Rhetorical Softening on the Precarious Path to Power

Reform UK hosted its first annual conference on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st of September. Like other political parties, it decided to do so outside of London. The Conservatives alternate between Birmingham and Manchester; Labour have been in Liverpool since 2022; and the Liberal Democrats take a seaside trip to Bournemouth or Brighton. This is to provide a defense against the perception that the political class is disconnected from the concerns of left-behind working-class northern towns. However, policies by successive Labour and Conservative governments have centralized economic opportunities in England’s capital. Were you to remove London from the UK’s GDP-per-capita, you would lose 14% — ranking the country lower than every single US state in living standards. Only London’s economy has grown 4% since the COVID pandemic, with the rest of the country stagnating or in decline.

This is one of the reasons Reform, an upstart party acting as a brick through the window of a sclerotic establishment, exists. With the return of Nigel Farage as leader, Reform earned the third largest vote share in July’s general election within just five weeks of campaigning. They won five seats in majority-English constituencies, and came second in 98 seats — 89 of which were won by Labour. If any party has a chance of persuading the 4.8 million northern “sofa voters”, disillusioned with a democracy which hasn’t delivered for decades, to show up at the polls come 2029, it’s Reform.

But if that’s their goal, then as someone who spoke at the Conference, I say, without intending to discourage: they have a long way to go.

Logistical issues for a first outing can be forgiven. Queues for entry were lengthy, slowed by a haphazard screening process. Security had received mixed signals on the size of bag and type of camera equipment to be admitted. They were, understandably, on edge, telling me “If anything were to happen at an event, it would be this one”. They were alluding to the likelihood that Farage and his supporters could be targeted by Islamic terrorists, after he highlighted in a Sky News interview the “growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values”. Farage was referring to the growth in the first- and second-generation immigrant population from Muslim countries, who have taken to the streets in support of Hamas since October 7th. Polling by the Henry Jackson Society a month prior found that only one in four British Muslims believe Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th; and that 32% of British Muslims favor the implementation of Sharia Law and enshrining of Islam as Britain’s national religion. The price you pay in Britain for telling the truth about Islam is to live with the omnipresent threat of physical violence.

Reform’s problems actually come with the softening of rhetoric since the general election. Four days before the Reform conference, Nigel Farage was interviewed by Steven Edginton on GB News. When asked if the demographic decline of the native white British population, from 87% to 74% in the last twenty years, was concerning, Farage said, “No, no that’s not a concern of mine”. When Edginton asked if Farage supports mass deportations, Farage replied, “It’s impossible to do. Literally impossible to do”. When pressed on if, despite logistical challenges, it was Farage’s “ambition” to remove the over-a-million illegal immigrants currently residing in Britain, he said:

No. No, I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations, or anything like that. (…)

If I say I support mass deportations, that’s all anybody will talk about for the next twenty years, so it’s pointless even going there. It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds-of-thousands of people. We simply can’t do it.

This alarmed Reform voters. In Reform’s “Contract with the people” released before the election (which, I have on good authority, was rewritten by Nigel personally), it says, in no uncertain terms, that “Illegal migrants who come to the UK will be detained and deported”. Their policy on foreign criminals reads:

Deport foreign nationals immediately after their prison sentence ends. Withdraw citizenship from immigrants who commit crime with the exception of some misdemeanour offences.

Farage’s latest statements seem to be an unannounced departure from their election pledges. Immigration is the issue Reform’s voters are most concerned about. YouGov polling found that 95% of Reform voters blamed permissive immigration and asylum policies for the civil unrest following the Southport massacre. Any reluctance to deport the 1.2 million visa overstays since 1998, >135,000 illegal immigrants who have crossed the English Channel since 2018, and the >10,000 foreign criminals currently in Britain’s prisons, is to refuse to uphold the rule of law. To think it impossible under present political constraints that these criminals —  who burden British taxpayers with a £14 billion annual bill — be sent home was seen as a betrayal by Reform’s base.

Why Farage made this unforced error has confused many. Due to the scale of illegal migration into the US, UK, and Europe, mass deportations have become a sensible and necessary policy. Parties such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), France’s National Rally, the Sweden Democrats, and Austria’s Freedom Party have made gains in recent national and EU elections, campaigning on mass deportations. As Farage mentions in the interview, this has caused Olaf Scholz in Germany, and the Moderate Party in Sweden, to accelerate deportations, and make overtures to concerns about immigration in order to retain the waning support of independent voters. Farage’s friend Donald Trump has made mass deportations and even “remigration” the central pledge of his 2024 presidential platform. Farage’s concern about how he will be pilloried by the media for even suggesting such a thing is unwarranted. When asked on stage at the Conference what one policy Reform should do to increase their support ahead of the next election, I said “Mass deportations” and was met with applause from the room. Not only are mass deportations already popular with Reform’s core supporters, but they’re becoming increasingly palatable with the electorate in countries more progressive than Britain. It disadvantages Farage to shy away from the policy.

Farage’s apathy about the rate of demographic change is also surprising. When the 2021 Census was released, Nigel took to Twitter to say “London, Manchester and Birmingham are now all minority white cities. Massive, massive demographic change is now taking place in our country”. Conservative government minister Sajid Javid replied, “So what?”. Such a response was seen to be characteristic of the Tories’ negligence of cultural concerns as they increased immigration to over a million a year, and changed the composition to be 80% non-EU entrants. Now, Nigel himself seems to have taken a similar nonplussed attitude.

Hence the backlash on X to Farage’s headline speech — during which he said:

Because we don’t want extremists. We don’t want bigots. We don’t want people who think that way. (…)

And we don’t care in this party— we don’t care about skin color. We don’t care about orientation. We couldn’t care less who you are. We care whether you share the values of this country. We care whether you obey the law. And we’ll judge you on who you are. We’ll judge you on who you are as a person. Isn’t this what everybody wants?

Of course, neither I nor Reform’s supporters object to the MLK-esque maxim of judging content of character over color of skin. However, Reform’s constant defensive posture, insisting it is not a racist party, is not putting forward a positive vision to attract voters. It also, per Robert Conquest’s law, appears to lead to a softening of rhetoric and policy, under pressure and over time. With the character attacks and infiltration efforts that Reform were subjected to on the campaign trail, one would expect they would have learned by now that the media would rather see them finished than win an election. Attempting to appease a hostile establishment will only lead to a loss of support from disenfranchised Brits who see all other parties as indistinguishable.

But the other problem with Reform’s beating the drum of “British values” is that they are incapable of defining them. The effort made by Chairman Zia Yusuf to summarize them as “equality before the law; the presumption of innocence; freedom of speech; (and) freedom of religion” amount to listing off pillars of liberal universalism. While it is true that liberalism originated in Britain, and that Englishmen founded nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, the implication is that anyone can be British by simply adopting these values. But some peoples are more or less inclined to agree. America’s failed foreign-policy ventures demonstrate that liberal democracy is not such a self-evident good to those in the Middle East.

Likewise, deputy leader Richard Tice MP said:

When people say what do you mean by “the British culture”, (or) “the British sense of value”, I always go back to that sense of— cricket. That sense of fair play.

Given the popularity of cricket in Pakistan, who hold historical hostilities against Britain for partition, and whose nationals were the perpetrators of Islamic grooming gangs, it doesn’t seem Britain’s sportsmanship can overcome all civilizational priors either.

Reform’s civic nationalism is an attempt to avoid comparisons to the abhorrent hard-bordered racism of the Nazi party; a specter raised anytime someone suggests a more exclusive definition of national identity than simply adopting “British values.” But Yusuf, Farage, and Tice fail to acknowledge that ethnicity can prejudice the likelihood of which culture a person may identify with. On average, immigrants self-segregate in cultural enclaves in their host nations. It’s why second-generation immigrants commit more crime, are less economically productive, and succumb to Islamic radicalization at higher rates than European host populations.

As I wrote recently, a purely values-based definition of national identity produces the following proposition:

So, a man who has lived in Lagos all his life, but believes in freedom of private practice of religion and common law, is now more English than King John: born in England, but who required Magna Carta to constrain his tyrannical rule. This is absurd. We can recognise the Nigerian chap may well make a better neighbour, but that he is not because of this more “British” than someone whose ancestors were born here. Nor is this observation a moral judgement of our Nigerian friend. Even mass immigration critics feel the need to soften the definition of an “indigenous” person, for fear of being mislabelled a racist. But stating the fact that the English exist as a distinct people is not to say other ethnicities are inherently lesser.

“British values” cannot be divorced from indigenous British people, and transplanted onto new arrivals from all over the world. Demographics are inextricable from culture, because host majority populations generate, and hold tightest to, the cultures of their countries. One must care about demographic change to care about cultural change. It would not be racist for Reform UK to say so.

The final problem with the conference was the atmosphere cultivated. While it aimed for jubilation, it came across as profoundly unserious. Reform UK’s conference felt like someone trying to stage a Trump rally during a bingo night at Butlins. Perhaps this is a generational divide: as the majority of the crowd, with a median age of fifty, seemed to be loving the tone-deaf renditions of I Love You Baby. But for young men like me, who face five difficult years of trying to own a home and start a family, subjected to unprecedented levels of migration and the highest tax burden since 1948, it induced concerns that Reform is not ready to take power in 2029. Given Reform was joint-first with young men at the last election, it may want to focus on encouraging more of Gen Z to support them as they come of voting age.

Author and academic Neema Parvini has criticized populist movements such as MAGA for confusing their ability to gather large crowds at rallies with being political action in and of itself. President Trump’s fatal flaw, acknowledged by his most loyal supporters, was his inability to circumnavigate the bad faith actors frustrating the mandate of his administration. Likewise, in my post-mortem of Liz Truss’ deposing from Downing Street, I wrote:

Had she gone beyond rote-learning the Hayekian principles of her hero, Margaret Thatcher, (Truss) might have understood that those staffing avowedly-neutral institutions have their own agendas; and interpreted their behaviour as being controlled by a cabal of enemies to their stated purpose. That the law matters less than the ethics transcribed in the hearts and minds of men applying it. That, unless your friends are installed in positions of power, then upsetting the status quo comes at a high price.

As her autobiography and recent interviews show, Liz has learned her lesson. I fear Reform UK has yet to take a lead from the former President or Prime Minister.

The best speech was delivered by Professor Matthew Goodwin. A day before taking to the stage, Matt released a short film, titled How to Stop an Invasion, which advised much stronger measures be taken against the thousands of illegal migrants breaking into Britain via the English Channel than Nigel Farage was willing to commit. As he spoke, another 707 were detected at Dover — taking this year’s total to 24,335.

During his speech, he told the story of aspiring marine, Thomas Roberts, who was murdered by Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an illegal Afghan migrant, in 2022. Abdulrahimzai had already murdered two men in Serbia before sneaking into Britain aboard a ferry, and telling Border Force he was fourteen. He was nineteen. Without checking his age, he was placed in a school before being expelled for threatening students with knives. The coroner ruled Roberts’ death did not require an inquest, because the state’s failure to investigate Abdulrahimzai’s age and criminal history “do not amount to a systemic failure”.

As such, Goodwin advised Reform to focus on their “core issues”: namely, deporting illegal migrants en masse. He also said:

This is what the Elite Class are trying to do. You see it, right? They’re trying to repackage who we are around a bland universal celebration of diversity that could just as easily apply to any other nation in the world. They’re trying to say that the only thing that defines the British — the only thing that defines the English — is that we celebrate multiculturalism. (…) To say that a nation is welcoming of diversity is fine, but it cannot be the basis of our identity because it’s like saying we have no real identity of our own. So you’re representing a majority of people in this country who do think there’s something incredibly special about coming from these islands.

Goodwin is providing Reform with a positive vision which is particular to Britain, and a policy platform which is popular with the convinced and undecided alike. If Reform is wise, it will abandon its retreat from restrictive immigration policies and strong national identity. Reform should adopt the principle “If Douglas Murray is saying something stronger, then we aren’t doing our jobs properly”. Only then will Reform be in a fit state to provide a solution to all the problems that Keir Starmer has already promised “will get worse”.