Farage and Reform UK: a clear and present danger

The success of Reform UK in the British general election of July 2024 is unprecedented.1 The far right, anti-immigration party won 4.12 million votes, 14 percent of the total, and five seats: Clacton in Essex, Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire, Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, and South Basildon and East Thurrock in Essex.2 This is sobering enough. Yet, the party also came second in 98 seats, 89 of them won by Labour. In several seats, Reform took 30 percent or more of the vote but failed to win: Barnsley South (33 percent), Kingston upon Hull East (31 percent) and Rotherham in Yorkshire (30 percent), Makerfield near Manchester (32 percent), and Castle Point in Essex (30 percent). The Conservatives held Castle Point; Labour won the other seats. Reform fielded 609 candidates and only 32 lost their deposits.3

It is worth noting that despite Labour’s landslide success, winning 411 of the 650 seats in parliament, the party’s share of the vote rose only 1.6 percentage points on 2019, to almost 34 percent. The Conservatives won only 121 seats with 24 percent of the vote, 20 percent down on 2019. The Liberal Democrats won 72 seats with 12 percent of the vote, 61 seats more than in 2019 with a mere 0.7 percent increase in vote share. The comparison with Reform—which won more of the vote than the Liberal Democrats but considerably fewer seats—highlights the impact of Britain’s “first past the post” system and carries a warning.4 Reform may benefit from this system in future.5

Reform leader, Nigel Farage, became an MP at his eighth attempt and with 46 percent in Clacton. Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the Tory party until early 2024, won in Ashfield. Millionaire property developer Richard Tice won Boston and Skegness. Fellow millionaire Rupert Lowe won Great Yarmouth, and James McMurdock—a man with no public profile, who joined Reform only to contest the election—won South Basildon. Reform blamed a candidate-vetting firm run by a former Tory adviser for many of its candidates being exposed as holding extreme right-wing views. Farage admitted “some pretty catastrophic failures in terms of candidates”, adding that “I didn’t quite know what I was picking up and running with”.6

In the previous issue of this journal, Joseph Choonara has identified Reform and its predecessors, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party, as radical right-wing organisations but not as fascist. He characterises them as groups,

often referred to as “right-wing populist” [seeking] to displace traditional mainstream conservative parties, typically by mobilising elements of far-right rhetoric, but without a worked-out Nazi worldview or strategy, or the aspiration of establishing a fascist dictatorship.7

Choonara notes that these organisations have risen through “a series of long and short-term crises” and amid popular discontent. They have this in common with three other types of far-right parties: organisations embracing an openly fascist agenda; those rooted in fascism but adopting an electoral approach and concealing their commitments; and mainstream conservative parties shifting right amid “the need to…contend with more radical rivals”.8

Farage’s response to the far-right riots and attempted pogroms against refugees and Muslims in late July and early August 2024 confirm Choonara’s analysis. The Reform leader released an online video on 1 August, three days after the fatal stabbing of three children in Southport and with multiple far-right rallies planned across the country, declaring: “What you’ve seen on the streets…is nothing [compared] to what could happen over the next few weeks”.9 It was a threat, not a warning.

In the days before, Farage and Anderson helped to lay the ground for the far-right violence. When people in the Harehills area of Leeds responded angrily to police forcibly removing children from a Roma family on 18 July, Farage declared: “The politics of the subcontinent are currently playing out on the streets of Leeds”.10 In a similar manner, Anderson said: “Import a third world culture, then you get third world behaviour.” “These animals”, he continued, “need locking up for good”.11

The Reform leader’s maiden speech in the Commons on 23 July called for Britain to quit the European Court of Human Rights, a target which increasingly unites the Tories and the far right, and to “start deporting people that come illegally”.12 Reform deputy leader Richard Tice used his maiden speech to claim that Eastern Europeans created “an intimidating atmosphere” in the centre of Boston.13 When online video revealed an armed police officer stamping on a man’s head at Manchester Airport on 25 July, Anderson responded: “These police should be commended, I’d give them a medal.” “My constituents,” he claimed, “are fed up with seeing police dancing around rainbows and being nice to people”.14

This article will examine the rise of Reform and its predecessor UKIP, the history and politics of Farage, and the threat he and Reform pose. Against this backdrop, it is worth first looking at who voted for Reform. Farage has insisted he can win over Labour voters, explaining post-election: “Just like UKIP, we rose on Conservative voters, but in the end reached the big numbers on Labour votes”.15 The threat is taken so seriously by the Labour leadership that it is cowardly bowing to Reform demands for a crackdown on migrants. Labour leader Keir Starmer went as far as to confess “great interest” in the asylum policy advocated by the far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni.16 Labour’s capitulation over migration further normalises anti-migrant policies, playing into the hands of Farage.

However, Reform’s 2024 vote derived overwhelmingly from disgruntled Tory voters. A survey of more than 16,000 voters found that among Reform voters, two-thirds had voted Conservative at the 2019 general election, only 7 percent Labour. The strongest votes for Reform were in north-east England and in the Yorkshire and Humberside region (17 percent), followed by north-west England, the West Midlands, the East Midlands and Wales (16 percent). Labour also recorded its highest vote in the areas where Reform appeared strongest—48 percent in the north-east of England, 42 percent in the north-west of England and in Yorkshire-Humberside.17

Almost four out of five Reform voters were aged 45 and over, and three quarters said they decided to vote Reform only in the month before the election, confirming the significance of Farage’s decision to stand, which he announced on 3 June.18 Asked to identify the most important of 25 issues, 60 percent of Reform votes picked “immigration/asylum seekers/migrants/travellers” compared with 16 percent of Tory and 2 percent of Labour voters. No other issue attracted a double-digit proportion of Reform voters—with the cost of living and inflation identified as the key issue by just 8 percent, the NHS by 4 percent. Four out of five Reform voters rated immigration a “force for ill”. Only a third of voters in general agreed with this statement. Sixty-three percent of Reform voters saw multiculturalism as a force for ill, as opposed to 22 percent of all voters.19

The politics of Farage

Farage’s long preoccupation with leaving the European Union (EU) has obscured an even longer association with far-right politics. For all his care to maintain a distance between his successive political projects and fascism, Farage has had a long association with racist politics and, in particular, with the racist Tory politician Enoch Powell, whom Farage has acknowledged as a political hero.

Born in 1964, Farage attended the private Dulwich College in south-east London in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period when the nazi National Front (NF) was attracting growing support.20 In 1977, the Metropolitan Police used Dulwich College as a base during the Battle of Lewisham: antifascist protestors confronted an NF attempt to march through the area, which hard a large African Caribbean population. A friend at the time noted of Farage: “He had this thing about the NF. He would chalk NF on the board”.21 NF, here, was intentionally ambiguous, as it could stand for his initials or the National Front. After Sir Keith Joseph, later a key figure in Margaret Thatcher’s government, visited the school in 1978, Farage joined the Conservative Party. When Farage was appointed a prefect in 1981, a former teacher recalled “a significant number of staff expressed concerns that Nigel had voiced views…that were racist”.22 One complained about Farage’s “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”. Another described Farage and other students “shouting Hitler youth songs”.23 Journalist Michael Crick, in a sympathetic biography of Farage, noted he uncovered “several people [who] accuse Farage of being significantly racist or antisemitic” at Dulwich.24 A Jewish pupil recalled Farage saying, “Hitler was right!” and “Gas ‘em!”.25 Another recalled Farage “frequently crying ‘send ‘em home!’”.26 A third told Crick: He was a vocal NF supporter. “There was no hiding it at all…with Jewish schoolmates he made no secret of his distaste for them. What you see now is what he was like then”. 27 Farage openly “supported the British Movement”, and chanted: “BM, BM, we are British Nazi men!”, as well as giving Nazi salutes.28One person gets to the heart of his early politics: “He was a deeply unembarrassed racist. He used words like ‘wog’ and ‘Paki’… He came out with the usual antisemitic tropes. He was a racist”.29

In 1982, Enoch Powell was invited to speak at Dulwich, and Farage later recalled he “dazzled me [and] became a political hero”.30 Powell, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton from 1950 to 1974, was a member of the Tory shadow cabinet. In April 1968, he delivered a viciously racist speech to what would otherwise have been a minor meeting of local Conservatives in the West Midlands but to which Powell had invited journalists.31 The timing was significant. Ahead of MPs’ second reading of the 1968 Race Relations Bill, an extension of the 1965 Race Relations Act that had made it an offence to refuse service in public on racist grounds. The 1968 Act extended this to private discrimination in employment, housing and so on.32

The speech is worth quoting to convey its character. Powell refers to an unidentified “middle aged, ordinary working man” whom he claimed had said: “in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” in Britain. Powell suggests:

What he is saying…hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking… Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant descended population.33

Powell demands immigration “be reduced at once to negligible proportions”, calling for the urgent “encouragement of re-emigration” and attacking the idea that “all citizens should be equal before the law”.34 He inverts the reality of 1960s Britain, claiming: “The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come.” Powell explains,

the existing population…found themselves made strangers in their own country…their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition.35

He concludes with a warning of “‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’”.36

This “Rivers of blood” speech saw Powell dismissed from the shadow cabinet by Tory leader Edward Heath. It triggered a spate of racist attacks, including a stabbing at a West Indian family christening in Wolverhampton. Dockworkers struck and immigration workers protested in Powell’s support. “Powellite” became a term for those seeking “to create a bridge between the Tory right and fascist fringe”.37 The speech is reproduced in its entirety in an odious book, Enoch was Right, published to mark the 50th anniversary of Powell delivering it. The author, Raheem Kassam, is a former aide to Farage and one-time editor of Breitbart News London—sister site of the far-right Breitbart News in the US, owned by former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon. The book carries an endorsement from Farage and an interview with him in which he acknowledges Powell “was very influential on my thinking”.38 Farage recalls chauffeuring Powell to an election meeting of the Anti-Federalist League, a forerunner to UKIP, at which he told Powell: “Some of us…completely believe in the things you fought for, and I will go on fighting for them”.39

The admission is significant. It is a mistake to think opposition to immigration and multiculturalism has ever been far from Farage’s mind. In 1999, when first elected to the European Parliament for UKIP, he noted “the word immigration didn’t appear on our leaflets”. Farage sought to change that.40 He describes “the vast number” of UKIP supporters as “disenchanted Conservatives”, admitting: “These people were Powellites, hardcore Powellites… That was how we started”.41 Farage goes on:

Those…prominent in the party did their very best to stop me from talking about [immigration]. I could see…it was going to be an issue. So, I started talking about it in 2002… I believed…that if you could link the themes of Europe and sovereignty and borders and culture…you had a formula that would get a lot of votes… I started to make this a consistent theme… 2004 marked the moment I made a very conscious decision to put this front and centre.42

“The Powell speech taught me a lot”, Farage confesses, “But [Powell] used a form of words in that speech that effectively cast him into the outer darkness of UK politics…made this stuff quite difficult to debate.” Therefore, he argues: “I tried…not to make the same mistake.” Farage sought to make Powell’s views palatable by disguising them. Asked what he thinks of the speech now, Farage suggests Powell’s “understanding…of areas becoming unrecognisable, of division in society… All of that is very correct”, meaning that Powell “has basically been proven right.” His only caveat is that “allowing the newspaper writers the headline ‘Rivers of Blood’ was a misjudgement”.43

This goes to the core of Farage’s politics. He is to all intents a Powellite, prepared to articulate views propounded by openly racist and fascist groups, while recognising the need to distance himself and his party from accusations of racism and from proximity to nazis—for tactical reasons. The young Farage sided with the fascists in the confrontations of the 1970s between the Anti Nazi League and NF. By the 1990s, with the rise of the British National Party (BNP) as the leading fascist organisation in Britain, Farage was well aware of the limitations any association with fascism would place on his political ambition. He has said repeatedly that any such association would be politically toxic. When, in 2005, then Tory leader Cameron dismissed UKIP as “a bunch of…closet racists”, Farage threatened to sue him. Referring to Cameron’s remark in 2016, he noted: “What you cannot do in the 21st century is lob about accusations of racism”.44 Yet, the consistency with which supporters and former members of fascist groups are drawn to Farage is also clear—a point to which I will return.

The rise of UKIP

UKIP emerged from a split in the British ruling class over membership of the EU, which came to divide the Conservatives. The divisions date back to the end of Thatcher’s time in office, beginning with a speech she made against greater European integration in Bruges, Belgium, in 1988. After Thatcher was forced out in 1990, Euroscepticism and Thatcherism fused.45 UKIP was formed “as a pressure group, to push the Tory party to adopt a more Eurosceptic position”.46

As a City of London trader in 1989, Farage set up a Eurosceptic lunch group, the Column Club, at which an attendee recalled “sympathisers or members of the BNP” being present.47 In 1992, Farage joined the Eurosceptic Anti-Federalist League, set up by London School of Economics professor Alan Sked, which drew derisory votes in two by-elections in 1993 before changing its name to UKIP. Farage spoke at hundreds of UKIP meetings. Journalist Richard North, who knew Farage in the 1990s, describes him as “racist in a Churchillian sense” who “believed in the superiority of the white Englishman”.48 The party banned former NF members from being UKIP candidates, but Sked claimed Farage suggested dropping this in advance of the 1997 election.49 UKIP fielded 193 candidates, mostly in the south, and won 105,000 votes.50

UKIP received a hand from the Labour government in 1999, when it adopted proportional representation for European elections, with members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected across large regions.51 The new system placed UKIP fourth with 6.5 percent of the national vote and 9.7 percent in the Southeast, electing Farage and two other UKIP members as MEPs. MEPs drew salaries, expenses and allowances that were used to finance UKIP activity in Britain. Farage spent most of his time “organising the party” in England.52 Staff paid out of EU allowances “spent nearly all their time on party political activities”.53 Farage’s profile was enhanced when, from late 2000, he began appearing regularly on BBC’s Question Time show.54 During the 2004 EU election, Farage had the funds to outspend both Labour and the Liberal Democrats thanks to millionaire supporters Paul Sykes and Alan Bown.55 It was this election at which UKIP made immigration its main focus, devoting an election broadcast fronted by former Labour MP turned “shock” daytime TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk to the issue. Kilroy-Silk would quit UKIP shortly after, but the party won 2.6 million votes, 16 percent of the total, coming third and giving it 12 MEPs. At the 2009 European election, UKIP’s vote rose to 16.5 percent, enough to finish second.

Farage has proved capable of switching the target of his anti-immigrant rhetoric to whoever he saw as most headline-grabbing: asylum seekers, Eastern Europeans, citizens of Turkey, Syrian refugees, those seeking to cross the Channel in small boats or Muslims. However, UKIP would remain marginal in domestic elections until the fall-out from the financial crisis of 2008-9 and the austerity subsequently imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government formed in 2010. UKIP averaged just 3.5 percent in seats contested in 2010, but in 15 by-elections, from 2011 to early 2014, it came second or third in eight, with 20 percent or more of the vote in three. UKIP undoubtedly benefited from Cameron’s drive to reposition the Tories as more liberal on social issues, picking up disaffected right-wing voters when Cameron campaigned on the slogan “Vote blue, go green” or championed legislation on marriage equality.56

In January 2013, David Cameron pledged to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership if the Tories won the next general election. This gave Farage his biggest boost.57 Cameron claimed UKIP’s role in his decision has been “overstated”, saying he first considered a referendum in January 2012 when “UKIP was still a small force”. Yet, he acknowledges: “I did see the attraction of UKIP to Tory voters”.58 One month after Cameron’s pledge, UKIP won 28 percent of the vote in a by-election in Eastleigh. In May 2012, it won 24 percent in another by-election (South Shields) and 147 council seats, establishing a significant base in Kent (17 seats), Lincolnshire (16) and Norfolk (15)—areas where Reform now enjoys success. Ahead of the 2014 EU election, Farage complained about a rail journey from London’s Charing Cross, claiming: “It wasn’t until we got past Grove Park [eight miles from Charing Cross] that I could hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage”.59 He suggested immigration had produced a 14 percent fall in real wages since 2007, not even mentioning any impact of the financial crisis and austerity. UKIP posters claimed: “26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose job are they after?”.60 The party topped the European poll, winning 24 seats with 27.5 percent and gaining 161 council seats in local elections.

In the 2015 general election, UKIP won almost 3.9 million votes, took its first seat in Parliament—that of former Tory MP Douglas Carswell in Clacton who defected just before the election along with fellow Tory MP Mark Reckless—and came second in 120 seats, not far from Reform’s 2024 result. On winning for UKIP, Carswell declared: “We must be a party for…all Britons.” An aide to Farage noted: “Nigel was utterly pissed off”.61 Farage responded by suggesting the repeal of race discrimination laws and arguing children of immigrants be kept out of state schools. In a TV debate, he repeated lines he had rehearsed: “We need to put the NHS there for British people…to put our own people first”.62

However, Farage and UKIP were largely sidelined by the official Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum, viewed as more likely to alienate voters than win votes. Farage ploughed on anyway, insisting: “We have to make people understand EU membership and uncontrolled immigration are synonymous”.63 After the Leave campaign won, Farage resigned the UKIP leadership, spending time in the US with the Donald Trump campaign and manoeuvring to have an acolyte lead UKIP. He did not stand in the 2017 general election, no doubt appreciating it would go badly once Brexit removed UKIP’s claimed core objective. There was also a clear left alternative to the Tories, in the form of a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, requiring the right vote not be split. UKIP won just 1.8 percent, although, from today’s point of view, its performance in Boston and Skegness (7.7 percent) and Clacton (7.6 percent) appears as a warning. The party lost all its council seats.

The fall of UKIP and rise of Reform

UKIP seemed spent following the Brexit vote and descended into crisis over its relationship with the fascist Tommy Robinson, former leader of the far-right English Defence League. The party had been permanently riven with infighting, partly due to Farage’s high-handed behaviour. More important, however, was the balancing act between denying racist intent and continually pushing a line with pure racist appeal. Farage struggled to keep the lid on the real views of members, at one point describing his fellow NEC members as “among the lowest grade of people I have ever met”.64 Yet, for all Farage’s disavowal of fascists and their influence on UKIP, their involvement in and around the party he dominated is well documented. When Farage stood as an election candidate in South Thanet in 2005, he did so with former NF member Martyn Heale as chair of the local UKIP branch. Heale “became a significant friend and ally”.65 When Farage set up a fund-raising call centre in Ramsgate, he put Heale in charge, and when he stood against in South Thanet in 2015, Heale again played a role.66

In 2018, Gerard Batten, one of UKIP’s founders, assumed leadership of the party and called a joint demonstration with Robinson against “Brexit betrayal”. He even appointed Robinson as an advisor. Then, Farage denounced Batten and broke from UKIP, saying: “the brand has been so damaged”.67 A UKIP associate and management consultant, Catherine Blaiklock, had already set up The Brexit Party Ltd as a company and soon it would be launched as a new party. Farage claimed it would follow the example of the far-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.68 Blaiklock would soon be exposed as having posted multiple racist comments online, including retweeting posts by Robinson and former BNP activist Mark Collet, founder of the nazi Patriotic Alternative group.69

The chaos of the Theresa May government’s attempts to secure a Brexit deal reinvigorated Farage and boosted the new party. In the 2019 European elections, the Brexit Party won 5.2 million votes, two million more than the Liberal Democrats, giving it 29 MEPs. The Tories won just four seats.70 Tice noted after Boris Johnson replaced May as Tory leader and prime minister and repackaged May’s deal with the EU: “Our support started slipping away”.71 There were frantic attempts to create an electoral pact between Farage and the Tories ahead of the December 2019 general election.72 In the end, Farage withdrew from seats held by the Conservatives in 2017 to prevent splitting the right-wing vote. With Johnson declaring “Brexit done”, the Brexit Party won just 2 percent (644,000 votes).73

The party appeared irrelevant, although Farage retained a high profile, with an LBC radio show five days a week, regular columns in the Daily Telegraph and Newsweek, and a significant social media presence with one million plus followers on Facebook and 1.6 million on Twitter/X.74 Farage announced he was quitting “frontline politics” in March 2021, stepping down from his party, which had recently been renamed Reform UK. In the May 2021 local elections, Reform stood 285 candidates but won just two seats and 1 percent of the London Assembly vote. UKIP, now led by former Tory MP Neil Hamilton, fared worse.

Several factors spurred Reform’s revival, crucially the implosion of the Tories. First came the Partygate revelations and the chaotic removal of Johnson, then the chaotic, brief premiership of his successor Liz Truss in 2022, before the slow disintegration of Rishi Sunak’s administration and its ever-deeper descent into racism. Farage used his media profile to attack government pandemic restrictions and champion their scrapping, along with large numbers of Tory MPs. He also focused relentlessly on the small boats carrying desperate asylum seekers across the Channel, warning on LBC “of something approaching an invasion”.75 Farage was dropped by LBC after he compared Black Lives Matter protestors, who pulled down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, to the Taliban. He was picked up by the right-wing GB News TV channel, owned by US billionaire and Trump supporter John Malone and backed by hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall. GB News began broadcasting in mid-2021, promoting Farage as its top presenter.

Reform UK today

For all its claimed appeal to disenfranchised members of the working class, Reform is resolutely pro-business, a fact reflected in its leadership. Of the party’s five MPs, four are from finance and business backgrounds and two are multimillionaires. Farage himself is a privately educated, former commodities trader in the City of London. His earnings from GB News run to more than £1 million a year on top of an MP’s salary and payment by the Telegraph.76 He owns properties valued at more than £3 million.77 Deputy leader Richard Tice, also privately educated, is a multimillionaire businessman—a partner in property asset management company Quidnet Capital. The privately educated MP for Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe, is another multimillionaire businessman. A former chair of Southampton Football Club, Lowe worked for Morgen Grenfell, Deutsche Bank and Barings Bank, and was on the board of the London International Financial Futures Exchange. James McMurdock, MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock, is another banker.78 Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield, is the exception, a former miner and Labour councillor before joining the Tory party, for which he became an MP and party chair, before defecting to Reform in March 2024.

In May 2024, Tice was reported to have provided 80 percent of the party’s funding in donations and loans since 2021, including outstanding loans of £1.4 million.79 The same report noted the Brexit Party brought in £17 million in donations in 2019 and £3 million in 2020.80 Businessman Terence Mordaunt, former chair of the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation, was a major Reform donor in 2023.81 So was multimillionaire businessman Jeremy Hosking, a man wealthy enough to appear in the Sunday Times Rich List, who gave £2.2 million to the Brexit Party in 2019 and donated to Reform in 2023. Another multimillionaire donor was Thailand-based technology investor Christopher Harborne, a shareholder in military technology company QinetiQ, who reportedly gave £13.7 million to the Brexit Party/Reform as well as £1 million to the Office of Boris Johnson and £1 million to the Tory Party.82 The wealthy family of Farage aide George Cottrell also donated £500,000 in September 2024.83

Zia Yusuf, the recently appointed chair of the party, is yet another millionaire. He is a former executive director of Goldman Sachs in London, who jointly set up and sold for $300 million a luxury digital concierge service for the ultra-rich. Yusuf donated £200,000 to Reform in the run-up to the 2024 election and was appointed party chair soon after.84 He is tasked with building the party’s infrastructure, including a branch network, and selecting candidates, telling the Spectator:

The underlying conditions in this country that have given rise to Reform and Nigel Farage are only going to get worse under Labour [and] we’ve got 11,000 or 12,000 council seats up for grabs over the next three or four years.85

Reform has already begun to pick up council seats, standing in 35 out of 100 seats between the July election and late October 2024, winning one seat from Labour in Blackpool on 3 October and another seat in Wolverhampton on 1 November.86 It has also seen Tory councillors defect to the party.87 Yusuf has claimed: “Reform is rapidly opening local branches and assembling its ground campaigning capabilities. By the time of the English county council elections, Reform will be a formidable electoral force”.88

However, it will not be easy for Farage and Yusuf to build the “respectable” electoral force they claim to want. When Yusuf was announced as Reform’s new chair, the response among self-declared Reform supporters on social media highlighted at least one problem they face, amid complaints such as: “I voted Reform to get Britain back for the British, not for it to be led by a Muslim”.89

The policies of Reform reflect its business leadership and backing, heavily laced with appeals to racism and discrimination. The party’s 2024 election manifesto set out its central appeal:

Record mass immigration has damaged our country. The small boats crisis threatens our security. Multiculturalism has imported separate communities that reject our way of life. Divisive “woke” ideology has captured our public institutions. Transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children… Only Reform UK will stand up for British culture, identity and values. We will freeze immigration and stop the boats.90

The manifesto offered vague promises beyond this—such as “no NHS waiting lists”, “good wages for a hard day’s work” and “affordable energy bills”.91 The party’s true attitude to the NHS was probably more honestly reflected by former UKIP secretary Matthew Richardson, calling the health service “the biggest waste of money in the UK”.92 Beyond specific pledges on immigration, such as barring students bringing dependents to Britain, much of the manifesto could have been filched straight from a Tory right wish list. It promised to “slash wasteful spending, cut unnecessary regulations, cut foreign aid”, abolish corporation tax on profits for small businesses, and to cut corporation tax on larger companies from 25 percent to 15 percent. It also pledged to change the definition of hate crime, replace the 2010 Equalities Act, scrap all diversity, equality and inclusion regulations, recruit 40,000 more police and deploy “zero tolerance policing”. On the environment, it promised to scrap “Net Zero commitments”, “Clean Air Zones” and “low traffic neighbourhoods”. 93 It offered tax relief on private schools and private healthcare, along with tax breaks for private landlords. The Institute of Fiscal Studies suggested Reform’s proposed spending cuts would total £150 billion, warning this would “require substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services”. The reality of what a Reform government might mean for economic policy was best demonstrated by Farage’s praise for the budget announcements of the 49-day government of Liz Truss in 2022, which he hailed as “the best Conservative budget since 1986” just before it triggered a major financial crisis prompting her removal as prime minster.94

At the time of writing, in late November 2024, Reform remains a limited company, the Reform UK Party Ltd, majority owned by Farage, with Tice as the only other shareholder. Its immediate future lies solely in their hands, although Farage has claimed he is “giving up ownership of Reform”, insisting: “I no longer need to be in control of Reform, so I’m surrendering all of my shares”.95 He claimed the company structure allowed him to “to stop the party being hijacked by bad people”.96 However, Farage also insisted he plans to lead Reform into the next election, despite Yusuf’s claim that party members will vote on the leader and policies, and he gave no indication of how Reform will avoid attracting “bad people” as it seeks to grow from two shareholders to a mass membership organisation with a presence in every constituency. A proposed constitution suggests members will be able to remove Farage through a no-confidence vote if half the members request one in writing, but only if there are more than 100 Reform MPs.97

Farage has shown little inclination to surrender control in the past, except when UKIP appeared finished. On the contrary, he has rapidly fallen out with anyone presenting an alternative pole of attraction—Kilroy-Silk, Carswell, Neil Hamilton and others. More important, tensions are already emerging as Farage, Tice and Yusuf attempt to turn Reform into a mass far-right party that maintains a distance from Robinson. Tice suggested ahead of a demonstration Robinson called in October that Reform “want nothing to do with” him. However, former Reform deputy leader, Ben Habib, and candidate for London mayor, Howard Cox, criticised Tice, with Cox suggesting Robinson’s supporters “are just concerned about getting our country back” and Habib claiming: “We are one group”.98 A report in Socialist Worker noted:

Cox and Habib see an opportunity in embracing forces further to the right. They see the numbers that Robinson turns out on the streets and would likely want to turn that support into an army of Reform UK activists.99

In reality, Farage and Robinson are bedfellows. However much Farage denies it, both are seeking to build anti-immigrant, anti-multicultural currents. Because of that, their forces can overlap and combine. One danger is that, as Reform develops branches and stands candidates in multiple local elections, as well as normalising racist positions, it will provide a platform and audience for even more extreme far-right ideas.

What now?

Farage is aware of his place in the global growth of far-right political currents.100 While still in UKIP, he acknowledged “exciting” developments in elections in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy, referencing the successes of Gert Wilders, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Farage has moved from denouncing Le Pen’s party as having antisemitism “written into its DNA” to endorsing its leader for president. He has also spoken at an AfD election rally.101

His biographer Crick recounts a meeting between Farage and Steve Bannon in 2019, at which the latter was filmed telling Farage: “I’d like to…set up something and fund it. You’re the perfect guy. We help knit together this populist, nationalist movement throughout the world”.102 Farage was undoubtedly revitalised by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and became a regular visitor to the US, speaking at media events and right-wing conferences such as the Conservative Political Action Conference, frequently staying at Trump hotels.103 He will be hugely encouraged by the return of Trump as US president. In his regular Telegraph column, he hailed Trump’s victory saying: “Britain must roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump”. He added: “Be in no doubt, politics, including our own, is moving rightwards”.104

In assessing Reform, we can agree with Andy Jones’s conclusion in his analysis for this journal of its predecessor UKIP:

[It] is not a fascist party—it does not attempt to build a mass street movement with the aim of destroying opponents, trade union organisations and the institutions of parliamentary democracy. It aims at electoral success, but it attracts members and ex-members of fascist organisations, drawn to its expression of anti-immigrant racism and Islamophobia.105

Stoking fears of immigration was at UKIP’s core from the outset, and Farage has, for all his studied rejection of accusations of racism and claims to brook no association with fascists, placed immigration and Islamophobia even more at the heart of Reform. In 2014, Jones pointed out that “the key factor” in delivering UKIP’s breakthrough was “the huge level of disillusionment with the mainstream political parties [which] UKIP positioned itself to tap into…by posing as a party of outsiders challenging the Westminster elite”.106 Each success for the party “legitimises anti-immigrant arguments and gives confidence to racists [and] creates a vicious circle in which the main parties attempt to appear ever harder on the issue of immigration, with the effect that political debate is dragged to the right”.107 Reform has repeated this trick. Farage has toed a line between issuing racist “dog whistle” remarks and denying he or his party are racist. He understands that Reform being labelled as a racist party poses a threat to its electoral success.

Jones also unpicked the analysis of Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin in an influential study of UKIP’s development, which argued UKIP had become a home for “angry and disaffected working-class Britons of all political backgrounds”.108 According to this analysis, UKIP was “at least as much of a problem for Labour as for the Tories”.109 Jones identified two significant problems with this—first, the equation of working class with manual labour and, second, the assumption that those formerly in manual jobs automatically voted Labour in the past. As a result, Ford and Goodwin exaggerated the extent to which UKIP hit Labour’s support.110 The post-2024 election survey referred to earlier confirms this analysis in relation to Reform. That does not mean undermining support for Reform will be straightforward, but the basis on which to do so does exist. A YouGov survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted in August 2024, amid the threat of far-right attacks on asylum seekers, found 72 percent rated right-wing extremists to be a “threat”, and almost half rated them “a big threat”, up from about a third in February 2021 and February 2022. Only 5 percent saw right-wing extremists as “no threat”. 111

More generally, the 2024 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey noted attitudes to immigration “becoming more positive”. In 2014, the survey found 30 percent of adults in Britain thought immigration had a positive impact on the economy. By 2020-1, this had increased to 59 percent.112 The authors recorded: “Both Conservative and Labour supporters have become more positive about immigration.” The BSA also conducted a European Social Survey, which found 58 percent of people in Britain considered immigration enriched the country’s cultural life, up from 33 percent in 2014. A little over half thought Britain is a better place to live because of immigration, up from 20 percent in 2002.113 The BSA noted: “These changes are not small…we seem to have witnessed a fundamental change in attitudes towards immigration and its effects in a short space of time”.114

This provides a solid base on which to challenge the politics of Farage. However, there is also a warning in this data. The BSA notes “evidence of a reversal in [the] trend” in 2023.115 The proportion perceiving immigration as good for the economy fell from 51 percent in January 2021 to 40 percent in January 2024, and those perceiving it as enriching cultural life dropped from 48 percent to 43 percent—reflecting the relentless focus of Conservative governments on “stopping the boats” and the associated rise of Reform.116

Moreover, the continued crisis of establishment politics can also play in Farage’s favour. As Robert Shrimsley notes in the Financial Times:

It’s easy to construct the theory of how the Tories will be forced on to Farage’s agenda or be leapfrogged by him… Trust in politics has plummeted. A struggling economy benefits radical parties. As one Labour minister notes: “It’s hard to do social democracy on 1 percent growth”.117

Indeed, a recent poll suggests almost half the Conservative Party’s members would back a merger with Reform.118

Farage’s desire to distance himself and Reform from fascism is, of course, a tribute to the success of the anti-fascist movements in making such forces toxic. Yet, his refusal to co-opt or collaborate with these forces may not prove permanent and may also happen despite his preferences. The temptation to combine a parliamentary presence with a racist and Islamophobic street movement may prove irresistible, as suggested by the reaction of Habib and Cox to Robinson’s demonstration in October. If Farage and Yusuf carry through on their claimed intention to make Reform a mass member organisation, it will inevitably create openings for those around Robinson. The AfD in Germany illustrates the potential danger, with its trajectory since 2013 demonstrating how “right-wing electoral formations can come to embrace a more explicitly fascist politics”.119

Farage has had a long association with the far right, and despite his caution over fascist infiltration, the dangers of convergence are real. Even without it, Reform threatens to drag politics to the right, normalise reactionary opinion and prejudice, and create greater room for fascists to operate. Nothing in the objective circumstances—the decay of the political centre, deteriorating public services, stalling economic growth and soaring inequality, alongside recourse to state racism—suggests a decline in the factors fuelling Farage’s rise.

It is incumbent upon the left and the labour movement to unite to oppose him and Reform UK. This requires exposing Reform’s anti-working-class policies and its millionaire sponsors but cannot be confined to this. It must also recognise racism is critical to the party’s growth, expose the unvarnished views of Reform leaders, funders, councillors, candidates and activists, and counter them. This requires a vibrant, mass campaign, drawing in existing anti-racism organisations, such as Stand up to Racism and Love Music Hate Racism, building local groups to challenge attempts to develop Reform branches in localities, disrupting meetings, calling counter meetings, demonstrations and concerts.

The protest by thousands of anti-racists outside the Reform headquarters in London on 10 August 2024 was a good start, but this needs to be scaled up to a movement of hundreds of thousands. We also need something more. The rise of Reform, like that of Trump, Meloni, National Rally, the AfD and others, is a product of the deepening crisis in the centre ground of politics. The Labour government in Britain appears destined to disappoint the working class. Campaigning against Reform cannot simply mean looking to Labour as the antidote but must be combined with building a socialist alternative to Labour. We must develop a revolutionary left to combat the right.

Ian Taylor is a journalist and a member of the International Socialism editorial board.