Nigel Farage is the most misunderstood politician in Britain. Vilified by the liberal media as ‘far right’ and mistaken by nationalists as a kindred spirit, the Reform party leader doesn’t fully comport with the pub bore caricature sketched by his enemies nor with the blokey everyman persona lapped up by his admirers. He is a wilier, more elusive beast, as his comments on the French elections remind us. Speaking to UnHerd ahead of the first results, Farage warned that victory for the RN would be a ‘disaster’, saying the party would be ‘even worse for the economy than the current lot’.
Dis-moi que ce n’est pas vrai, Nigel! It’s a statement sure to have friend and foe alike twisting themselves into political pretzels. The RN, or National Rally, is the nationalist party headed by Marine Le Pen which, together with its allies, has come out on top in first-round voting for the National Assembly. Surely Farage would be happy for his fellow far-right Russian stooges, his detractors will cry. Why is Nigel siding with the centrist establishment against patriotic populists, his supporters will wonder.
The answer is that, given a choice between the status quo liberalism of Ensemble (the Emmanuel Macron aligned electoral bloc) and the political prescriptions of RN, the Reform leader would choose Ensemble every time. Not out of any particular affection for a movement of metropolitan technocrats but because they are friendlier to the Anglo social and economic model than Le Pen. Farage isn’t ‘far right’ but much closer to a bog-standard Essex Man Thatcherite. He’s for tax cuts, spending cuts, deficit reduction, light-touch regulation and privatisation, all the golden oldies of the Eighties. Put Brexit and immigration to one side and there’s not much he and George Osborne could find to disagree on.
Le Pen is a very different creature. Her politics have very little in common with the Gladstonian liberalism of Margaret Thatcher. She is a statist, an economic populist, a spending and subsidy enthusiast. She is for farmers and unionised workers and sceptical of big business and the market. Put immigration and Islam to one side, and there’s not much she and the left of the Labour party could find to disagree on.
Douglas Murray has asked why Britain is such an outlier in a Europe moving right. The answer is that Europe is not moving right, it is moving on from liberalism. Where populists and nationalists are in power or in the ascendancy, they got there with a platform departing from the liberal status quo. In most cases, that means rejecting both the social liberalism of mass immigration, multiculturalism and progressive identity politics and the market liberalism that has challenged the European social model in recent decades and especially since the financial crisis. This is broadly true of RN but also Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Geert Wilders’ PVV, and Giorgia Meloni‘s Brothers of Italy. (A major exception is AfD in Germany, which though hostile to social liberalism remains loyal to the market variety.)
As with so much else when it comes to Europe, Britain is an island apart. Our right-wing parties are not in rebellion against the market liberal model, they are its enforcers. The Conservatives and Reform are largely as one in espousing the establishment economics that has governed more or less since the 1980s, albeit with significant interruptions during the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Tax cuts good, public spending bad, slash the deficit and let the market take care of the rest. So wedded are British conservatives to this penny-pinching accountancy that they will pursue it to its most unconservative ends, as in the first seven years of this government when ministers allowed police numbers to fall by 20,000 in the name of austerity.
Farage isn’t ‘far right’ but much closer to a bog-standard Essex Man Thatcherite
Nigel Farage offers no challenge to Tory economic liberalism, save that he would prefer it if they were much more liberal. Shrink the state, rip up regulations, and the lads in the City could do with another tax cut. God knows, they’ve got it tough. The irony will not be lost on Farage that the fiscal policies he promotes reward the very people who hate (and occasionally attempt to debank) him while punishing those who make up his political constituency. Note that Reform’s ‘contract’ with the British people says nothing about maintaining the pensions triple lock and instead pledges to ‘review’ a system ‘riddled with complexity, huge cost and poor returns’. That certainly sounds like more spreadsheet liberalism at the expense of Reform’s baby boomer base. If only he could be brought round to the merits of mass immigration, Farage would be the patron saint of FT subscribers.
One group unlikely to venerate him is younger voters. The most recent Opinium poll shows just one in ten Britons aged 18 to 35 is planning to vote for Reform. Yet the RN just won a third of the same age cohort. It’s not as straightforward as French youth being more nationalist. The key issues in this election have been wages, energy prices and pension reforms. It is precariousness that troubles les jeunes français and while this led almost half to vote for the far-left New Popular Front, it delivered those also concerned about immigration into the arms of Jordan Bardella, the RN’s 28-year-old candidate for prime minister. But while Bardella proposes to continue the sort of social spending which older French people enjoyed in their youth, Farage’s Reform has nothing to say to Gen Z or millennial Brits, whom the party’s modal voter considers to be woke snowflakes still renting only because they buy too many avocados.
There are few reasons to see Nigel Farage as the way forward for the British right
So it’s hardly surprising that Nigel Farage isn’t keen on Marine Le Pen and the RN. Rather than ‘far right’, he is really a malcontent of boomer liberalism, railing against the social outcomes of the post-1980s consensus while wishing to maintain the economic conditions that create them. He is ideologically hostile to the populist, nationalist and common good economics practised and advocated elsewhere in Europe by leaders and thinkers whom his followers and opponents would consider his natural allies. His natural ally is fellow boomer-whisperer Donald Trump.
When the liberal left casts Farage as a 20-a-day Oswald Mosley, it commits a cardinal sin of politics: misunderstanding the enemy. Farage flirts now and then with incendiary rhetoric but if he is the apogee of national populism in Britain, we will be very lucky indeed. I suspect, however, that he won’t be. A few years back, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed: ‘If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.’ I’d suggest to progressives that the same applies to Reform’s leader: if you dislike Farage, will till you see who comes after him.
But the misunderstanding is bipartisan. Nationalists who put their faith in Farage are not only fooling themselves, they are postponing the realignment they wish to see on the British right. Baby boomers will not be with us forever and yet without them Faragism is nothing. A populist British right isn’t going to win over millennials or Gen Z with nostalgia, NIMBYism, and the economic prescriptions of Milton Friedman. It is not enough to be post-liberal. Right-wingers must be pro-social, giving young people a rewarding place in a well-ordered society that aims for sodality, coherence and dignity as much as it does autonomy, diversity and growth. Thursday will deliver a much-deserved reckoning for the Conservatives but there are few reasons to see Nigel Farage as the way forward for the British right.
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