Barely have they abandoned the sinking ship that is HMS Tory than right-wingers are finding their liferaft taking on water. Reform seemed unstoppable for a small while, often outpolling a Conservative party whose captain went to sea four months ago and hasn’t been heard from since. Now Rupert Lowe, its most prominent MP other than Nigel Farage, has lost the whip and been reported to police for alleged ‘threats of physical violence’ against Zia Yusuf, the party’s chairman. Lowe denies any wrongdoing. Discontent has swelled in the ranks, especially among younger and very online members, who regard Lowe as the most ideologically sound of Reform’s MPs.
For liberals, it’s tempting to gloat. The historian Maurice Cowling wasn’t entirely wrong when he called the political economist John Stuart Mill ‘a man of sneers and smears and pervading certainty’. We do like a bit of the old sneering, us lot. Even so, we should check our schadenfreude.
This is perhaps the most vital lesson from Reform’s civil war: a political party is not enough
Nationalism is a growing force among the millennial and Gen Z right. A generation ago, young right-wingers were still reading Hayek, Friedman and Sowell. Today’s up-and-coming reactionaries are devotees of Bronze Age Pervert, Drukpa Kunley and the Lotus Eaters. Nigel Farage represents the former strand of political thought and any party led by him will, for the most part, be a bulwark against the latter strand. He might skirt the boundary on occasion, and there will sometimes be some cross-talk, but his instincts yoke him to an earlier and substantively different rightism.
This is why Farage’s party looks and sounds as it does. Reform is hardly a conservative party, scarcely a reactionary party, and not even remotely a nationalist party. It is an electoral sponge for the sundry malcontents of managerial liberalism: retired Essex Men who still reckon Maggie was a good’un, former sales directors tweeting ‘England has fallen’ from the Costa del Sol, Labour-all-my-days types who now spend all their days watching GB News, and Facebook mums posting ‘so much for the tolerant left!’ under an endless stream of boomer bait. This is Reform’s core vote. They have no ideology beyond objecting to the excesses and contradictions of a status quo they otherwise accede to.
It is not indolence so much as a lack of political imagination. The median Reform voter doesn’t want to reform all that much because while he has frustrations with post-Thatcher economic liberalism and post-Blair social liberalism he has no alternative. Farage is the ideal figurehead for this voter in that, lacking the power (and perhaps the will) to change the status quo, he instead goes in front of a camera and complains about it. Boomers were the first television generation: it has been a central cultural expression of their lifetimes, arbiter of taste and aesthetics, signifier of legitimacy and status, architect of norms and consensus. There is scarcely a higher authority. As such, ‘destroying’ some aspect of wokeness in a TV segment becomes a more meaningful political act than destroying it in legislation or policy.
The other strand of right-wing thinking, the strand more favourable to Lowe and his support for mass deportations of illegal immigrants, is philosophically and demographically at odds with Reform’s boomer base. It tends to be younger, reactionary, and nationalist. Some call themselves ‘Anglo-futurists’, and believe our decline can be reversed by a visionary, Singaporean Lee Kuan Yew-style leader relentlessly pursuing a realpolitik agenda of nation-building, government reform, economic growth, crime suppression and the recapture of institutions from the left.
Singapore’s political model, which we might call democracy with Singaporean characteristics, seems to work over there, but Anglo-futurists have yet to come up with a convincing case that it can be copied and pasted here. Others spurn civic nationalism in favour of ethnic identity politics, culturism in favour of hereditarianism, and gradual change in favour of accelerationism. The Lee Kuan Yewists likely have the edge among millennial/Gen-Z Reformers, but across the broader radical right, the ethno-nationalists command a sizeable support.
A few questions flow from all this. Can Reform survive its current schism? Is it in the interests of the right-wing that Reform survives? And would it be wise to set up a rival party in the Anglo-futurist vein? These questions can only properly be answered by right-wingers, but allow me to make a number of observations.
Nigel Farage, however much he might frustrate the young guard, remains the only figure on the post-Tory right with national recognition. He brings in votes that might otherwise go elsewhere or simply not be cast in the first place, and irksome though boomercons might be, they are the reason Reform has any MPs at all. Check out Ukip if you’re curious what a right-wing populist party looks like after losing Farage as leader.
Whatever happens to Reform, any right-wing party hoping to make major gains under first past the post will have to be a coalition of interests. The difficulty comes when interests collide in a way that is hard to reconcile. Take arguably the most important social issue in Britain today: housing. Average rents in London represent between 40 and 57 per cent of annual salaries. Progressives blame nimbyism and insufficient funding for social housing, while reactionaries lay the fault with mass immigration.
Both are true: a failure to build homes drives up rents for young Londoners, but so does allowing families headed by foreign-born persons to occupy 47.6 per cent of the capital’s social housing. Yet any attempt to make inroads with younger voters via a large-scale housebuilding programme would inevitably run into opposition from Reform’s existing supporters, retirees with plenty of time on their hands to protest development (and protect the value of their assets). It’s hard to be a nationalist party in a country with such a weak understanding of and fidelity to the national interest.
That is perhaps the most vital lesson from Reform’s civil war: a political party is not enough. You need ideas and policies, analysts who can test and improve them, and a language for speaking about them to the electorate. Policy development is so bereft on the British right that the main right-wing party can’t be convinced of the case for mass deportations. The way to influence a party’s policies is not to work the system from within but to establish authority and apply pressure from the outside. Right-wingers need think tanks, journals, researchers and benefactors willing to invest in them even when they say or do things that displease the leadership of Reform.
Nigel Farage made himself the face of the British right by knowing how to do politics. If his internal opponents want to outmanoeuvre or even oust him, they will have to learn the same.
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