From the Election to Today: Are Nigel Farage and Reform Blowing the Chance of a Populist Revolution in Britain?

Unlike Miliei in Argentina or Trump in America, Reform are Conforming, and That’s Not What Voters Want.

Looking at the trends since the British 2024 election, it would be easy to think that the leadership of the Reform Party were doing a magnificent job. While the election secured only 5 MPs for the new party challenging the Two Party hegemony of Labour and Conservative which has dominated British politics for the last century, the popular vote told an entirely different story. From a base of very recent creation, Reform secured 4.1 million votes. For full context, the Labour Party swept to power with a gigantic majority on not much more than double the Reform performance. Where 4.1 million votes secured only 5 MPs for Reform, 9.7 million votes secured 411 MPs for the Labour Party.

The difference between the Reform end results and the Labour formation of a government with a huge majority (172 more MPs than any other party) was a startling indicator of the flaws and injustices of the existing first past the post system. Britain’s voting system, where overall number of votes are irrelevant and only coming first in each constituency matters, inherently favours the two main established parties, which is why even when the British electorate are deeply disillusioned with both the prize of electoral victory still passes back and forth between the same two parties.

For a third part to triumph it essentially has to work many times harder than one of these two established parties. The obvious injustice of the system is disguised if the two main parties seem significantly different or if one is genuinely popular with the majority of the public at that particular point. When the two main parties look and sound different and support different policies, that gives the sense that a range of public opinion is being reflected and genuine alternatives have a chance to get into power. Or when one party has had a period of rule and is firmly rejected, that usually comes with a sense that the incoming rival party represents a genuine change and has some significant proportion of public support.

In the 2024 British election none of this applied and the full injustice of the current political system was laid bare. Just after the election the BBC published a chart indicating the disparity in the ratio of votes required to secure an MP for different parties in the election. These are the figures they published for the two main parties and for Reform:

Labour Vote Share: 34% Labour Share of MPs: 64%

Conservative Vote Share: 24% Conservative Share of MPs: 19%

Reform Vote Share: 14% Reform Share of MPs: 1%

In other words Labour disproportionately secured seats in Parliament, actual power, compared to their share of the vote. They ended up with nearly twice as many MPs as their share of the vote would secure in a completely balanced and fair outcome. The Conservatives as the main party coming second secured slightly below their share of the vote, but still obtained a pretty fair reflection of how many people voted for them. It’s the Reform result thar is truly and starkly unjust. They secured 14 times fewer MPs than their share of the popular vote would secure if the system was reflecting the popular vote. The injustice doesn’t just apply to Reform as a political party. It applies to the millions of people who voted for them. 14% of the public gained just 1% of the representation in Parliament.

What this means is that it took far more votes for Reform to secure one MP than it took for Labour to secure one MP. Nearly a million people had to vote Reform for every MP they secured. By contrast Labour needed just 23,600 votes for every MP they secured. This made the gap between the popular vote and the results obtained the largest since 1918. It was a grossly disproportionate outcome. The scale of that disproportionate outcome can be expressed in a number of different ways. It becomes evident for example when you compare the results with what would have happened under a proportional representation system. Under that, the results would have been vastly different, especially for Reform and Labour:

“A purely proportional system - where national vote share translated exactly into the number of seats - in 2024 would have given Labour about 221 seats and no majority. The Tories would have had 156 seats, Reform 91, the Liberal Democrats 78 and the Greens 45.”

The most likely outcome there would have been a Labour Party with no outright majority having to enter a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats, as David Cameron’s Conservatives did in the Cameron-Clegg alliance following the 2010 election and up until the 2015 election which saw a Conservative majority and a Lib Dem near wipeout as their core voters punished them for aligning with the Conservatives and betraying some core Liberal Democrat policies. But such a government would have been much weaker and found it much harder to push through the extreme policies that the current Labour government is enacting. There would also have been the possibility of a Conservative-Reform Coalition, which again would be weaker than a pure majority one party government but would have been very much to the Right of the current Labour administration.

What allowed such a stunningly disproportionate result in 2024? The reality was that both main parties were unpopular going into that election. The Conservatives were widely detested having governed with very mixed results for 14 years. They were the party in power during COVID and the party that was considered responsible for all economic damage that followed from COVID policies. Rishi Sunak, Chancellor during COVID and Prime Minister in 2024, was the man who announced the worst economic damage for 350 years while he was Chancellor.

The bland, centrist Liberalism of the post Thatcher Conservative Party had long since abandoned most of an actually conservative platform of rule. They didn’t stand for small government and personal liberty, and most of them didn’t stand for national sovereignty and against the EU either. They didn’t speak against wokeness and they didn’t oppose Globalist or foreign interference in UK affairs. They tore themselves apart on Brexit, with the Cameron and then May leaderships being either fully Remain or wanting a diluted version of Brexit that satisfied nobody. They only did well in the 2019 election thanks to the public finally believing they would deliver it under Boris Johnson, and thanks to Johnson having at least some populist charisma compared to his anodyne or off-puttingly robotic colleagues. That goodwill all evaporated when they delivered a weak Brexit and a COVID Globalist set of insanities. Infighting that essentially saw a gradual Remain and Establishment recapture of the senior posts in government represented just the last stage of errors begun under David Cameron.

By the time of the 2024 election the Conservatives had nothing conservative to offer. They were managerial Globalists, providing exactly the same policies and errors as any officially leftist party would provide. As people became increasingly frustrated with governments that ignored them and ignored the interests of ordinary people, as the whole western world underwent a radical realignment where populist and nationalist voices came to be the sole protectors of the average majority, the Conservative Party in the UK was trapped in an old paradigm, still terrified of being called Far Right and still attempting to emulate Blairism long past the point where everyone hated that too.

One of the consequences of a system which inherently favours two established parties is that these parties increasingly become the same thing, a UniParty with the same interests which are separate to the interests of their voters. Partly this is the consequence of deliberate corruption as all these figures are purchased by donors and corporate interests or nurtured by the Deep State and told what policies they are allowed to support. But partly it’s a purely social and class phenomenon as these people all attend the same schools, do the same degrees at the same universities, work in the same limited industries if they ever work at a real job at all, and form the same opinions from the same narrow set of experiences. A few working class oiks will be scattered around here and there to suggest a broader representation in Parliament, but these individuals (especially on Labour benches) will invariably be intellectually stunted chancers who are out to grab personal gifts and bribes just as much, if not more, than their better spoken ‘rivals’.

Another way in which the Two Party system, especially when combined with first past the post voting, provides a UniParty experience is because whenever one party is ousted their first explanation of defeat and their first strategy of recovery is always to emulate the party that beat them. A Labour government that loses assumes it has to be more like the Conservatives to win, and a Conservative Party that loses assumes it has to be more like the Labour Party to win. Meanwhile both have abandoned their original core voters and their original principles and never consider returning to those as a path to victory at all.

The Conservative Party that was in power between 2010 and 2024 was one shaped by this fundamental misapprehension of what gets a party into power and keeps a party in power. Unity, competence, and doing what the majority of the public want are what really wins free and fair elections. At the point where Tony Blair had become hated, David Cameron adopted Blairism on behalf of the Tory Party. He and his analysts took on the entire package of Globalism, none of which has any conservative elements and all of which despises listening to the public and acting on public wishes as an evil thing called Populism. They tottered through 14 years of rule on the sole basis that Labour were even more obviously worse, and their rule ended with them only once accidentally grasping a populist and popular truth when Boris Johnson’s personal ambition noticed that Brexit might make him Prime Minister.

When we look at the career of Nigel Farage what we see is the direct result of the Conservatives and the Labour Party becoming a Uniparty offering no options and no hope to those unhappy with the status quo. For the millions of people in Britain who didn’t like the EU and didn’t like Britain following commands from abroad Farage became the lightning rod of resistance. On Brexit and on the EU Farage showed a brilliant campaign instinct and a brilliant and forthright refusal to moderate his language, follow the Establishment line, and act with politeness and deference towards those who treated the idea of British sovereignty with scorn. His speeches in the EU as an MEP and his campaigns in the UK itself showed just how effective plain talking in a populist cause could be, forcing the reluctant and Globalist Conservatives to finally offer a referendum and a say on the EU to the British people in 2016.

Wherever the topic was the EU, Farage was both the most skilled campaigner in the UK and the most ardent and seemingly sincere populist. That’s why he was so effective, because he knew that whatever the frenzied and indoctrinated middle classes might think, whatever the university educated metropolitan or media and political ruling classes might think, the majority of British people were either indifferent to the EU or resentful towards it. On this topic alone Farage said what those disillusioned and ignored people said and thought, without apologies, without a false politeness, without any fear regarding what he would be called in response. While both the Cameron Conservative leadership and the Labour and Liberal Democrat Partied offered slavish devotion to the EU, Farage and UKIP provided the only populist alternative, the only party and leadership that offered a different choice and an escape from the EU.

It’s interesting to compare Farage’s trajectory since then with that of Donald Trump. In 2016 both looked like consummate populists pulling off spectacular victories against the consensus Uniparty assumptions of the ruling class. Farage of course supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, the two developed a personal friendship, and the two suffered similar demonisation from the media and from globalist and progressive sources. A Farage and Brexit promise of the revival of British sovereignty and freedom of choice, combined with the potential of a fully pursued Brexit making the UK more competitive and successful than EU nations, suggested that Faragism might be the British version of Trumpism, that Make Britain Great Again might entail the same populist policies, the same prioritisation of your own people and your own economy, that MAGA offers to Americans in the US.

Farage has had two vehicles with which to deliver on this hope now, first UKIP and then Reform. And Trump has provided the perfect template to follow. On the surface Farage and Reform have done that and it has given them success. The 2024 UK election result was as unjust and as unreflective of real votes as the 2020 US election steal by massive fraud was. In Britain the fraud was already baked into the system through vote share and seats gained potential disparities. The huge Labour landslide was not a huge vote in favour of Labour. They got 34% of the cast votes but 64% of Parliament. One third became two thirds. And when you look at the number of people who didn’t vote at all, it becomes even more obvious that this was not an endorsement of Labour, or even a mandate for Labour. By that metric, only 20% of the eligible to vote Brirish population voted Labour. 80% of people did not want them.

The disproportionate result already discussed came not from Labour popularity but from Tory collapse and Reform success. The vote of the Right was split between those who kept with the Conservatives despite all their Globalist errors and those who went to Reform looking for real conservatism and an actual choice. There was no electoral pact or tactical voting on the Right. Conservative votes reduced what Reform could achieve and Reform votes reduced what the Conservatives could achieve. On the Left, though, so far as those old labels still work, Lib Dem votes didn’t hurt Labour and Labour votes didn’t hurt the Lib Dems because both sets of voters voted tactically. Where Labour had the best chance, Lib Dem voters backed them, and where Lib Dems had the best chance, Labour voters backed them. Not all, but in sufficient numbers to make tactical votes count. Reform got over 100 2nd place finishes in Constituencies across the country because of the way the vote on the Right was split and the way the vote on the Left mitigated a split with tactical voting to keep out Reform.

The effect was a stolen election result that didn’t require massive electoral fraud to be stolen. Tactical voting, the split on the Right, and the inherent flaws in the first past the post system achieved what ballot harvesting, postal voting vulnerability to fraud, and Dominion machines achieved in the US in 2020. Keir Starmer got into power whilst hated, with the alleged excuse that Rishi Sunak was hated more. Labour did not increase their vote from prior elections which they had comprehensively lost, they simply benefited from the peculiarities of the British system to an enormous extent, whilst Reform in the other direction unfairly suffered.

It could be argued of course that all parties compete under the same system and know that strangely disproportionate results are possible. But that downplays just how extreme the injustice of the result was for Reform voters and how unearned Labour’s vast majority really was. When results are this divorced from votes, it makes a mockery of the entire idea that what is being offered is a free and fair election or a representative democracy led by a government with a real mandate. The way Labour have governed since has only confirmed that sense of them being a party that fluked their way into power, having never attained the level of support that makes a government legitimate.

The disproportionality of the result really stripped bare the brokenness of the system, just as earlier Labour and Conservative Uniparty efforts to reverse Brexit did in a different way. For the kind of voter inclined to vote either Reform or Conservative what they could see was that the mainstream party of the Right consistently failed to deliver what they wanted and asked for, while the alternative party of the Right was massively underrepresented even when they did listen, leaving millions of voters with no say in the system and no sense of fairness in the results. The rightwing voter saw that his vote was worth perhaps one fourteenth of the value of a leftwing or centrist vote, a situation thar made a mockery of ‘democracy’ even before wider issues like media bias and external Globalist pressure were taken into account.

Labour’s actions in power have been spectacularly clueless and have very closely followed the model of the Biden administration in the US, or of the Trudeau government in Canada. Reform’s position of only obtaining 5 MPs was not, in the context of what then unravelled, as bad as it first appeared. A nominal presence in Parliament gave them the opportunity to speak and act on the biggest stage, rather than merely as hecklers from the fringes. But such a small presence meant they could easily avoid being tainted with the label of being just like the rest and retained the increasingly valuable designation of outsiders when the vast majority of people view all of Westminster with loathing. The combination of disgust at the disproportionate election result, continuing distrust of the traditional party of the Right and its supine weakness when facing Globalist and progressive demands not backed by most people, and Labour’s immediate extremism in power set perfect conditions for a huge populist revolt.

Like the Biden administration, Starmer’s government took a controversial win as a truly resounding mandate when it was nothing of the sort. Like the Biden administration, the Starmer one signalled immediately that it would prioritise everyone except its own citizens. Like the Biden administration it confected a Reichstag Fire style excuse for a dictatorial and insane clamp down on dissident voices, using the Stockport Riots in exactly the same way the Biden administration used J6. It showed that it would govern in a Marxist manner, criminalising thought and speech it didn’t like and abandoning all pretext of equal treatment under the law so thoroughly and obviously that Starmer earned the nickname Two Tier Kier. Like Biden, Starmer gave a series of public speeches and addresses castigating a significant proportion of the country as Far Right thugs, racists, and Nazis simply for being angry at yet another murder of innocent children by yet another immigrant (2nd generation this time) killer. As fresh revelations regarding 30 or 40 years of Pakistani Muslim rape gangs in Britain emerged after that, Labour again showed their despicable nature by refusing an inquiry and by once more labelling all discussion of the issue ‘Far Right’.

All this came on top of other Labour tone-deaf and popularity-averse moves like removing a winter fuel allowance for pensioners when they themselves had in opposition stated that doing so would lead to thousands of extra and early deaths each year. The public were fully capable of contrasting this citizen slaying penny pinching with the standard Globalist largesse on Net Zero, Ukraine, and foreign aid. Labour’s already low popularity sunk further as external commentators and British ones marvelled at the spectacle of a major nation swiftly destroying itself, sacrificing its own children on an altar of diversity, driving grandfathers to suicide with unjust imprisonments, and instituting the kind of levels of speech and thought control normally seen only in Third World dictatorships. The 14 years of Tory incompetence and refusal to deliver were still fresh in people’s minds, and the tyrannical and morally loathsome priorities and actions of Labour firmly established that both main parties deserve to be hated.

Reform’s share of the vote, predictably, rose. Some polls have shown them just 1% behind Labour, some have shown them ahead. They have overtaken the Conservatives in both share of the vote and size of the party membership. In other words, an election held today could, if the results were more in line with vote share, deliver a Reform government. With that happening, it might seem that Reform have been doing a good job. But really my personal view is that the way Labour have governed since the election, and the way the Tories governed before that, represents the biggest open goal imaginable for a third party to finally break through to a level that overcomes the inherent bias in the system towards the two main parties. There is a tipping point where one or both of the main parties have declined so much that a third party has a genuine chance and the public can see that they have a genuine chance. This has to be visibly a possibility to the voter on the street. Thanks to Labour’s governance and prior Tory failure, that time is now.

People are crying out for an alternative. People detest both the main parties. Both the main parties retain a rump of their old vote but chunks can break away, as Labour’s Red Wall did in 2019 to the Conservatives and as nearly half the Conservstive vote did to Reform in 2024. Reform’s task then was to offer a sense of genuine difference, to do things differently to the two main parties, to ride that wave of disgust, to look like they were genuinely listening to those the main parties either ignored or, more shockingly still, imprisoned for thought crimes. The pollster Matt Goodwin has reiterated again and again how the old loyalties have shifted and how a populist alternative to the two main parties is the only route to power for a third party. He and others have shown that Uniparty positions, Globalist positions, are deeply disliked whether they come from Labour or from the Conservatives.

What was Reform’s template of real success? It was Trump’s period in the wilderness during the Biden administration. Did Trump worry about being called racist or Far Right? He did not. He got more of that dishonest and hysterical criticism than anyone else, and didn’t change a single policy or a single aspect of his presentation because of it. The more it was thrown at him and the more he ignored it, the more popular he got. Because most people know it’s a lie. Most people know it’s an Establishment line designed solely to control who is allowed in power. Trump never compromised his core values. He never abandoned his core voters. He never changed his presentation, appearance or language. He doubled down on Trumpism, populism and the things attracting insane levels of hatred from Democrats. And he showed courage throughout, leading up to and long before that iconic moment of the failed assasination attempt. That refusal to budge on his attitude to the border or his style of argument or his other key positions (like energy independence and smart protectionism and tariff battles, or like his distaste for unnecessary wars) projected strength and leadership. It drew in people who began to acknowledge the actions against Trump as hysteria and tyranny (especially in terms of the lawfare cases).

It is that strength of character, commitment to populism, refusal to budge or be broken or submit, that explains how Trump was able to overcome all other adversities and adversaries, including the glaring error of having been deceived and manipulated on COVID and being unable to admit that. The Trump voter knew that Trump could make mistakes, but also that he could not be broken or purchased. All this was sitting there as an example to Farage and Reform, a playbook to follow. They saw that through staying populist, staying himself, sticking to the plain language and common sense policies and America First agenda no matter what, Trump triumphed. They saw that he even managed to draw in disillusioned Democrats without compromising any of his core principles in the process.

But neither Farage nor Reform seem to have understood the populist lessons of Trump’s success and journey back from the theft of 2020. To follow the Trump template they should have totally seized on the disgusting betrayal of white working class children by Labour and to a lesser extent by the Conservatives when that re-emerged. They should have shown that they are different to the rancid cesspool of political correctness and Westminster elite blindness that worries more about ‘community relations’ and polite language than about child victims of industrial scale rape and abuse. Incredibly, Farage let class snobbery and fear of being called racist determine his responses, just like a David Cameron or Theresa May would have. He couldn’t stop himself condemning Tommy Robinson just like the main parties, which only plays well to people who would never vote Reform anyway and which disgusts people who want a real alternative to the mainstream moral sewer. By doing so, he also managed to alienate Elon Musk-the exact opposite of what Trump did. Instead of an incredibly powerful allied voice in the worlds richest man, Farage and Reform delivered a weak, Islam friendly response that horrified people who would vote for them, infuriated a potential foreign ally, and would not gain them a single vote from the only people who like attacks on Tommy Robinson, the progressive Left.

It was a monumental blunder. All the instincts Farage has for the common touch and the populist way on Brexit seem to desert him entirely on wider social issues. He has a real history of being pathetically weak on Islam and surprisingly worried about what the BBC or C4 will think of him when those media outlets and the politics they reflect will always despise and be unfair towards him and anyone who backed Brexit. Farage and Reform seem to think they can escape the Far Right label by denouncing Robinson and alienating Musk, but all that signals is a Tory style weakness most of us have long since lost patience with. Combine that with now approaching Charlie Mullins as a Reform candidate and it is easy to begin to wonder if Farage is deliberately trying to squander the opportunity for a real populist surge. For those who don’t know, Mullins is a minor millionaire businessman with zero charisma and a big mouth, who was virulently pro COVID tyranny and a massive supporter of the EU. The US equivalent would be something like Trump picking Liz Cheney as one of his 2nd term team choices.

Britain is crying out for a populist leader who like Trump never buckles. Musk may well be right that Farage is not that man.