Nigel Farage will not be Prime Minister
In the last few weeks there has been a lot of talk about the likelihood of the Reform UK party gaining power in the UK in the next few years, about the government or various MPs having to stand down, and about Elon Musk spending a large amount of money on winning an election for Nigel Farage and putting him into 10 Downing Street at some time in the near future. All of this is ludicrous, ignorant talk from people who do not know much about politics here. Some of it is braggartry, some of it is scaremongering and some of it is driven by real fears. There has been fuel poured on the fire by a petition calling for a new general election which, although it gained enough votes to merit a debate in parliament, was dismissed out of hand, giving people in right-wing echo chambers on both sides of the Atlantic a pretext to tell each other how “out of touch” the government is and how much contempt the “metropolitan liberal elite” hold for “real people”. All nonsense.
To take the petition first, it’s not the largest petition that has been presented to parliament and not the largest to have been dismissed. In the wake of the 1832 Catholic Emancipation Act, there was an enormous petitioning effort to oppose the act, which granted Catholics the vote. It was widely believed that doing this would allow Catholics to undo the Reformation and use the state to persecute Protestants as heretics. The Romantic poet Robert Southey, for example, wrote that he supported granting the vote to other non-Anglicans, “Jews and all”, but not to Catholics as “they will not tolerate”. The petition (according to the historian Linda Colley the biggest petition in British political history, although she wrote before Brexit) was disregarded and the Spanish Inquisition never showed up. More recently, millions signed petitions to hold a second referendum on Brexit or just disregard the first. They too were disregarded, not least as neither gained as many signatories as the vote to leave in the 2016 referendum. The reason millions signed the anti-Brexit petition was because everyone could see what a disaster leaving the EU was becoming. This petition has so far gained nearly three million signatures, which will mean a debate (on 6th January), but there will be no general election as we have just had one, and the fact that the people who opposed the winning party before the election still oppose them is not a reason to call another.
As for the prospect of a Reform government, this overlooks the fact that the party, which has traded as UKIP and Brexit Party in previous elections (the rump of UKIP still exists, but when Farage moved, so did his supporters), has never polled 15% in any election. With Nigel Farage as leader, UKIP polled 12.6% in the 2015 election; after he stepped down, they slumped to 1.8% in 2017. In 2019, Farage’s Brexit Party did not field candidates against pro-Brexit Tories, resulting in a vote share of only 2%. This time, they scored 14.3% but won only five seats, a well-known artefact of the First Past The Post electoral system which rewards local majorities, not thinly-spread votes across the country. The party has a history of its MPs being former Tories who defected, as with Douglas Carswell in Clacton (now represented by Farage) and more recently Lee Anderson in Ashfield (in Nottinghamshire); it does not have councillors on any of the county or district councils where they currently have MPs. Indeed, it has no history of service in local government at all, an important training ground for people seeking to run for parliament and an important means for parties to build connections with local communities, nor do many of its current parliamentarians have any real connection to the areas they purportedly serve. For example, Rupert Lowe, now MP for Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, owns a farm in Gloucestershire, had stood in a by-election in Kingswood, a suburb of Bristol, in February 2024, had previously been an MEP for the West Midlands, had stood for Cotswold as a Referendum Party candidate in 1997, and has also owned Garforth Town football club (a West Yorkshire non-league side) and been chairman of Southampton FC. So, he gets about (though his base appears to be Gloucestershire).
Farage and his cheerleaders are known for harping on their status as outsiders, as being champions of “real people”, as being apart from the “liberal elite” and free of so-called “luxury beliefs”. In fact, Farage, Lowe and Richard Tice are all privately educated men with a background in the finance industry. Their MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock in Essex, James McMurdock, though educated at a state school, also worked in banking for 17 years before being elected. Only Lee Anderson really comes from a working-class background and has a real link with the area he serves. Any time they talk about so-called elites, they are referring to intellectuals, not to the super-rich or the financial elite who have been the cause of much impoverishment and suffering over the past twenty years or so with the 2008 crash and the financier-dominated Tory austerity government. Reform’s supporters are emboldened by Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, but Farage is not as wealthy as Trump, nor as famous, and unlike Trump does not have the backing of a major party. He is more comparable to Ross Perot, a businessman who ran an anti-NAFTA presidential campaign in 1992 and won 19% of the popular vote (more than Farage has ever polled), though this did not translate into any electoral college votes.
The government elected last July has four and a half years left to run. During that time, they can make an impression and show the public how they respond to any crisis that arises. The Tories had that opportunity in 2020 with the Covid outbreak, and blew it, despite entering on a high and getting their main election promise out of the way in the first couple of months. There is an awful lot to criticise Keir Starmer and his government for, but the things the Faragists and some of the Tories attack him for, such as not divulging confidential information about a police investigation and not just holding a general election at their demand, are right and proper. The Faragists’ platform is their media, such as Talk TV and GB News, which gives them the opportunity to pretend to themselves that they are the majority; in fact, the Tories and Reform combined won only 38% of the vote in the election and were outpolled by Labour and the Lib Dems combined at 45.9%. Farage and his cabal have a lot of money (with or without Elon Musk’s contribution) and are able to make a lot of noise, but this does not mean they have a positive contribution to make; Farage is politically a one-trick pony, notorious for diverting every discussion onto immigration, and how much headway he can make with such arguments depends on the circumstances of 2028 or 2029 and how Starmer deals with them.
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