What The Hell America!

In a country with a proportional election system, two right-wing parties taking more than 20 percent of the vote each would be in an excellent position to form a government. Under the British first-past-the-post model, on the other hand, they might cancel each other out and end up with much fewer seats than their combined vote share would lead one to expect.

Farage has traditionally been the one who suffered from the pressure to cast a “useful vote” on the Right. After last week’s result, he will be aiming to deal with the Tories from a position of strength if they come looking for an election pact.

In his previous adventures with the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Brexit Party, as Reform was initially known, Farage repeatedly stumbled on the hurdle of Britain’s voting system. The right-wing maverick and his allies would consistently perform very well at elections for the European Parliament, which were based on a form of proportional representation, but they could not translate that into success at the next Westminster poll. In 2019, the Brexit Party took 30.5 percent of the vote in Britain’s last European election but could only manage 2 percent in the general election held a few months later.

One might have expected Britain’s departure from the EU to prove very damaging for Farage’s electoral prospects: not only did it deprive him of what had been his central campaigning issue for the past thirty years, it also meant that he would no longer have the European Parliament available as a trampoline from which to bounce his way onto the domestic political stage. Yet last year’s general election actually saw him take a seat in the House of Commons for the first time, along with four Reform colleagues, with their party taking more than 14 percent of the national vote.

Earlier this year, Farage’s many detractors hoped that an acrimonious row with the Reform MP Rupert Lowe would take the wind out of his sails. But the Lowe controversy doesn’t seem to have made any impression on Reform’s potential voters. From his early days of success with UKIP, Farage has fallen out with a succession of political allies, from the broadcaster Robert Kilroy-Silk to the former Conservative politician Neil Hamilton, without sustaining any lasting damage.

The clash with Lowe did bring some interesting dynamics on the Anglo-American right to public attention. Farage has long pursued a strategy of distancing himself from overt right-wing extremism and street violence, presenting his electoral vehicles as a respectable alternative to groups like the British National Party and the English Defence League, and relying on dog whistles rather than megaphones to get his message across. He decided to launch the Brexit Party in part because he felt that UKIP had drifted too far to the right in its positioning since he stepped down as leader.

Elon Musk’s decision to flood the zone of public discourse with his own deep thoughts on a wide range of questions disrupted this careful balancing act. At first, Reform’s association with Musk seemed to be a boon for the party: Farage posed for a photo with the billionaire after Donald Trump’s election victory, and there was even talk of a $100 million donation from Musk to Reform ahead of the next general election. However, Farage soon faced the problem of dealing with a petulant man-child who happens to be the richest person on the planet.

In the space of a few days, Musk lurched from praising Farage to demanding his resignation as leader of Reform. According to Musk, Farage revealed his unsuitability as a leader when he declined to embrace Tommy Robinson, a racist agitator with a string of convictions for assault, fraud, stalking, and contempt of court. An association with Robinson is precisely the kind of maneuver that Farage deems to be toxic if Reform wants to become the hegemonic force on the British right. Musk, who appears to spend most of his waking hours gulping down swill from a cluster of far-right accounts on Twitter/X before regurgitating it to his followers, had no interest in such practical considerations.

Farage felt obliged to put a jovial face on his disagreement with Musk. But he was less diplomatic in his response to Lowe, who made similar arguments for a lurch rightward without the protective shield of a vast personal fortune. Musk’s support for Lowe did the MP no good when Farage stripped him of the party whip over allegations of bullying.

Reform is very much a personal vehicle for Farage, without the conventional structures of a membership-based party. Farage designed it that way from the start, having found the experience of dealing with UKIP members during his stint as leader deeply tiresome. A one-man party certainly has its advantages in terms of putting forward a clear and cohesive line. However, it also means that Reform has little strength in depth as Farage prepares for the next stage of his political offensive.

Farage and his allies have drawn up plans to establish a think tank that will help them develop their policy agenda. They are hoping to attract funding from Trump donors in the United States: “MAGA, Tech, Religious conservatives.” The Reform treasurer Nick Candy also intends to launch a major fundraising drive in tax havens like Monaco, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates, enlisting the support of wealthy British people who would rather not contribute to the public finances but nonetheless have very firm opinions about how the country should be governed.

The aim is clearly to recruit a set of rich benefactors who will be less demanding and capricious than Musk, leaving Farage to steer the ship on a day-to-day basis. A party like that, with Farage at the helm, is obviously not going to do anything that will help the working class if it gains power. Yet Reform has been trying to win over working-class voters with a sham version of economic populism, making sympathetic noises about striking sanitation workers in Birmingham, calling for the nationalization of British Steel, and railing against the greed of private water companies.

It would be much harder for Farage to pull off this stunt if the Labour Party had not worked so hard to expunge the genuine left populism that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell promoted between 2015 and 2019. Keir Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have spent their first year in office antagonizing Labour voters with cuts to disability benefits and the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

Having started from a very low base, with less than 34 percent of the vote in last year’s election, they have still managed to drive down support for Labour, at a time when the Tories have been flatlining under the leadership of Kemi Badenoch. Reform has been able to overtake Labour without breaking the 30 percent barrier in any of the polls to date. One Labour MP, speaking off the record, summed up the party’s dilemma for the Guardian: “It’s all very well for No 10 to say we’ve got to keep delivering. The problem is that it’s the stuff we’ve delivered that people hate.”

As the Labour apparatchiks who chose Starmer as their agent have made absolutely clear, the headlong rush away from the policies of the Corbyn years has nothing to do with electoral pragmatism. They are hostile to basic left-wing ideas like public ownership and social housing as a matter of principle, and because they want their project to be financed by wealthy businessmen rather than party and trade union members. They would much rather lose from the Right than win from the Left.

Farage was widely mocked for setting up an account on Cameo, the site that allows people to buy personalized greetings from minor celebrities. Yet this money-raising wheeze seems almost wholesome when you compare it with the Labour health secretary Wes Streeting and his financial ties with private health care interests. For the likes of Streeting, the ultimate dream is to secure a lucrative post-political career in the mold of Tony Blair, whose Institute for Global Change serves as a glorified version of Cameo for Blair’s core constituency of petrostates and tech billionaires.

When Labour members voted for Starmer in 2020, most of them probably thought they would be getting the British equivalent of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez — less radical in substance and more conventional in style than Corbyn, but ready to work with the Left and take some of its ideas on board. Instead, they unwittingly handed over the reins to a destructive clique whose members have no interest in using government office to change society for the better. Farage can unquestionably be beaten, but these are not the people to do it.

It speaks volumes about this clique that its leading members are now gravitating toward the “Blue Labour” current associated with Maurice Glasman. Glasman is an academic with a life peerage who presents himself as the champion of Britain’s working class against a “progressive elite” that supposedly keeps them in check. A recent profile for the Observer shows him to be a conceited, resentful, and above all vacuous figure, whose snootily dismissive comments about the Labour left — “they’ve got nothing intellectual; no analysis of capitalism at all” — fit his own tendency like a glove.

Glasman is clearly starstruck by the attention he has received from J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon, who have no problem recognizing an easily impressed sucker when they see one. The Labour peer describes MAGA as a “pro-worker” project without mentioning the attacks on trade unions and social services that the Trump administration has launched. Indeed, it is safe to assume that he approves of those attacks. After all, his only complaint about the cuts that Reeves has made to disability benefits is that they don’t go far enough: “I would like to see a real decimation of the administrative welfare state.”

Although the Observer’s profile of Glasman describes Blue Labour as a “pro working-class, socially conservative campaign group,” its agenda does not contain any proposals for working-class empowerment after decades of heavy-handed state intervention to keep British workers fragmented and disorganized. An article for the Daily Mail by Dan Carden, the Liverpool MP who chairs the Blue Labour group at Westminster, railed against “neo-liberal economics” but did not mention the panoply of anti-union legislation that prevent workers from standing up to their employers.

Carden and his associates would rather talk about converting half of Britain’s universities into vocational colleges than propose the repeal of a single anti-union law, including the ones that were enacted by the Conservatives during the last decade. For Blue Labour, the working class is only useful as a rhetorical prop — an atomized identity group that cannot represent itself and must be represented by figures like Glasman. No wonder the tendency appeals so much to political operators like Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.

There was a small but telling example of how British politics came to be in its current state during the run-up to the local elections. Sky News had to apologize after its host Sophy Ridge falsely claimed that the independent MP Iqbal Mohamed had been suspended from the Labour Party for antisemitism. Ridge, who made the comments about Mohamed while interviewing Corbyn, appears to have confused the MP with a former Labour councillor called Mohammed Iqbal.

Mohamed is part of a loose grouping of independent MPs who were elected last year on platforms that highlighted Labour’s support for the genocide in Gaza. Those MPs have been working with Corbyn to keep Gaza on the political agenda when Starmer’s government would clearly prefer to see it forgotten. Ridge’s clumsy piece of defamation built on years of concentrated effort in British politics to conflate opposition to Israeli occupation and apartheid with antisemitism. Starmer himself made use of that conflation to marginalize the Left inside the Labour Party.

If a Sky News anchor had confused a Reform MP with a former Tory councillor who was suspended for racism, purely because they had similar-sounding names, it would certainly have been the end of their career in broadcasting. The right-wing media machine would have generated several cycles of outrage, and the management at Sky would have issued a groveling apology to Reform and its voters. Yet the reputational hit job on Mohamed didn’t even generate a ripple in British public discourse.

The ongoing push to exclude and delegitimize those who challenge Britain’s political consensus from the Left has created a welcoming environment for right-wing mavericks like Farage. They can pose as critics of a dysfunctional economic model while assuring rich donors that they will never do anything to interfere with their core interests. Farage is entering the political mainstream on a ramp that has been constructed for him by the establishment he affects to despise.