26.03.2026

Reform at the crossroads

Have we reached ‘peak Farage’? Perhaps, argues Paul Demarty. But, whatever the fate of Reform, the drift to the right is likely to continue. Lining up with the centre is no answer - independent working class politics is needed

A strange spat broke out last week between Nigel Farage and the polling wonks at YouGov.

Most opinion polls are reporting Farage’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Reform UK, at about 30% support in general election voting intentions - a commanding lead over an increasingly-fragmented chasing pack. YouGov, however, is an outlier, and its most recent polls have Reform on 23%-25%. This was enough for Farage to accuse YouGov of a dodgy polling methodology - deliberately doing down Reform at the behest of persons unknown.

As it happens, there is a significant methodological difference at play here, as YouGov explained. It asks respondents to tell them how they plan to vote in their constituency, rather than a more general prompt about which national government they prefer. The intention here is to capture the dynamic of tactical voting - which does not seem unreasonable, especially given how recent by-elections in Gorton and Denton as well as Caerphilly played out.

As is well known, the Labour Party’s strategy seems to be to set up a direct lesser-evil contest between Reform and itself, with Labour as the only sensible choice to prevent a Farage imperium at the next general election. The apparent success of tactical voting campaigns in these recent elections, which returned Green and Plaid Cymru MPs, has been a source of great embarrassment to Sir Keir Starmer and his decimated kitchen cabinet. It presents deeper problems for Reform, however, since it seems to suggest that anti-Reform votes can be successfully coordinated - perhaps well enough to deny them significant numbers of seats.

As a compromise, YouGov has promised to publish both general and constituency-specific numbers henceforth. Yet Farage’s testiness on this point tends to confirm that this is a real worry for him. Reform’s rise in the polls since Labour’s victory in 2024 has been the best argument that it, and not the beleaguered Conservative Party under the largely anonymous Kemi Badenoch, is the real opposition party on the right. Reform’s relatively meagre parliamentary presence tends to undermine this, so opinion polls matter all the more in projecting that all-important image of success.

Percentages

Yet the prospect for Nigel and his merry men is not quite so sunny as it once was. A steady rise after the 2024 election peaked in October 2025, with a simple trend line over the different polls suggesting a Reform share of a little over 30%. That has noticeably dropped since (it is now hovering at around 27%) and, while YouGov’s lowballing is part of the story, it is not the whole story. Is 30% really the ceiling for Reform? Have we quietly passed ‘peak Farage’?

That is highly uncertain, of course. Nonetheless, we can think of reasons why it might be true. The first is the extreme incumbency bias of Britain’s comically undemocratic electoral system. It is designed, roughly, to alternate power between two main parties and marginalise everyone else. Only once in this country’s modern history has there been a changing of the guard, when Labour displaced the Liberals as the main ‘left’ contender in the 1920s; that had been unthinkable before the extension of the franchise to all men and most women in 1918.

No comparable change in the composition of the electorate has happened recently, though the effects of deindustrialisation on the class structure of the country are significant and should not be downplayed. Moreover, mid-cycle opinion polling has a tendency to inflate the appeal of would-be challengers to the duopoly. The Social Democratic Party breakaway from Labour looked, at times, on course to eclipse Labour, but nothing of the sort happened, when the general elections of 1983 and 1987 rolled around. Much-trumpeted breakthroughs for the Liberals and then Liberal Democrats have likewise failed to emerge. The one significant exception here is the Scottish National Party breakthrough in 2015; but, of course, only the 50 or so Scottish seats are in play there.

Secondly, Reform has entered politics as a radical, quasi-populist, ‘outsider’ force. It claims to stand for all the things that ‘ordinary decent Brits’ believe, but which have been betrayed by an aloof political class. The trouble is, of course, that, once you spell it out - basically Thatcherism with an especially nasty anti-immigrant culture-war edge - the political programme is not, in fact, universally believed by ‘ordinary decent Brits’. Ours is a heterogeneous country with a complex political geography.

For all the projections of insurgency and “Youth triumphant” (as the Daily Mail headline on Hitler’s victory in 1933 famously put it), Reform voters remain substantially old, white (of course) and suburban. Where many such voters live in Gorton and Denton, Reform did well; in the more typically Mancunian part of the constituency, they were crushed. Perhaps 30% is actually the proportion of Brits who would possibly welcome, or even tolerate, the presence of an ill-disciplined paramilitary border force modelled on ICE?

Conventional wisdom

The conventional bourgeois political wisdom, then, would be to ‘moderate’, on something or other. Yet that will tend to degrade Reform’s ability to pick up votes from the true-believer enragés. It is noticeable that the recent decline in its fortunes coincides with a series of high-profile defections to Reform from the Tories - many of whom are rather shop-soiled figures from the farcical fag-end of the last period of Conservative rule. Are you really that much of a populist if you are palling around with Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi?

Finally, there is the international dimension, and specifically the matter of Donald Trump and his cronies in the US. These people have made plain that the backing of America in Europe, including Britain, is to shift towards the far right, be it Reform, Rassemblement National or Alternativ für Deutschland. Farage’s links to Trump and the American new right are, even in this scene, extremely obvious. His loyalty to Trump is unbecomingly slavish for a purported patriot: he has spent the whole period of the present war on Iran demanding greater British involvement.

Trump, however, is deeply unpopular in this country; and his latest military escapade is unpopular in America, let alone here. If he should overshoot the local appetite for Trumpism, Farage would hardly be the first. The Canadian Conservatives looked on course for a crushing general election victory last year under the leadership of the thoroughly-Trumpified Pierre Poilievre, with the incumbent Liberals in disarray. But then Trump started to float the idea of annexing Canada. Mark Carney, the new Liberal leader and former Bank of England governor - the greyest of grey eminences - was thus able, improbably, to run a strongly nationalist campaign, all but daubing his face with woad, forcing the Canadian Tories into an embarrassing defeat.

Fusion

If this is ‘peak Reform’, then the question becomes - what next, and what do we do about it? One scenario often mooted in the political press is some kind of pact between Reform and the Tories. The upside is clear: the story of the 2024 election, after all, was exactly what Rishi Sunak said it would be: a story of Reform splitting the rightwing vote and handing an enormous majority to Labour. The by-election results have seen, for the most part, swings from the Tories to Reform, and from Labour to the Greens and nationalists. A formal electoral pact would prevent this.

Moreover, since Boris Johnson’s purge of the ‘remainer’ wets in 2019, the political differences between front-bench Tories and Farage and his various political outfits have tended to disappear. It required no great recantation on matters of substance for Jenrick, Zahawi, Suella Braverman et al to cross over, and indeed Farage stood down his Brexit Party in the 2019 election - all but ensuring an outright Tory victory. It might be a difficult pill for Phil Hammond to swallow, but not as difficult as losing his seat.

It would not even really be unprecedented. The Tories’ official name is the Conservative and Unionist Party - a relic of the fusion of the Conservatives with the Liberal Unionists (a breakaway from the Liberals who opposed Irish home rule). The two parties governed Britain and Ireland in formal coalition from 1895 to 1906, and finally fused in 1912. That was a long old process, of course, but then there was a serious political division, over tariffs and free trade, to be dealt with first. Is there an equivalent, really, for the Tories and Reform?

Whether or not this precise scenario unfolds, the tectonic forces we have mentioned - the structure of the British political system, and the radical subordination of the UK to the US, combined with American support for the far right - will tend to reconstitute a single, large party of the right. It will be a party further to the right than the last Tory government, never mind that of David ‘hug a hoodie’ Cameron, which will sell international irrelevance and ever more humiliating servitude to the US by packaging them with pogromist national chauvinism and ‘law and order’ authoritarianism.

The leftwing response to the threat of the far right tends to be ‘presentist’, and to focus on the malevolence of the particular enemy we face at this particular moment. In talking down Reform, we do not intend to suggest that the threats posed by far-right ideology - terrorism against migrants, reversal of gains on questions like gay and women’s rights, assaults on civil liberties, and militarist insanity, above all - are not real. We want to zoom out, and think strategically about where the threat really comes from, and how it relates to the other principal actors in British politics.

In this respect, the role of the US, already mentioned, must be emphasised. Its current strategic orientation - carried through by at least the Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies - is the much-ballyhooed pivot to Asia. This entails the radical subordination of Europe, in order to prevent it from emerging as a third competitor for hegemony. (Interestingly, this falls out of both the Biden administration’s backing of the Ukraine proxy war, and Trump II’s listless attempts to offload responsibility for this endeavour onto Europe.)

A Europe largely under the control of fractious groups of irridentists is ideal for its subordination, ensuring the paralysis of the EU and its steady decomposition into easily controlled puppets, entirely reliant on the US for military tech. Britain, thanks to Farage and friends, is rather further down this road.

Secondly, there is the real mass support base for this kind of politics - notably stronger in regions hardest hit by deindustrialisation. A coalition of provincial petty bourgeois and deproletarianised workers is quite open to the ‘beggar thy neighbour’ politics of national revanchism, and to the message that all their social maladies may be laid at the door of the treacherous and manipulative ‘elite’ in London.

If we take it to be our main political role to stop the rise of the far right, that pushes us into alliance with the sensible politicians of the centre; but, of course, these are, precisely, the hated ‘elite’, and moreover - at least in the specific case of the bourgeois political parties and the main bourgeois media - the main agents of subordination to US imperial dominance.

On paper, however, stopping the right is not the central objective, but rather the achievement of socialism. To be sure, that entails fighting the right, since it can only be achieved by action in solidarity across national borders and promoting class rather than national consciousness. We must face facts, however: all the bourgeois parties promote fake solidarity between British workers, petty bourgeois and capitalists; all are willing tools of American imperialism.

We can be as tough as we like on the far right, but we can only be tough on the causes of the far right if we build our own party, independent of the parties of the state, sharply politically opposed to class collaboration and the promotion of the interests of ‘UK plc’.