On 16 May, 60,000 racists joined a demonstration in London led by far-right agitator Tommy Robinson. Marchers carried wooden crosses and placards bearing the slogan, “Christ is king, fuck Islam”. An unnamed organisation distributed leaflets promising anonymity to prospective members. “In a country saturated with degenerates ... and imported political enemies”, the flyer read, “we are a brotherhood of White Europeans”. This is the muck that is shaping, and is shaped by, the political ascendancy of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
The recent electoral deluge that resulted in Reform gaining more than 1,450 seats across Britain’s local councils was a devastating advance for the party’s momentum. But it was not unexpected. Reform has topped opinion polls in the UK since April 2025, according to PollCheck’s voting-intention tracker. It became the third-largest party with 14.3 percent at the July 2024 general election—an ominous breakthrough that quickly catapulted Reform ahead in the polls, surging first past the crisis-ridden Conservatives and then ahead of the sitting Labour government. In an article for the British Politics journal, Richard Hayton suggests that Reform is also likely on track to become the largest party by membership, with 200,000 members as of February 2025.
For more than two decades, Farage has painstakingly built an electoral base for his distinct brand of hard-right British nationalism. This goes beyond the “Trump effect” often cited as the motor for far-right successes around the world. There’s a decidedly home-grown political history behind the rise of Reform that stretches back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the mainstreaming of Islamophobia and the splits between the Eurosceptic and the pro-European wings of the Conservative Party from the 1970s.
Certainly, Trump being in the White House has accelerated the pull to the right and legitimised all kinds of political filth. Farage’s own racism has become more vitriolic over time, as Joseph Choonara points out in a September 2025 piece for the International Socialism Journal. In 2024, Farage rejected the idea of mass deportations when the far-right Alternative for Germany adopted the then-controversial stance, saying it was “a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people”. By August 2025, with Trump’s anti-migrant machine in full swing, Farage was unveiling an Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill that promises ICE-style immigration raids, the construction of removal centres in “remote parts of the country” and a target of 600,000 deportations.
But Farage and his entire political framework are not just a carbon copy of Trumpism adapted for a British audience. Reform UK (and similar parties around the world) developed from splits within the establishment conservative political tradition and its voter base.
Farage himself drifted away from a fourteen-year stint in the Conservative Party as a young man in the 1980s and gravitated towards a circle of Eurosceptic reactionaries, as political scientist Vernon Bogdanor explains in his 2024 book Making the Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain. While formally operating outside the Conservative Party, these anti-Europe circles included prominent Tories and overlapped with an extant Eurosceptic wing inside the party.
The Eurosceptic right believed the mainstream Conservative project of incorporating the UK into the European economic bloc was a turn away from British imperial ambitions that would hinder entrepreneurial drive. When Farage helped cohere the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the early 1990s, the unifying ideological factor was not street-level racism. It was the world view of a minority section of financiers, Thatcherites and small capitalists who viewed European integration as fundamentally bad for British business.
It was only in the early 2000s that UKIP seized the initiative to launch an anti-immigration campaign for seats in the European parliament. But Farage did not create this racism. Across the Western world at that time, media and political establishments unleashed a wave of Islamophobic chauvinism to justify the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. This translated into massive spending on border “fortification”, immigration controls and increasingly brutal treatment of refugees seeking asylum from the ravages of war.
UKIP’s policy of British “independence” now swam with a tide of nationalism and anti-Muslim scare campaigns driven by establishment forces. Farage could argue that separation from the European Union would allow Britain to better secure its borders against the “threat” of immigration.
The rising tide of racism and this new angle on Euroscepticism helped UKIP become the second-largest party in the European Parliament at the 2009 elections. The Western ruling classes’ “war on terror” helped Farage turn a fringe, capitalist dispute over trade regulations into a weaponised political strategy.
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, mainstream political forces doubled down on racist arguments to deflect anger away from their own austerity programs, wage freeze policies and hollowed-out welfare states. Shamefully, social democratic and reformist parties often led the charge. Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised “British jobs for British workers”, and Labour leader Ed Miliband’s 2015 campaign team went so far as to manufacture official Labour Party mugs emblazoned with the blunt slogan: “Controls on immigration”.
Today, Keir Starmer’s Labour enforces “voluntary repatriation” policies that offer financial incentives for non-Britons to leave the country. Starmer warned at a May 2025 press conference that if the government didn’t “take back control of our borders ... we risk becoming an island of strangers”. For their part, the Conservatives have gone even further, with a party spokesperson suggesting that legally settled migrants should be deported from Britain if they earn less than £38,700 or claim welfare.
The policies and racist admonitions of today’s major parties would have been entirely at home in the 2010 manifesto of the British National Party, an earlier far-right electoral formation active from the 1980s to the mid-2000s. But unlike the current Labour government, the BNP held no seats in the House of Commons, was categorised by academics such as Nigel Copsey as “fascist” and was widely pilloried (even by right-wing tabloids like the Sun) for its beyond-the-pale racism. What was once regarded as scandalous is now accepted as regular political terrain in Westminster.
With these racist narratives already set in motion by establishment forces, the 2016 Brexit referendum catapulted Farage into prominence as a political personality. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was an ill-conceived attempt to manage the Eurosceptic faction within his own ranks. Instead, it provided an unrivalled campaigning opportunity for the anti-migrant and anti-European right inside and outside the Conservative Party.
As Bogdanor outlines in Making the Weather, a section of the Tory base was already disgruntled with what they regarded as Cameron’s “progressive” turn in the 2010s. To appeal to young urban graduates, Cameron embraced causes such as equal marriage and green energy. Many older, socially conservative Tory voters were repulsed. They found UKIP’s unashamed British nationalism refreshing and were charmed by Farage when he promised a return to old-fashioned Conservatism.
When the referendum results delivered a “yes” to leaving the European Union, the Tories ditched Cameron in favour of the recently self-styled Brexiteer Boris Johnson. With the Eurosceptic wing ascendant inside the Conservative Party, Farage receded from the political limelight. Data from political scientist Oliver Heath, released in March 2025, show a clear, oscillating pattern among a large, volatile segment of right-wing voters.
Prior to Brexit, there was a defection of hard-right Tory voters to UKIP. By 2019, those voters returned to the Tories under Boris Johnson’s promise to get Brexit done. After a few years of Tory rule, they swung right back to Farage under his new vehicle Reform UK, with roughly 80 percent of Reform’s voters coming directly from the 2019 Tory base. This dynamic has become only more entrenched. YouGov’s recent voting intention study showed one in three remaining English Tory voters planned to switch to Reform at May’s local elections.
It’s this realignment of the conservative vote that allowed Labour to sweep into power in 2024—a House of Commons research briefing shows Labour’s vote share was lower than that of any other postwar majority government, yet the party secured seats because the right-wing vote was split between the Tories and Reform. This was the darker mechanism behind the cheery narrative of a “landslide” general election victory for Labour.
Another myth gaining ground after May’s local elections is that Labour voters are shifting to Reform in big numbers. Reform’s success in traditional Labour seats in the north of England seems to bear this out, but a closer look at YouGov’s statistics shows only 5 percent of Labour voters were considering voting Reform at the local elections. In contrast, 22 percent of Labour’s base was moving to the Greens, while 24 percent of Labour’s 2024 voters were so disillusioned that they were simply planning to abstain.
This collapse in Labour’s already low primary vote, and the increasing dominance of Reform on the right, allowed Farage’s party to sweep traditional Labour-voting areas. But this was not due to working-class Labour voters flipping to Reform—they are abandoning Labour for the left-pitching Greens, or shifting into total disengagement from parliamentary politics.
Instead, it’s cashed-up capitalists who are lending Farage their increasing support. Ashley Armstrong reported in June 2025 for the Financial Times that Reform was hosting a series of events for corporate leaders who wished to “influence policies with a party seen as a real contender at the next election”. This apparently involved a meal with Farage and twenty business advocates, during which they discussed slashing regulation and government spending. Harry Shukman’s report for anti-fascist research centre Hope not Hate outlines Reform’s billions of pounds in funding from millionaire financiers, former Tory donors and old-money English aristocrats. As mainstream parties and sections of capital pull Farage’s politics into the mainstream, they help neo-Nazis like those around Tommy Robinson to recruit in the shadow of Reform’s electoral success.
The collapse of establishment conservatism in Britain and the rise of Reform have been slow-motion processes over twenty years, but the same dynamics are playing out much quicker in places like Australia. Farage has set an example for parties like One Nation that aim to carve out a base among former Liberal supporters. In fact, Farage’s machine is providing direct assistance to its Australian counterpart—in April, the Guardian reported that Reform UK member and former Conservative MP Tom Hunt was advising One Nation on electoral strategy in the South Australian state election and the Farrer by-election in New South Wales.
What is clear is that Reform and parties like it are now solidly established in the landscape of right-wing politics. The crisis and rightward trajectory of capitalism’s major parties are not going away, and neither are the political monsters they produce.
Yet Britain also offers a hopeful example for socialists in Australia. The massive mobilisations we have seen on the streets, such as the half-million-strong anti-fascist march in London on 28 March, will not stop the newly normalised far right in its tracks. But they are an indispensable first step. They cohere an opposition and give anti-racists confidence in numbers. We need to build a permanent, radical counterweight that can challenge the far right and the system that breeds it.
