At the Green Party’s by-election HQ, a former hairdressers’ overflowing with boxed leaflets and donated snacks, we shared weird stories about Reform UK from Denton and Gorton’s doorsteps. My partner in door-knocking had three Reformers come to her door; two stayed completely silent while an over-excited man launched immediately into a rehearsed speech about how he used to be a Labour supporter until he saw social housing being given to groups of “military-aged” Asian men. Others told me of how their supporters would yell the party’s name at them through letterboxes (“Reform!”) as if it were a curse.
It is safe to say that Reform’s activists can be odd ducks. And these anecdotes – hardly definitive; all political parties attract misfits – are reflective of a broader issue for the radical right. The election of the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer in Gorton and Denton has overturned one of the just-so stories of British politics: that if a general election were held tomorrow Nigel Farage would become prime minister. That can no longer be taken for granted. Part of that is because voters rejected hate in favour of hope. But the part that the mainstream press is much less likely to speak about is that Reform are simply weird and off-putting – not only on the personal level, but also the political.
There were many serious reasons to oppose Reform in general and their candidate, Matthew Goodwin, in particular. Those who know him claim he is ruthlessly ambitious and driven by a thirst for recognition, which is far easier to come by in the largely standards-free right-wing than his former home on the left, where one is expected to maintain intellectual and personal standards. One of Goodwin’s campaign managers was suspended days before the election after claims of anti-Semitism. Goodwin for his part has previously argued that people who don’t have children should pay more taxes, while conservative defector Danny Kruger has spoken of Britain living under an “unregulated sexual economy”. Reform ran a controversial campaign that nearly saw Goodwin fined for a “printing error”. Since the defeat, they have resorted to blaming the results on a Islamo-communist alliance in which hard-line Muslim patriarchs force their wives to vote for a female atheist and, by extension, a gay Jew (without this pressure, the argument goes, they would have voted Reform). Kemi Badenoch and the right-wing press have eagerly echoed this framing.
And yet as much as they are dangerous, the far right are always equally silly. Many people’s introduction to Matthew Goodwin came when he ate a book on live TV. On his native land of X, he speaks in ominous one-sentence paragraphs, like an anime villain giving product marketing tips on LinkedIn. Former colleagues describe him as “aggressive, brittle and deeply insecure“, particularly when it comes to his intellectual abilities. His attempt to become a serious right-wing intellectual, the book Values, Voice and Virtue, reheated the usual pabulum about the dreaded “professional managerial class” while roundly ignoring empirical evidence that didn’t back up his anodyne claims. It was lifeless compared to truly unhinged post-liberal tracts like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed or Catherine Liu’s 90-page shitpost Virtue Hoarders, hence why it had little pull even within the think-tank set. His follow-up, Bad Education, would be a hilarious ironic portrait of a man unable to accept that he is a mediocre thinker if it was presented as fiction. As non-fiction it is just rather sad. He is at once far too goofy for general consumption and yet too sensible for the truly rabid far-right crowd. He is a poster, not a politician, and not a very compelling one.
Like so many people on the extreme right, he is deeply camp, and completely oblivious to how unserious he sounds to normal people. Ordinary people simply do not talk about “regulating the sexual economy”. Pro-natalism is not a position that even 1 per cent of 1 per cent of voters hold. It is a language for those who know their OrthoBros from their Dimes Square Neoreactionaries, their Pepe from their Groyper. These are not things that you will encounter if you are, say, a plumber and councillor who wants to reduce fly-tipping. They are phantasms that exist entirely in digital spaces. Goodwin and his door-knockers made the mistake of thinking that you can seamlessly transition from X to the real world, and their dismal electoral showing is the result.
This is an electoral liability for Reform, and may prove to be their undoing. They are already being outflanked on the right by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, a party even more mired in online fever-swamps. Their recent launch video filtered UKTV Gold nostalgia through the terrorwave aesthetic popular with online accelerationist groups. Restore’s leader frequently talks about foreign “orcs” invading the “Shire”. This is language and imagery calibrated to siphon off Reform’s younger, more online and more obviously fascist supporters, and Reform has no reply for it. In online arguments you don’t win by taking the relatively sensible, moderate position; you win by ratcheting up extremity under a fig-leaf of ironic detachment until your opponent looks like a “low T beta” for not supporting the deportation of millions of people.
As I’ve argued in these pages before, the aesthetics of the very online right appeal to small numbers of fanatical shut-ins, not a broad electoral coalition. Reform, like Ukip before them, have been buoyed by a British press determined to let Nigel Farage play on easy mode. But he appears to be the only figure in the party that anyone has any affection for, and then only as a figurehead for general dissatisfaction with the two formerly mainstream parties. In reality, he breaks down when subjected to even the most basic questioning. As a person, as opposed to an empty signifier, he loses all appeal.
That is the problem Reform will face going forward. They work as an avatar of formless dissatisfaction. But to be a political force they need MPs, activists, canvassers, door-knockers. The people they can find to fill those roles will inevitably be extremely strange. Manchester is not a conventional city: our biggest cultural exports may have been the meat-and-potatoes rock of Oasis and mum-approved pop of Take That, but we also produced The Fall, John Cooper Clarke, Frank Sidebottom, Caïna and Mandy, Indiana. We can do weird, but the cool type of weird that creates something new, the way Factory Records, Dostoyesky Wannabe or Gondwana Records have. Matthew Goodwin is not that. He’s not even from Manchester. And voters reacted accordingly.
[Further reading: Going native]
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Subscribe here to commentWhen I was young, I was into extreme sports and PS2 PlayStation games. I had all sorts of millennial lingo on the go.
My mother would be present for some seemingly simple conversations and inform me that she understood nothing of what I said.
When I entered university, I started to understand advanced, philosophical language. Sometimes mixed with French, Greek, Latin even.
I thought I had conquered the English language from slang to soliloquy.
Yet, this article is like seeing the words I think I know, form up into a jumble of puzzles that then fade into a haze in my mind.
That’s not to say this article was not well written. On the contrary, I think it’s to say that I realise what it is like to feel old.