, that’s for sure. Even Jeremy Clarkson is to the left of them on this issue!

Even beyond the environment, their policy platform is riddled with wingnut US “libertarian” nonsense which has no purchase with British voters: Privatise the NHS. Privatise everything, in fact. Tin foil hat nonsense about the need for an inquiry into Covid “vaccine harm”, long after everyone has moved on from Covid. Cut “government waste” and “red tape” (what a novel idea!). Cut regulation. Cut subsidies (but add a tax rebate on private school fees! Just what the working class needs!). Cut everything except for the army, prisons and police (we’ll need lots of those when the country falls apart under our agenda!). And, of course, cut almost all taxes. 

Reform’s previous incarnation, “The Brexit Party”, proudly ran in the 2019 election with no explicit policies… except for one. If you went to their website, they promised to abolish inheritance tax. It was their only explicit policy. I remember laughing audibly at how perfect that was. For that is the true core of the “libertarian” movement: Dunning-kruger trust fund babies who have constructed an entire political philosophy in order to justify their plan to leverage mummy and daddy’s money to become rentiers and never have to get an actual job.

And while this stuff might sound wonderful to the sort of chaps who used to give little Nigel wedgies at Dullards’ College, such people are a vanishingly small portion of the electorate. The comparison with LePen in France, or Meloni in Italy, is unflattering. In some way, Reform is a reflection of the fact that, unlike France or Italy, the UK never overthrew its aristocracy and retains an antiquated class system. RN and FdI have built a broad base of support among working and lower-middle-class people, speaking to their anger at the failures of neoliberalism and promising that the state will invest and create jobs.

Reform’s manifesto, meanwhile, makes it clear that they think Thatcher didn’t go nearly far enough. It is a party run by upper class private schoolboys and funded by multi-millionaires. Its entire party structure is set up to keep the great unwashed away from the levers of power. Its leader has built a media profile by hob-nobbing with the equally elitist, patrician and out-of-touch British media class, which is quite happy to keep the discussion within the realms of culture wars, palace intrigue and general whinging about foreigners, with little substantive discussion of kitchen table issues which matter to working families.

This means that Reform is horribly out-of-touch with public opinion on just about every issue except immigration. Its leadership doesn’t seem to think this will matter, but it will. Most British voters have anti-immigration views. But very few are single issue immigration voters. If Reform wants to exist as more than an immigration protest vote, it will need radical reform. And it will never get radical reform, because it is an edifice constructed around the ego of one man: Nigel Farage, a snobby, self-regarding former City trader who is despised by the majority of the British public.

Here are the results of a recent YouGov survey on whether Nigel Farage would make a good Prime Minister:

These YouGov surveys are generally among the more favourable polls for Farage. And even they paint a bleak picture. Farage has persisted, for decades now, as a figure of revulsion among British voters, even if BBC programmers are still enraptured by him.

Therefore I see little route to power for Nigel and Reform. If anything, I think he is the dog who caught the car. After eight unsuccessful runs for parliament, Nigel now gets to sit in the dusty old chamber and… do what, exactly? Make his little speeches for his online fanbase, just as he used to do in the European Parliament? He’ll have less opportunity and a much rowdier audience. He will have less time for his media career, and his dream of running off to the USA to present a cable news show will have to wait.

In the UKIP days, Farage used to look down his nose at the handful of MPs that the party had (Carswell, Reckless and Spink) and how impotent and amateurish they looked in the Commons. But he will find his new squad fares no better, even under his stentorian leadership. To Parliament, he is a crank, a gadfly and a swivel-eyed loon (in the words of Michael Howard and David Cameron) and will be treated as such. Nobody will watch his vainglorious rants on BBC Parliament, and no party will work with Reform to effect legislative change. He faces five years of standing around awkwardly, achieving sweet Foxtrot Alpha.

But what of the right-wing rage among sections of the public? I suspect it will be channelled into para-political action: firstly, into online toxicity and secondly, into EDL-style street thuggery. The UK, mercifully, does not have widespread firearm ownership. Nonetheless, I would anticipate an increase in “lone wolf” far-right violence from extremely online individuals; plus a spate of anti-migrant or anti-Muslim race riots. Farage will probably respond to this by dog-whistling to those who sympathise with the perpetrators, as he has done before. It will not endear him to the public, but make him an even more toxic figure. Reform will make little, if any, headway at the next General Election in five years.

As Farage flounders, the ferrets will begin to writhe in the Reform sack. Some other narcissistic ponce will eventually think they can do a better job than him and stab him in the back. They will fare no better than Richard Tice or Lord Pearson of Rannoch (remember them?). Reform will be fully kaput.

As for Starmer: his position is secure. He will be deeply unpopular with the people, but beloved by the London bourgeoisie, the media class and Washington DC. And in the UK’s dysfunctional political system, there is no stronger position than that.