By Ethan Harvey
He has done it again. The man who spearheaded Brexit in 2016—when he deftly used the UKIP pressure group to unsettle the EU establishment in Westminster, influencing the pivotal referendum that triggered Article 50—has once again bombarded the establishment. The news of Farage's return as the leader of what could potentially be the new enlightened party of the centre-right, poised to replace the weary Conservative party, has transformed an objectively lacklustre and uninspiring election into a potentially game-changing moment in British history.
Having changed his mind from the beginning of the election after being caught off guard by Sunak’s surprise snap election, Farage has replaced Richard Tice as Reform UK’s leader and will stand in the traditionally conservative, pro-Brexit seat of Clacton. Whether you approve of Farage’s politics or not, this has struck a chord in a mind-numbingly tedious election with a pre-determined outcome: a Labour supermajority. While his return will not change this, it will alter the conditions by which Labour reach the majority by further puncturing the Conservative support base. Apathetic and disillusioned stay-at-home voters would have intensified Labour’s majority. Instead, an enormous defection of Tory voters to Reform, including socially conservative ex-red wall voters, will reduce the Tory vote share, inadvertently helping Starmer.
Farage’s impact is likely to be significant, especially after You-Gov projects, for the first time, Reform will win at least four seats. Another You-Gov poll shows them two points behind the Conservatives, which prompted Nadine Dorries to predict them overtaking the party in the next few days. This will startle many political observers who recognise how difficult it is for any party, especially one that has only existed (in the form of the Brexit party) since 2018, to make a breakthrough into Parliament under the disproportionate electoral system, First-Past-The-Post. After all, UKIP could only secure one seat despite accumulating nearly four million votes. This was more than the established Liberal Democrats, which achieved fifty-seven seats. Therefore, a tangible victory for Reform at the next election would be getting more than one seat. Once achieved, it will mark the beginning of a major paradigm shift in British politics, the end of the Blairite order.
Since 1997, social and neoliberal dogma has infested British politics, where mainstream parties have sung from the same hymn sheet on all the major talking points, from the European Union to immigration. The revolutionary politics of the Blair era, which saw the reconstruction of the British constitution with the Constitutional Reform Act and Human Rights Act, combined with the dreadful devolution reforms that irrevocably altered the uniquely British character of our unitary state (built on common law and conventions). The New Labour vanguard then created QUANGOs and excessively increased the layers of bureaucracy, such as the civil service, local government, elected mayors and the newly founded Supreme Court. The new vacancies this generated were primarily filled by Blairite apparatchiks, allowing the New Labour agenda to permeate British institutions and effectively bind its successor to its constitutional changes. This marked the beginning of the New Labour paradigm.
After the affirmation of the paradigm in British institutions, the Cameron government later inherited the New Labour programme as part of the conditions for forming a government with the Liberal Democrats in 2010. Ever since that moment, we have had a political class conscripted to neo and socially liberal, politically correct ideation of politics built on internationalism. This is reinforced by Britain’s genealogical transition to Europeanised politics that accelerated in 1997, with legislation incrementally introduced that would de facto displace the British constitution with an unfamiliar, top-down and artificially manufactured one, such as the Lisbon Treaty that came into force in 2009. Of course, this ended after Britain voted to reassert control from the bureaucratic, faceless EU overlords that increasingly sought to deplete its sovereignty and exacerbate the democratic deficit between a soon-to-be European superstate and the people.
"The news of Farage's return as the leader of what could potentially be the new enlightened party of the centre-right, poised to replace the weary Conservative party, has transformed an objectively lacklustre and uninspiring election into a potentially game-changing moment in British history."
The point is that whilst the 2016 Brexit vote mediated the Blairite paradigm, its hegemonic influence did not dissolve. The zombie parliament, riddled with Europhiles and globalists, still existed, which explains why it failed to capitalise on the opportunities presented to post-Brexit Britain, such as deregulation, control over British frontiers and fishing rights. Ironically, it has had the opposite effect, with gross and net migration at an all-time high. 1.2 million people migrated to the UK in 2023, unusually elevated levels when contextualised. This suggests that despite the 2016 nationalist pushback from working Brits alienated by bourgeois Blairism and metropolitan liberal elitism, our out-of-touch politicians never transgressed the liberal paradigm that has pervaded politics for the last 27 years.
Why is this important? Well, Reform UK’s philosophical school of thought, unlike the rest of the establishment blob, is incompatible with the Blairite paradigm of mass immigration, political correctness, and progressive politics. Instead, Reform represents the interests of what Farage calls the ‘little people’ – working-class patriots in middle England outside the M25 who are fully exposed to the social decay that has inflicted Britain after years of multiculturalism. Many of these people have had their wages undercut by a vast exodus of cheap foreign labour, a result of a liberal policy that is justified by short-term GDP gain. The short-term positive gain is repudiated by GDP per capita being less after mass immigration. Ultimately, a successful Reform party - that seeks to implement a policy of net-zero immigration – foreshadows a future overhaul of the Blairite consensus.
Interestingly, this overhaul is made more likely by Farage’s ability to connect with young voters, with his party having won the so-called TikTok elections (with the party receiving more support than Labour on the platform with a famously young demographic). This would make sense as the young are most vulnerable to the corrosive effects of the paradigm, with political correctness infiltrating the education system and universities. Furthermore, just 8% of 18-24-year-old Brits plan to vote Conservative, with many likely to vote Reform after Farage’s success on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and subsequent appeal on Tik-Tok.
Farage’s return ignites a spark in British politics. It provides disaffected, ordinary working people with a voice, something they had lost since he resigned as UKIP leader after the Brexit referendum. Since then, Farage has become more mainstream, with Conservative MPs realising that they can’t survive without him. He now has a net positivity rating of +79 among Reform voters, higher than the King.
Despite all the excitement Farage’s return has inflicted on a featureless election, its predetermined outcome, namely a Labour landslide, still stands. What will change is that millions of alienated, apathetic voters will vote in their droves for Farage’s party. This presents a significant challenge to the Blairite paradigm, one that has led some to predict an eventual Prime Minister Farage. Of course, this depends on the Conservative Party's destruction and subsequent displacement by a new centre-right organisation, Reform. This requires a Labour supermajority, one big enough to vaporise all traces of the legacy Conservative Party from existence. Whilst this would theoretically necessitate more years of managed decline under the Blairite paradigm, it is a price worth paying in the eyes of middle England voters. Especially if it leads to dismantling the disease of Blairism, the ideology responsible for the abolition of our once adversarial Parliament.
Image: Flickr
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