Land’s End

“Remember,” Nigel Farage said in late July in his office near Parliament, “I am the moderate…reasonable…democratic…experienced…grown-up face of the fightback. If I lose, just you wait.”

For nearly 30 years, Farage (rhymes with “barrage”) has been the most influential British voice of what he calls the fightback, and his detractors call populism. At the turn of this century, as a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), he fought to “save the pound” at a time when London elites hoped to abandon England’s ancient currency for the European Union’s Euro. The pound survived, and in 2010 the Euro crashed. Almost alone among top politicians back then, Farage called for Britain to leave the E.U. outright. By 2016, a majority of his countrymen agreed. They broke their European ties in the so-called Brexit referendum, even if three years of parliamentary and judicial chicanery delayed Britain’s exit till 2020. (See “Why Hasn’t Brexit Happened?,” Summer 2019.) Winsome, bibulous, half-prophet and half-clown, he has a habit of being vindicated.

Farage has been warning for a decade that immigration—rather than economic growth or global warming or animal rights—is the issue that will determine whether Brexit succeeds and Britain survives. The signs are not good. To its population of 69 million the United Kingdom has been adding almost a million migrants each year, overwhelmingly from outside of Europe. Tens of thousands of them are smuggled onto the country’s south coast in motorized “small boats,” which authorities have proved unable or unwilling to stop. Skippers used to hit the beaches at high speed, sending unknown young men running up streets and scattering across fields. Lately, they have entered port in a more orderly way. There’s no reason not to. Migrants render themselves undeportable by applying for political asylum, confident of being swiftly released into British society whether their application is approved or not. Thirteen boats arrived in Dover alone on one afternoon in late July, just as Donald Trump was landing in Scotland to open a golf course. The Times of London bannered across its front page: “Trump Flies in to Warn: Migration is Killing You.”

Even the large part of the British population that deplores Trump tends to agree. A frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago during the president’s four years in the wilderness, Farage has become a national darling. His Reform UK, Britain’s newest political party, won seats for him and four others in last year’s elections, taking 14% of the vote. It has grown swiftly and steadily since, now commanding the allegiance of 31% of the electorate. That is way ahead of the country’s fragmented Conservative Party, which stands at 17%, having lost more than two-thirds of its parliamentary seats after Boris Johnson, having won Brexit,  opened the floodgates to immigration. Reform is also way ahead of Labour, which in last year’s election, due to the mismatch of the British two-party electoral system with a four-party field, won an invincible parliamentary majority (412 of 650 seats) with just a third of the vote (33.7%). That huge majority has radicalized Labour at a time of growing conservatism, making Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government less popular with every passing month. It now has the backing of just 22% of the country. According to Matthew Goodwin, a sociologist formerly at the University of Kent who has abandoned academia to join Farage’s movement, Reform commands a majority of those who voted for Brexit in 2016 and a third of those who voted for the Conservatives last year. It is the top party among the working classes and the top party among men. And this despite a dire shortage of top-level talent at the level below Farage, not to mention Farage’s own clumsiness in managing his party’s growing right wing.

Though the strength of Reform is not surprising, the upshot is shocking. On current trends, British voters could very soon destroy Britain’s venerable Conservatives (by some reckonings the oldest political party in the world), along with its two-party system and part of its social contract—the part that, since the Cold War, has been built on porous borders and imported notions of human rights. That so many in Britain have grown comfortable with the prospect of systemic demolition may reflect the influence of Trumpism. Or it may be a harbinger of something even more disruptive.

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