Reform Won’t Save Britain

Dan Evans writes:

Labour isn’t working — and things will only get worse. As if chaining itself to neoliberalism isn’t bad enough, the Government is now tying itself in knots over rearmament, ironically the very issue that did for Clement Attlee. Good luck going to war with no domestic steel or petrol, or bolstering the economy after smashing higher education, one of our few productive sectors. Unsurprisingly, then, Starmer’s popularity is tanking, and Reform is surging. Yet, as Reform’s first public bust-up so vividly hints, there are reasons to suspect that Farage won’t do much to solve Britain’s underlying woes either, leaving the country to drift even further into the abyss. 

The tectonic plates are shifting in British politics, and the two-party system is edging towards disaster. As Reform’s momentum seems irresistible — until recently anyway — we may well be witnessing the belated emergence in the UK of something akin to the authoritarian national populism snaking across Europe, the final “Pasokification” of Labour and the emergence of a hegemonic Right-populism in Britain akin to Meloni, Le Pen or Orbán. Reform, then, are on course to be their British heirs.

Yet for all the discourse about the Red Wall and Labour losing the working class, Reform is not strictly a working-class revolt. Like all Right populist movements across Europe, Farage’s outfit is in reality a complex class coalition. To be sure, they undoubtedly do have a very strong base in the old skilled or “respectable” working-class (think: skilled tradesmen). But they also draw support from right across the social spectrum, with a lower-middle class core (think: policemen or shopkeepers) as well as sections of the professional classes (think: lawyers, bankers or managers).

Like Thatcherism, Reform’s ideological centre of gravity, its weltanschauung, is therefore not the working-class — but the frenzied fear of falling from the lower-middle class. This is certainly class politics and class anger, but it is not the collectivism or solidarity of communities during the miners’ strike. A better example is Hans Fallada’s “little man” in interwar Germany: squeezed and pushed around until he snaps, his isolated, uncollectivised rage fizzing everywhere like a firework let off indoors. In other words, then, Reform faces both ways. It’s both anti-elite and anti-underclass, taking aim at those on welfare as well as politicians and the rich. The hard working majority, the people, are being mugged off, by lazy freeloaders, whether migrants or students, bankers or politicians. Reform’s manifesto is a homage to this worldview: back small businesses; help small landlords and farmers; defend the nuclear family; attack state bureaucracy and the nanny state.

There are remarkable parallels today with the mood of the late Seventies, captured by Stuart Hall in his famous Policing the Crisis, written as the UK stood on the precipice of a new political-economic paradigm. Then, he argued, economic crisis fed popular, racialised fears of crime and disorder, which was in turn absorbed and entrenched by Thatcherism. Today’s popular rage, insecurity and fear of crime is coalescing around migration, an issue which has become a proxy for the huge divide between the people and the elite, a catch-all upon which ideas of powerlessness and glaring, jarring decline are projected. Vox pops of protesters on recent anti-migration marches didn’t even mention immigrants that much. What they did say was that the place has gone to shit; there used to be pubs here now it’s full of litter.

As Hall noted in 1978, a generalised culture of hysteria over immigration and crime drowns out key questions regarding deeper, structural causes for societal malaise — where have all the good jobs gone; why we don’t have any social housing; why the NHS is broken and we can’t see a doctor; why pubs are closing down; why councils don’t collect rubbish; why the police can’t respond to crime; the actual relationship between immigration, wages and public services. Yet answering them honestly would, of course, necessarily implicate many of the politicians and media figures currently pushing simple solutions to Britain’s problems, which doesn’t seem likely these days.

There’s a broader point here too. One of the most compelling criticisms of Hall’s work came from so-called “Left-realist” criminologists, who argued that his focus on the “moral panic” around crime obscured the reality that mugging was happening, crime was rising, and it was mainly affecting working-class communities. Today, while people’s fears and anxieties are undoubtedly being stoked by a sensationalist press, their fears and anxiety are real. Crime is high. Streets are dirty. The migration system is broken. The system is rigged against hard-working people. Social cohesion and trust have tanked. Society is fucked. Across the world the middle-class is being squeezed: it has felt the pinch more than all other sections of the population in recent years, with wages falling, debt soaring, and professionals under ever-more pressure to keep up appearances in their rotting Hackney terraces. This fear of falling and sense of unfairness is stoked by an increasingly visible underclass which hoovers up scarce public resources.

Rachel Reeves was right in her “securonomics” speech that we are at an “inflection point”. The UK is desperate for a new political-economic paradigm. It is not just the physical fabric of society that needs to be repaired, but the mental and civil. Ours is a country that has been driven mad by the twin strains of austerity and precarity, punctured by hyper-individualism and isolation. We need political leaders to articulate new ideas of shared citizenship, a new social contract. The welfare state was underpinned by an emotional articulation of values and citizenship rooted in shared suffering, contribution and fairness. While Thatcher attacked this consensus, she nonetheless simultaneously articulated a distinct, positive vision of the good life and the aspirational citizen-capitalist, liberated by property ownership.

Labour’s problem is not merely that they are straitjacketed by their commitment to spending limits and state intervention. It is that their technocratic approach to politics is incapable of articulating a new emotional common sense, so anathema is this idea to the bloodless managerialism in their hearts. Labour’s strategy is, therefore, just more managed decline, to tell us that things will never get better. Even more outrageously, some Labour politicians have claimed with a straight face that the economy is fine, that people must simply be imagining that they’re broke and let down.

Much as the lower-middle classes found their saviour in Thatcher’s fusion of penal populism, nationalism and individual economic liberty, today the frustration of the “hard working majority” finds its perfect outlet in Reform. Farage, an enthusiastic Thatcherite, seems to be the only person in British politics to grasp this worldview, the lack of faith in politics, or indeed the desperation for change. As during Brexit, Farage is seemingly the only politician capable of saying that the system is broken in an engaging way, and skilled enough to articulate a new positive vision.

In other words, then, there is a positive element of Faragism: a blokeish, nostalgic utopianism which pledges to break with the consensus and reset the social contract for decent, hard-working people. Because migration has become a proxy for societal decline and unfairness, the simple act of securing the borders and cutting migration contains a promise for rejuvenation and fairness: the high streets back to how they were; cleaner pavements; lower crime and higher wages. Thatcher had the scrounger as the foil for her positive vision. Farage, for his part, has migrants. Starmer, too, is currently attempting his own Thatcher tribute act with his recent attack on the benefit system. Yet Thatcher’s very raison d’être, like that of her class, was anti-statism, a visceral hatred of the nanny state and the bureaucrats who administer it. This stuff doesn’t work when you personify the very nanny state you’re meant to dismantle.

In the end, though, voters exhausted with the two-party consensus may be disappointed in the insurgents. First, there’s Farage himself, who is both Reform’s biggest asset and its biggest liability. Reform is dangerously over-reliant on the Brexit hero, a reluctant parliamentarian who is always on the look-out for the next lucrative opportunity on American television, and with a long history of falling out with former allies. The current public feud between Farage and Rupert Lowe comes as little surprise to anyone who has followed Farage’s career.

This clash of personalities equally speaks to Reform’s internal contradictions. As a committed Thatcherite, Farage (like all of Reform’s top brass) ironically backed the economic paradigm that has caused British decline to start with. Now, with an eye on power, Reform are cobbling together an eclectic economic strategy which, like other European Right populists, borrows aspects of welfare redistribution: their manifesto wants to part-nationalise utilities. Yet though Lowe apparently called for the creation of a Reform policy unit, Farage proved reluctant.

There are a myriad of possible reasons for this feud. It could be that Lowe was trying, perhaps naively, to professionalise Reform and turn it into a party ready for government, whereas Farage simply has zero interest in the responsibilities of actually taking power. Meanwhile, Farage supporters suggest that Lowe’s enthusiasm for mass deportations and Tommy Robinson risks scaring the horses and becoming an electoral liability, threatening Reform’s appeal to more moderate, respectable conservatives. Either way, beneath the bravado, Reform is fragile.

And even if Farage turned into a policy fiend overnight, he’d be incapable of solving Britain’s basic problems. Unlike Thatcher, current economic circumstances mean that he would be unable to provide any material concessions to his base: beyond cutting migration anyway. There will be no cut-price council houses and no discount stock options. Right populists in power will face similar issues to the current government.

It all speaks to the sheer depth of our crisis. The UK’s economy is painfully imbalanced and focused on the City of London, crippled by parasitic rentierism, by cynical capitalists who prioritise short-term extraction of wealth over stable investment. Low productivity, low investment, low growth, low wages, poor infrastructure — the UK is Canary Wharf with a country attached, overseen by a bloated political elite that never leaves the M25. Successive attempts to rebalance the economy and build a viable industrial strategy have failed. Recent headlines that the UK is now a poor country is news only to those within the bubble. And, all the while, any departure from the status quo is strangled by the vested interests, from the civil service to asset managers, that control the British state. Compared with all that, Reform’s bickering suddenly feels trifling.