Last Friday I walked my dog in a park used by Brits of every colour. I bought fresh bread from a cafe run by a family from Angola. I picked up my coat from an Indian-run dry cleaners, and grabbed some flowers at a stall run by a cockney from Ethiopia.
And then I had to sit through a day-long livestream of the Reform Party conference, telling me “we want our country back”. Presumably from me, my friends and the decades-old multi-ethnic community I live in.
The conference was glitzy: the production values were a mixture of Britain’s Got Talent, Leni Riefenstahl and live darts. It was big, too – 4,000 people packed into Birmingham’s NEC to boo, hiss, cheer and laugh on cue.
When it came to vox pops (on Reform’s own YouTube channel naturally, to ensure total editorial control) what struck me was how reticent the delegates were in sharing their beliefs. “I love the party and what it stands for” said one; “I’ve lost faith in the Conservatives” said another. The host repeatedly tried to get them to explain why, but failed.
They were too polite to say it, but I suspect that many would happily see the Royal Navy blitzing the small boat crossings with water-cannon.
How do we know this? Because while the smoke was still rising from the refugee hotels torched by fascist rioters, some 21% of Reform voters polled by YouGov said the riots were justified. And as hundreds of thugs, drug dealers, lifelong crooks and hapless losers were sentenced for violent disorder, 51% of Reform voters said their sentences were too harsh.
With Reform scoring 4.1m votes on July 4, if those polling figures are right, that’s one heck of a lot of support for insurrectionary racist violence.
But Reform’s appeal rests on something deeper than racism. Like all populisms, its politicians speak only in truisms: unchallengeable statement of common sense that cannot be reasoned with. Make a list of them – and these are direct quotes from the three MPs whose speeches I sat through – and the Ur-narrative becomes clear:
I want my country back. Let’s end two-tier policing. End the war on motorists. Stop Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. Repeal the Human Rights Act and leave the ECHR. Under Thatcher we knew who we were. Net Zero… what a load of rubbish. Scrap IR35 (off-payroll working rules). Defund the monopolistic, malign BBC. They used an experimental jab on millions of people.
These are the collective grievances not – as we are often assured – of the working-class victims of neoliberalism, but of its lower-middle-class beneficiaries.
What they want, in effect, is Thatcherism without the consequences. Bash the unions, slash corporation tax, raise the VAT threshold, shrink the state… but end immigration, which was one of the main sources of growth in Britain’s free-market era, and end the promotion of diversity – which is what you get when you build an economy based on services, brainpower and at the centre of a global financial market.
It is, like all populisms, a delusion. The central demand, to reduce legal net immigration to zero, would tank the public finances: according to the Office for Budget Responsibility in a report last week, the UK needs net inward migration of 315,000 every year for the next 50 years to avoid bankruptcy and economic depression. Much sooner than that, the NHS and social care would collapse for lack of staff, and the universities from lack of students.
But it’s a dangerous delusion. Georges Sorel, the anarchist philosopher turned proto-fascist, argued that all mass movements need to be sustained by a “social myth”: an event everyone expects to happen, and which indeed is emotionally existential, but which keeps the movement alive even if it never does happen.
For the fascists who rioted, their animating social myth is the ethnic civil war that ends democracy. For Reform, the animating myth is electoral victory in 2029, which puts Nigel Farage into Downing Street, thereby saving democracy.
What Reform thinks democracy consists of was well encapsulated in the speech of Rupert Lowe MP – that man of the people who gained his education at Radley and made his fortune at Barings Bank. “The majority,” he warned, “will prevail over minorities.”
We need to tell every decent person attracted to Reform’s sob story what this means: their gay sons and daughters are a minority; their disabled relatives are a minority; their daughter seeking an abortion will – as in America – be treated like a minority. As for Britain’s actual ethnic minorities – above all the 2.9 million Muslims – they should be justifiably afraid of what “majority rule” would mean under a Farage premiership.
And here’s the biggest lesson I took away from Reform’s conference: they could actually win.
Laughable though it is, this mixture of white grievance, curtain-twitching prejudice and performative stupidity is a drug. It is much more compelling than the circus of modern Toryism – which at the end of the day wants Thatcherism with the consequences.
To stop Reform, we need a credible Labour government that can achieve things fast. We need politicians to tell stories of hope, not fiscal rigour, and pay them off with decisive action.
It may be that the Tories revive, and that the disco lights and the folksy racism won’t sustain Farage and his crew’s momentum for long. But at every election, including the locals next May, the democratic parties of the centre and the left need to give serious thought to tactical alliances that can keep Reform out of power everywhere.
Their mind-garbage is dangerous – both to democracy and to the very fabric of our multicultural society. Letting them run so much as a parish council would be a grave mistake by parties who could instead, with the minimum of tactical nous, bury them.
