What is the ideology of Reform UK? “Conservative” fails to reflect its disruptive energy and willingness to defy convention. “Fascist” is an obvious hyperbole, in that the lumpen bigots who make up much of its activist base are hardly a 21st-century Freikorps. “Far right” is a loose designation which also applies to marginal groups like the British National Party or English Defence League. “Populist” is vaguer still, typically invoked by the liberal centre to tarnish its opponents on both sides of the spectrum. Whatever it is, following this week’s elections, from the hair’s-breadth victory in Runcorn to the clean sweep of the Lincolnshire mayoralty, it is now the ascendant politics of the realm. And, as Kemi Badenoch comes under pressure to “unite the right” and strike a deal with Reform, it may eventually consume the Conservative Party of which it was once the parasite.
A more precise term for Nigel Farage’s outlook, which some commentators have used en passant, is “Powellism”. Farage has never been coy about his admiration for the one-time Tory member for Wolverhampton South West, whom he has described as his political hero. When Powell visited his sixth-form college in 1982, the teenage Farage was, in his words, “dazzled… into awestruck silence”. A decade later, Farage had the honour of chauffeuring Powell to campaign for “The U.K.I.P.” – as it was then known – at the 1993 Newbury by-election (he was supposedly given the task because he was the only one of his cohort of Eurosceptic agitators who drove a Mercedes).
Farage subsequently exchanged letters with the octogenarian Powell, trying to get him to endorse Ukip and run for parliament on its ticket. He says that he agrees with the “basic principle” of the “Rivers of Blood” speech – although he concedes that it was a divisive intervention, largely because “using analogies from the classics doesn’t always go down very well”. Yet Powellism has always been more than just a personal pathology; it is a national – specifically English – disorder. Its most acute diagnosis was provided by the Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn, whose essay “Enoch Powell: the New Right” (1970) describes how his particular strain of xenophobia developed in response to the end of empire. Any account of our own reactionary surge must begin with Nairn’s analysis of this imperial diminishment – not least because the UK is today grappling with a very different, and potentially more implosive form of national decline.
Nairn began by observing the misalignment between Britain’s global presence and its domestic strength. “English imperialism could scarcely avoid the most soaring ambition: it possessed so much, and had dominated so much of the world for so long, that its power could not help looking ‘universal’… But on the other hand, the English universal power was incapable even of governing the British Isles, as the Irish proved every few years. The immensity was also empty.” The country had long relied, economically and culturally, on this fragile external structure to the detriment of its internal life.
This imbalance could not be addressed without a project of modernising reform, but the dead weight of British conservatism militated against that prospect. So English nationalism always had a certain void at its heart, lacking both a popular-emancipatory content and a coherent, self-standing nation around which to coalesce. It therefore assumed a purely romantic quality: obsessed with pomp and pageantry, symbols of national greatness with nothing to substantiate them. As the country lost control of its overseas possessions, imperialists like Powell – whose horror at Indian independence was what motivated him to enter politics – retreated into this dreamworld, as a refuge from the new reality of Britain.
What was needed in this context, Powell decided, was for the English to revitalise their mythology – to forge a collective narrative which would restore faith in the nation and allow its citizens to reconnect with their ancestors. Historically, such myths had been galvanised by wartime; fighting to defend the empire or crush the Nazi menace had heightened the power of patriotic symbols, from the flag to the Crown to the Palace of Westminster. But with no urgent threat from the outside, the enemy now had to come from within. Thus did Powell settle on the immigrant as his principal target. “This scapegoat,” wrote Nairn, “was to have the honour of restoring a popular content to English national self-consciousness… by providing a concrete way of focusing its vague but powerful sense of superiority.”
Powellism, in this sense, emerged organically from within the English conservative tradition – engaging in the same myth-making, fetishising the same icons – yet it displayed a belligerent radicalism that was at odds with it. If conservatism functioned as an “instrument of adaptation, a way of absorbing and neutralising change”, Powell had an ardour and inflexibility which was markedly “un-English”. This was true of both his immigration policy and his economic positions, which doggedly opposed constraints on the interests of capital. In each case, Powell insisted that dramatic change was needed to keep everything the same. He tried to gain a mass constituency by contrasting the ferocity of his prejudice with the more tepid sensibility of the establishment – pointing out, not inaccurately, that it was paralysed by the country’s post-imperial predicament. In so doing, he prompted that establishment to move steadily to the right.
The continuities with Farageism are plain to see: an obsession with the symbols of Englishness (not just the monarchy and St George’s cross, but the pint of bitter and the tweed flat cap); a plan to restore “national pride” which amounts to little more than hardening the borders and strengthening big business; a set of establishment positions articulated with a fervour that frightens the establishment itself; an oversized ability to influence the political consensus at a time when both Westminster parties are rudderless.
Farage’s politics are also inconsistent in much the same way as Powell’s. He has no desire to change Britain’s growth model – a rentier state with a large, low-wage service sector – yet he abhors the immigration that sustains it. He makes opportunistic demands for more economic nationalism, including public ownership of steel, while lamenting that too many footloose billionaires are leaving the country. Were Reform to come to power, it would surely founder on such contradictions. But in opposition it can continue to confect hysteria about its pet issues, from “small boats” to “two-tier justice”, aware that the government will do nothing to push back.
The historical factors that produced Farageism are, however, distinct from those of its predecessor. Powell was the son of a primary school headmaster who went to public school on a scholarship and then to Cambridge, before rising up the ranks of the military during the Second World War and eventually serving as a brigadier in Delhi. His “poetic” nationalism was influenced by his classical education and cultivated by his first-hand experience of Britain’s presence abroad. Farage, by contrast, is the son of a City stockbroker who skipped university to become a commodities trader when the industry was booming in the early 1980s. His window onto the world was not colonial India but an American investment bank.
This biographical difference says something important about the evolution of the British right. Whereas Powell was formed by the twilight years of empire, Farage’s political origins can be traced to the early days of neoliberalism. For Nairn, the Thatcherite experiment was a paradoxical effort to solve the problem of decline by doubling down on the conditions that created it. If Britain had been overly dependent on its foreign possessions, neoliberalism sought to extend this external orientation: removing any checks on the City as the entrepôt of globalised capital, and consolidating its position as the country’s economic nerve centre. If an ingrained conservatism had previously hampered the prospect of modernisation, Thatcher effectively recast it as the basis for this new economic settlement – using her scolding moralism to enforce market discipline and wean people off the welfare state.
Thatcherism was, in other words, a tacit admission that there was no means of reversing the condition of imperial decline; the only hope was to see it through to its logical conclusion. This implied a break with Powell’s cosmopolitan idea of the British empire – in which, as Nairn writes, the “Old English and grateful brown-skinned multitudes jostled bizarrely together” – and an acceptance of subordination to the American hegemon, which was increasingly imposing its monocultural “values” on the rest of the world. By the 1980s, Powell’s romantic image of national greatness was long gone – replaced with a more modest, and more philistine, conception of Britain’s proper role.
One could describe the gap between Powellism and Farageism in precisely these terms. Both are heavily nostalgic, but whereas the first is haunted by the loss of empire, the second looks back wistfully on the Thatcher era – whose promises of market-led Atlanticist regeneration have now come to naught. Reform is not responding to the atrophy of imperialism but to the crack-up of neoliberalism: feeding off the despondency and enervation left in the wake of this failed experiment. Its greatest source of political oxygen is not the decolonisation of India in 1947, but the Great Recession of 2008: the event that undermined the dream of deregulated finance to which Farage has been devoted ever since he was hawking futures in the Square Mile.
While both ideologies have sought to revive their cherished national myths via racism, then, in Powell’s time national decline was a relatively recent, and seemingly reversible, phenomenon – which helped to legitimise his romantic vision. Today, Britain’s subordinate position in the world-system is the background condition of its political life: the very basis of its neoliberal order. Nothing resembling real sovereignty, let alone supremacy, is on the cards. As a result, there is little romance to contemporary nationalism. Its primary sentiments are rage and despair. The rioters descending on asylum shelters aren’t chanting AE Housman.
The distinction is particularly clear from Powell’s perspective on the US, which he labelled “our terrible enemy” while denouncing the special relationship as an “illusion”. His hostility to America’s rise, as a precondition of Britain’s fall, was so pronounced that at various points it led him to advocate closer ties with Europe – even supporting Harold Macmillan’s initial application to join the European Economic Community in 1961. Nothing could be more alien to Farage, who praises the Anglo-American compact and presents himself as the man to uphold it, recently offering to act as a go-between for Starmer and Trump. His lifelong project to cast off from Europe is not based on any delusion that the UK could act autonomously; it owes more to his neo-Thatcherite view that European integration conflicts with Britain’s obligations as a US satrapy.
Hence the strangely Americanised nature of Farage’s English nationalism: his pledge to “Make Britain great again”, his attacks on “critical race theory”, his conspiracy theories about postal voting; his economic agenda centred on courting transatlantic capital; his near-Floridan suntan. It is a significant irony that many elements of Reform’s programme are foreign imports. For although the Powellite image of England was hollow in its own time, it could at least arouse popular passions when the memory of empire was still fresh. Now its credibility is shattered, and its inheritor must sustain itself, instead, on the fantasies of the Trumpian manosphere.
Of course, the Labour Party is hard at work promoting its own, equally vacant form of nationalism, harking back not so much to Thatcher as to Tony Blair, in the hope that the spirit of Cool Britannia can be recaptured. This has created a striking symmetry between the centrist government and the right-wing opposition, both of which have responded to slow growth and global turbulence by nostalgising a simpler period, characterised by market confidence and Atlanticist zeal. Both have followed Powell in shifting the blame for social ills on to immigrants, yet both have considerably lower expectations for the country: promising, at most, to rewind the clock to an earlier phase of neoliberalism. The impulses of Powellism – escapism, paranoia, nativism – are alive and well. Its political ambition is not.
The question, then, is whether Farage’s politics represent the ultimate horizon for English nationalism in the 21st century, or whether they will turn out to be the precursor to an even more zealous variant. If US influence declines over the coming years (by no means a certainty, but a definite prospect given Trump’s direction of travel), might we see the renewal of a hard-right Anglo-British sovereignism – one that breaks with Farage’s Americanophilia and strives to restore the UK’s position as a great power? If Farage is only Powell’s bastard heir, might he pave the way for a genuine inheritor?
[See also: The English rebel]
Content from our partners
Related
