Nigel Farage’s ascent to power is not inevitable, and his party’s success in the May elections will expose its major weaknesses. There is no sugarcoating the fact that on the basis of last week’s elections, Reform UK is now the largest party in British politics by vote share. It is still a long way from ever winning power at Westminster, but we don’t need to look far to see whether a Reform government would try to make good on its various threats – because Reform is our local version of an international wave of populist rightwing nationalism.
This loosely connected movement has declared its hostility to the checks and balances that prevent democracy from becoming a tyranny of the majority, or even of those with only a plurality of support. It can be chaotic and destructive, like Nigel Farage’s beloved Donald Trump, or slow and grinding like the recently departed Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán. But we can make a reasonable guess as to what life under a Reform government might look like – and I suspect it’s something that neither you nor I would welcome.
Yet Reform’s success is not inevitable. With hundreds more seats in English local government and a sizeable presence in Scotland and Wales, Reform has an unprecedented opportunity to convince people it is a genuine contender for power. But this masks a number of weaknesses, not least the fact that its share of the vote dipped compared with last year’s local elections. Reform benefited this time from a more fragmented political landscape overall, but it’s possible its support has hit a ceiling, at least for the moment.
A more fundamental weakness lies in the very essence of Reform as a rightwing populist party. This style of politics surfs on a multitude of resentments, promising people that their sense of pride and belonging can be restored by redrawing the borders of national identity more narrowly and punishing those who stand in its way. Reform’s sinister promise to place immigration detention centres in areas that vote Green is a case in point. This is what gives Reform its edge, but it is a mixed blessing. Ostentatious cruelty won’t actually improve the lives of its supporters, so a party that does business this way must either race to outdo itself with even more extreme pronouncements, or back down and lose credibility.
That is a huge potential weak spot, particularly as Reform is now under more scrutiny than ever. It’s especially true in English local government, where Reform has actual decision-making power, a system that has been so starved of resources it is a poisoned chalice for any party. It’s even more difficult for one whose representatives are largely untested and in some cases unfit for office, and which has spent several years claiming there is a magic money tree to be found by cutting “wasteful” spending on diversity initiatives. (Spoiler: there isn’t, as suggested by the difficulties faced by existing Reform councils.)
There are at least three ways this weakness might be exploited. The first is through a revived centre right. That might seem counterintuitive to a left-leaning reader, but in western Europe the centre right once provided a durable barrier to radical rightwing challengers. It was most successful in the postwar period when those challengers tended to be parties seeking to revive fascism – in most places there was a taboo against collaborating with the people who had brought much of the world to ruin in the mid-20th century. But a glimmer of this persists in Germany and France, for instance.
