11.09.2025
Nigel prepares for power
Reform’s so-called conference saw its big beasts play the hits and rile up the base. But Paul Demarty wonders how long they can keep their lead over the historically established Tory and Labour mainstream
In the event, Reform UK’s annual conference was rather overshadowed by events elsewhere: eg, the resignation of Angela Rayner as deputy prime minister.
Yet, on reflection, Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and crew will not worry too much: Labour chaos is hardly unhelpful to them. They could get on with celebrating: where the government has lurched from crisis to crisis in its year in power, and the official opposition is all but invisible, Reform remains triumphant. There have been rough patches - the bust-up between Farage and the even nuttier Rupert Lowe, with Lowe backed from afar by Elon Musk, being the most notable. But the show is still on the road. Reform leads every opinion poll by crushing margins. Farage has since been dragged into a similar property-purchase scandal to Rayner, but it seems unlikely to seriously wound him.
What, then, was this conference? Access cost you £55 (£25 for the youth), for which sum you got the right to listen to lots of speeches, go to fringe events and “networking opportunities with other attendees”, whatever that means. A business class ticket would set you back £600, in return for which there seemed to be some kind of airport-lounge-type arrangement (literally sponsored by Heathrow) and a special reception. The high rollers could buy a ‘platinum ticket’ for £2,500, whose principal benefit was a “champagne breakfast” with Farage.
Nowhere on the convenient pricing palette on the conference website1 is there any reference to voting. It would have been quite astounding, of course, to discover that this was a decision-making conference, even if that phrase ought to be tautological. (Surely a conference is where one confers …) Reform remains, in official legal reality, a limited company. It is worth taking that status literally: what we have is effectively an alternative media corporation with a small parliamentary fraction.
Whoop and holler
The job of attendees, therefore, was to show up, whoop, holler and clap like trained seals. The job of the bigwigs was to play the hits. Andrea Jenkyns, indeed, literally performed a dreadful song she had apparently written herself, dressed in a ridiculous sparkly jumpsuit like a stage magician’s assistant. (Farage stuck to his city-boy outfit, albeit with a jaunty tie.) There was a great deal of hot air about free speech - occasioned by ultra-Terf Graham Linehan’s admittedly ridiculous arrest for intemperate tweets, and naturally not by the mass arrests of Palestine Action sympathisers that would have been taking place concurrently, but for police delaying tactics. Net zero was to go on the fire. Aseem Malhotra, a doctor in the RFK Jr stable, attracted some controversy for repeating idiotic anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
Farage promised to end the small boats ‘problem’ within two weeks of taking power. (He later had to walk this back slightly - it would be within two weeks of the relevant legislation taking force, which under our dilatory legislative process means years, but who’s counting?) Diatribes against the European Convention on Human Rights were fulsome, as they always are; so too the UN convention on refugees.
Triumphalism
The overall picture, then, was one of triumphalism, of unity of purpose (with the Lowe fiasco well in the rear-view mirror). That is what you get by organising your ‘conference’ as, in reality, a rally, which I suppose is one reason it is so popular nowadays. Decisions are still, in some formal sense, made at Labour conferences; but the decisions have been obviously dead letters for at least half a century. Tory conferences are mere occasions for speechifying and rallying the troops; what decisions are made are taken backstage - in the no longer smoke-filled rooms. It is not merely a British phenomenon - it is many a year since the Democratic and Republican national conventions in the States have had any more actual business before them than rubber-stamping the results of presidential primaries and formally agreeing election platforms that nobody reads.
The downside of doing things this way, of course, is that it is a little too easy for the real powerbrokers to get high on their own supply. Last year’s Democratic national convention, after all, produced a whole flood of sunny prospects of a Kamala Harris victory. American liberals succeeded in convincing themselves that yet another glamorous, celebrity-driven campaign totally void of politics would carry the day. We know how that one turned out - with Trump back in the White House and the Democrats in debt to the likes of Oprah Winfrey to the tune of millions of dollars in appearance fees.
Is Nigel Farage at risk of the same overconfidence? After all, the numbers do not lie: Reform’s poll lead has been pretty unshakeable since their rampage in local elections earlier this year. The evisceration of several Conservative councils will make Tory campaigning in those constituencies harder: councillors double up as organisers, and there is precious little other infrastructure to rely on. Conservative Associations are not what they were; nor is the Church of England - once the Tory Party at prayer and an important component of British politics at the capillary level, but now much shrunken and politically ambiguous.
This wastage of the Tories’ sinews of war, however, has not come with a decline in the popular grievances that have historically given the world’s oldest political party a platform to stand on. Popular sentiment towards immigration is divided, but negative overall, with ever larger minorities treating it as the central political issue. Reform is, for obvious reasons, well placed to reap the benefits, and attempts by the government to neutralise it have instead had merely the effect of raising the salience of the issue and therefore recommending Reform to voters.
On the other hand, it must not be underestimated how hostile the British constitution is to new challengers. Reform knows the truth of this already, having got roughly the same vote as the Liberal Democrats in 2024, but a 10th of the seats. The effect of their good day at the office was merely to punish the Tories and inflate Labour’s majority.
In order really to replace the Tories, Reform would have to take over the broad function served by this party: to mobilise popular sentiment in favour of government in the interests of the core of the capitalist class. The Tories throw some meat to the oiks (in the form of splashy, but basically shallow, anti-migrant and more generally suburban-reactionary policies), so that things can go on to the benefit of the City. Reform is doing a good job of capturing popular resentment, but can it serve as capital’s first eleven?
Brexitism (from which all this ultimately stems) did have some support in high finance, specifically in the hedge-fund industry, well placed - thanks to the nature of its métier - to profit from general chaos. Hedge funds, however, are not enough. The success of the British economy is based on fair Albion’s ability to serve as a global financial centre, which in turn entails its integration into the world system and its subordination to the global hegemon.
Farage will happily take orders from a Donald Trump, and sell it to his rabid fans as so much reflected glory. Will he happily take orders from, say, Gavin Newsom? Can that be sold on? More importantly, do the real players - the large-scale institutional investors - believe him?
Economics
It is hard to know either way, partly because things are so much in flux. Trump is currently chipping away at the independence of the Federal Reserve - central bank independence being, heretofore, an important gesture of government subordination to the requirements of big capital. The issue has already been raised, indeed, in this country, with the Bank of England’s effective defenestration of Liz Truss. (Its independence, in any case, is a far more recent thing, having been put in place by Tony Blair.)
Reform’s economic policy lacks even the coherence of the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng regime, such as it was. It is too much the product of grievances hastily stapled together: the anomie of the deindustrialised north and the Nietzschean impatience of the hedge fund bros; the isolationism of nationalist die-hards and the Atlanticism of Farage and other such products of the City.
It is a little too easy to see the politicians of the mainstream parties as simply idiots. The strange, directionless flailing of the Starmer government seems incompetent - as, of course, did the white-hot flameout of Truss, and the endless comedy of Rishi Sunak’s ill-fated reign. No doubt many government ministers of the years since the great financial crisis have been idiots - it is beyond my ken to find excuses for Matt Hancock or Chris Grayling. Yet they have confronted a situation which is not terrifically amenable to solution. With no serious threat from the working class, austerity was inevitable; concessions are made only to save the skins of the elite. Life was, for the vast majority, destined to get worse; all that remained on the table was to redirect the resulting anger onto targets other than the auto-cannibalism of capitalism in a prolonged period of stagnation.
The trouble, as I have argued often, is that (to take the pertinent case) migrants are bluntly not the problem. Indeed, the ability to use them to undercut wages becomes more and more necessary to keep basic functions of the state going. The splashy announcements pile up; nothing ever changes. A great leap into the unknown, even, is lined up, in the form of Brexit; the result is merely that Romanian migrants are supplanted by Nigerian migrants.
In No10, Farage will face these same choices; submitting to a punishment beating from global markets, or else behaving himself and thereby betraying his base in one way or another. He does so as America, under Trump, moves in the direction of an openly extractive and exploitative policy towards its thralls - unlikely, in my view, to be reversed in a future Democratic administration. He too will be made to look like an idiot.
Left alternative
Not that this gives the left much comfort. After all, we do not currently offer a thoroughgoing alternative, which would have to be internationalist in outlook simply to confront the problems before us in anything like their true scale. Without that, the overall political effect is a ratchet to the chauvinist right: each failure to reduce migrant numbers, or even just to restore some of the lost social fabric (reduce NHS waiting times, fill potholes, etc), paradoxically demands more of the same ‘medicine’. There will always be someone available to promise to do it all again - but this time ‘for real’. (Hell, even Truss is still angling for an implausible political comeback.)
So, whether or not Reform can make its success last and win a general election, the default expectation is for politics to become more Reform-like, before ultimately exceeding it in degeneracy. And that is the word - what we saw last weekend was, in the end, a contemptible display of political infantilism. Idiotic magical thinking on migration and the economy is cheered to the rafters. Net zero is to be rejected not because it is an empty target barely taken seriously by the people who came up with it, but because climate politics as such interferes with self-gratification. A man who merely repeats his audience’s prejudices back to them is hailed as a truth-telling hero.
Communism aims to raise the common man and woman to a ruling position; Reform-ism and analogues prefer to reduce them to the infants of Freudian psychoanalysis - mere agglomerations of unsatisfiable drives on a collision course with the reality principle.
That is the true choice before Britons - and indeed everyone.