A MAGA Mutation Has Infected Britain‘s Tory Party
A MAGA Mutation Has Infected Britain‘s Tory Party
The populist Reform UK is unlikely to win seats in the upcoming election but it will pull Conservatives in an extreme right direction
Nigel Farage is back—sort of. With the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing a snap general election for July 4, the Conservatives face a surging Labour Party seeking a return to power for the first time in nearly a decade and a half—but they also face a threat from their right: Reform UK, a Covid-era rebrand of the populist Brexit Party, itself the spiritual successor to the anti-European Union UK Independence Party. Farage has either founded or led all three, though he has pledged not to run in Britain’s upcoming election in order to remain free to help Donald Trump win back the presidency in the United States.
Although Reform UK is poised to shake up British politics, there is no danger of it becoming the major party in Parliament. Instead, its most lasting impact is likely to be on the Conservative Party. Third parties occupy an odd place in British democracy. Despite the 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and the regional success of the Scottish National Party, the U.K. electoral system still favors two-party dominance. Since seats are single-member, won through a first-past-the-post system, third parties can play the spoiler for Labour or the Conservatives in many constituencies—but because of their smaller imprint, they’re ill-positioned to ever really win a majority and form the government. Though Reform UK’s leader, Richard Tice, says the party is planning to field 630 candidates across England, Scotland, and Wales in July’s election, its real impact will be measured in how effectively it can steer the Tories toward adopting Reform UK’s general culture war agita and immigration hawkishness.
What Reform UK Offers
Reform UK was founded in late 2018 as the Brexit Party and rebranded into its current name two years later with a specific anti-lockdown focus. As the pandemic gradually receded from the public consciousness, Reform UK managed to remain a political factor by adopting a general anti-woke posture that gave it the flexibility to stay relevant, no matter what culture war issue happened to be dominating the news cycle. For example, in recent times, its figures have routinely railed against Labour’s “woke” agenda and the general “wokeism” of DEI policies, all while sweetening the message with talk of how to “make Britain great.” But its curated messaging doesn’t always hide what’s at its core; multiple Reform UK candidates have been removed as a result of racist and other inappropriate comments they posted online.
When it comes to policy, Reform UK offers a mixture of opposition to spending and waste and broadly right-wing cultural positions. The party promotes anti-immigration sentiment and climate change skepticism. Rhetorically, its candidates are fond of attacking “woke” targets in the form of foreigners and trans people. Last October, Mark Hoath, Reform UK candidate for Sutton Coldfield, told GB News that International Pronouns Day is “just another woke nonsense initiative.” Noel Matthews, Reform UK’s candidate in North West Leicestershire, is in charge of determining when candidates should be dropped for extreme or controversial views. But Matthews has his own questionable track record. He has reportedly said: “Islamophobia is a silly, made up word.” And he defended a 2019 rally by infamous far-right agitator Tommy Robinson as being about “corruption” rather than being “about racism and fascism.” Tice himself has said that “multiculturalism has failed” and that “what we want is people to live in a harmonious country under a single British culture.” As for the party’s supporters, a poll by nonprofit Hope Not Hate found that 76% see immigration as hurting the U.K., 60% self-identify as “anti-woke,” and 41% believe climate change is either not happening or are unsure.
Reform UK proposes to “freeze non-essential migration,” leave the European Convention on Human Rights, make it harder for international students to bring over their dependents, cut government spending, cut corporate tax rates, slash foreign aid, launch a formal inquiry into vaccine safety, increase the number of police officers on duty, ban “transgender ideology” and critical race theory in British schools, and decrease overall “wokeness.”
Since the Conservative Party is being led by a “social democrat,” as Farage has bizarrely characterized the sitting prime minister (as well as Labour leader Keir Starmer), Reform UK is needed to usher in a “brand new Conservative movement.”
Populism’s Unpopularity
What are Reform UK’s electoral chances? On the surface, not bad at all. April data on voting intentions from YouGov, Reform UK’s best-ever polling result, gave the party 16% of the vote share, with Labour soaring to 43% and the Conservatives at a dismal 20%. Crucially, this result showed Reform UK taking the lead with Brexit voters. The first YouGov tracking poll released since Sunak’s election announcement put Reform at 14%, Conservatives 22% and Labour 44%.
What makes these indicators only superficially positive is that even with 16% of the vote share, Reform UK would be on track to get entirely shut out of Westminster in a general election, occupying exactly zero seats in Parliament when the dust settles after the July election. This is because the party is mostly eating away at already-cratering Tory support. Tice has made a show of playing against both of the big brands of British politics, but Reform UK’s foray into so-called Red Wall seats is more likely to cement those constituencies’ defection back to Labour after Boris Johnson’s 2019 romp saw the Conservatives win big in working-class strongholds in the North and Midlands regions.
Local elections make this point clearer. Reform UK did not win a single council seat in May’s elections across England and Wales. But it did damage Tory chances in many races, either snatching second place from the Tories or placing a respectable third. The Conservatives lost nearly 500 councilors in these elections, a wipe-out that party hardliner Suella Braverman claims Rishi Sunak “owns” and “must fix.” With a general election now underway, he has precious few weeks to do so.
The problem facing the Tories is a structural challenge in British politics that affects all parties: first-past-the-post voting favors plurality winners. Any party pulling votes away from a more competitive ideologically aligned counterpart only serves to electorally boost the chances of their opponents. Yet many voters supporting the parties from the center to the left—including Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and regional parties like Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party—have shown a willingness to cast their votes tactically for the best-positioned party in their constituency in order to ensure Conservative losses. The parties, Labour in particular, are split on the strategy, and it’s possible tactical voting efforts will falter in the general election.
But on the right, Reform UK is looking to take on the establishment wherever possible, with Tice boasting that it has Sunak “terrified” by challenging the Tories head-on. Unlike MAGA’s takeover of the GOP, Reform UK is attacking the Tories from outside the castle walls, but they do have some sympathetic friends on the inside. Lucy Allan MP has stepped aside in her Telford reelection bid to support the Reform UK candidate, claiming, “The Conservative Party in its current form is disconnected from the needs and concerns of Telford people.”
Reforming UK By Deforming the Right?
But Reform UK doesn’t have to win any representation to reshape British politics—it is already doing so. A strong Reform UK performance, even if it doesn’t yield a single parliamentary seat, could help propel the Conservatives toward becoming the hard-right culture war party that factionalists like Braverman and her fellow MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger crave.
They are all keen to turn a rightward lurch into a full turn to the hard right. Cates is an evangelical Christian and former Labour Party member who now co-chairs the right-wing New Conservatives group within the larger Tory party alongside Kruger. Cates has bemoaned that the soul of Britain’s children is being “destroyed” by “cultural Marxism.” She also breaks with Tory leadership in her opposition to banning LGBT conversion therapy.
Braverman was Home Secretary from October 2022 to November 2023 and holds the distinction of being fired from that post on two different occasions by two different prime ministers in the span of 14 months. She is a Brexiter who has positioned herself as one of the leading lights of the Tory right. As Home Secretary, she vigorously backed the plan to relocate asylum seekers arriving in the U.K. to Rwanda, something she was caught on camera saying was “her dream.” Braverman has also shown a flair for the kind of culture war rhetoric that is now essential for aspiring politicians on the hard right. During debate over a measure to crack down on protestors blocking public transportation routes, Braverman dismissed protestors and her critics as part of the “tofu-eating wokerati.” Braverman introduced harsh anti-protest legislation that passed in 2023. This May, the U.K.’s High Court deemed it unlawful and acquitted protestors convicted under it, including Greta Thunberg.
Last year, the National Conservatism conference held one of its summits in London. Speakers included Kruger, Cates, Braverman, and hardline commentators like Douglas Murray. There, Kruger mourned how “globalization, liberalization, and modernization” had “failed” Britain. Murray defended ethnonationalism as a good that shouldn’t be tossed aside just because “the Germans mucked it up twice in a century.”
In April, Braverman and Farage spoke at the 2024 conference in Brussels, which made global headlines when the event was briefly (and misguidedly) closed by the city’s mayor until that decision was reversed by a court order. Braverman used her speech to attack the “rights radicalism” of the European Court of Human Rights. Braverman sees human rights as a pesky impediment to the application of harsh immigration and criminal justice policies, as well as reactionary cultural ones. In her speech, reprinted by The Critic, she asserted:
[W]hether it is securing our borders against illegal migration; removing rapists or paedophiles from our communities; preventing terrorism; protecting children and same sex spaces for women; defending our brave soldiers from witch hunts through the courts; the ECHR is binding our hands and choking common-sense decisions.
Farage proclaimed that he and his allies are “up against an evil ideology” and described the EU as a “monstrous union.”
On this side of the pond, Liz Truss, the short-lived Tory prime minister who didn’t used to be an extremist, attended CPAC in February. She exclaimed at the event that the world “needs a Republican in the White House” and waxed conspiratorial about how her own brief tenure had been undone by the “deep state.” Also in February, Truss launched a new group, Popular Conservatism, at an event alongside ally Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, who promised the downfall of “Davos man.” Truss urged the need to take on “left-wing extremists,” a group Truss conceives of as including those who are “in favor of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.”
From America to The World
It isn’t only the Conservative Party that is undergoing these shifts. British media, particularly conservative media, is changing too. GB News, the self-styled “disruptor” network that launched in 2021, has struggled financially but also steadily built its viewership while achieving big gains in online readership and radio listeners. The company has platformed numerous right-wing voices, including Farage, Rees-Mogg, and Lee Anderson, the latter a recent defector to Reform UK after being suspended by the Conservative Party over his Islamophobic comments about London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Anderson’s former colleague in the Conservative Party, Marco Longhi said Anderson should never have been kicked out.
GB News suffered a major scandal last fall after on-air misogynistic comments by regular guest Laurence Fox on Dan Wootton’s opinion show. Fox—an actor who has found a second life as a Covid-skeptical, anti-migrant, anti-LGBTQ activist, and failed political candidate—was taken off the air along with Wootton. But this was only one of many incidents for a network that one former GB News journalist has called “a right-wing propaganda channel.”
All this shows just how fertile the environment has become for a much more American-inflected, right-wing populism to take root around the world. If Reform UK helps to reduce the Conservatives to a rump, the hardliners will be quick to tout their policies as the path out of the political wilderness. And if the moderates in the party get wiped out by a combination of Labour’s opposition momentum and Reform UK eating away votes from the right, the power base for the Conservatives will have shifted overnight. When one adds to this a media environment increasingly remade along reactionary lines, it’s hard to imagine how the British right will be able to resist becoming the sort of radicalized, identity-obsessed, conspiracy-indulgent bloc that permeates the MAGA GOP and has started to emerge more recently in Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in Canada.
The danger of the next U.K. election isn’t that the politics outlined above are set to enter government. Labour is almost certainly going to win what will either be a substantial or a potentially historic majority. But it might also signal the end of the Conservatives as a relatively stable center-right party and initiate the kind of fringe takeover menacing more than one liberal democracy today.
© The UnPopulist 2024
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I have recently subscribed to the London Times and am surprised how the reactionary commetariat there mirrors ours here in the US. I know that Steve Bannon for years has been evangelizing for his project of deconstructing the administrative state. I also wonder how many American political advisors and consultants are working in the UK to facilitate the post-Brexit right. Also how much of this is being supported and funded by Russia.