The Trick Question that Elected Reform

Nationalism proved the constant takeaway from 7 May’s local elections. Nationalist parties won in Scotland, Wales and, most perceptively, in England. The clinging gains made by the SNP and the groundbreaking upsurge of Plaid Cymru shot nationalist First Ministers to power, mirroring a similar upsurge from the nationalist Sinn Fein majority in Stormont. One can look at the political makeup of the UK now and see every devolved region seeking to burst out of devolution. And though these parties are, at a closer look, poles apart in history and objective, they’re all emerging from an outward progression. The great contradiction in these wins is that nationalism shines a light on the universal image of these small regions, opening them up to the international community through a newly expressed identity. The main win, in England’s past local elections, exposes something stranger.   

In years to come, people may wonder what Reform UK truly intended with their grassroots, bolstering campaign. Already, temperaments have perked up, that the party has caught a strong fish in the lake and are quickly wrestling it to the surface. Wes Streeting, in his quasi-resignation speech and bid for the Labour leadership, stated that a fight against nationalism is paramount. Andy Burnham will fight a precarious by-election in Makerfield against Reform candidate Robert Kenyon, making what would have been a safe stepping stone to his leadership bid a tough risk. Brash in his message that they’ll “throw everything” into knocking Burnham off his leadership path, Farage and his party have created a new brutality in British public life and practiced it during the local elections. Helping your constituents and bringing people together are not so important; the driving force behind the party’s victory was the strong belief in inequality.   

A practice of this belief occurred a few days ago, as part of the battle for Makerfield. In a charity cafe where Andy Burnham was hosting a celebration for young trainees with additional needs, the Reform leadership burst in. The goal of this stunt was to embarrass Burnham and, if it were an appropriate place, it wouldn’t have been that strange. Shoving cameras in the faces of disabled people and crashing an event where they were supposed to be uplifting themselves makes the cruelty real that the Reform party machine doles out daily on social media. In fact, this small impersonal act of unkindness is an echo of what they said during the local elections. Putting deportation camps in Green controlled constituencies sounds so bizarre that it turns absurd. The media and a lot of the electorate can only muster half-laughs and sly remarks to a policy so utterly undemocratic.   

Lopsided though these indignities may be, but they both circle within the same darkness. It’s a darkness which everyone knows shouldn’t have a place in modern public life and yet festers away. Winning elections by the harm they do, not by the good. If the May elections proved anything, they proved that England today is a deeply divided society. And in a society carved up by class, gender and identity, victories are not solutions. Orwell wrote that his fondest wish for his country was that it be humiliated by nobody and humiliating nobody. The macho vanity of nationalism, Lee Anderson’s swagger and finger pointing and Farage’s common sense takedowns, wriggles out of this essential insecurity. Here, buried underneath Reform’s banality and turquoise blandness, is the trick question that won hearts and minds.  

Reform posits themselves as the future yet by their nature, by their very nature, stand as a guarantee that no future exists.

Tapping into a widespread culture of contentment, they are certainly treating politics and their rapid rise to power with the utmost, if not deranged, seriousness. Media organisations are having to start pre-submitting questions to Reform press conferences. Farage tells stories of women clutching his hands, pleading with him to save Britain’s young girls and has stated many times in televised Commons debates, that Iranian immigration to the UK constitutes a national security emergency. Reform posits themselves as the future yet by their nature, by their very nature, stand as a guarantee that no future exists. England’s ancestor worship: the Royal Family, the House of Lords, large swathes of privately held land is the nation’s quality. Like the reactionary nationalism that marked Northern Ireland for decades, Reform bows down Britain’s wars and its ruling classes. The dominating feeling of zero-sum games and trick questions, that many voted Reform in a sluggish protest rather than out of any idealism, marks this stone-dead party.    

No one back in the coalition days of the early 2010s or even during the Boris phenomenon would’ve seriously suggested leaving the European Court of Human Rights or tearing up the Human Rights Act. However, Reform has stirred up a cruelty fervour, much bigger than the ‘Take Back Control’. The party’s proposed Mass Deportation Bil is something many of the local election voters wouldn’t have known about. Building mass deportation camps, disapplying applicable law, stopping the courts from questioning any decision made by the government. This apparatus for barbarism and terror can only begin in people’s minds. Someone must not only spend hours thinking and writing down, but say to friends, loved ones and party colleagues that this Mass Deportation Bill is the right thing to do. The dangerous nihilism of Reform UK. People, even in the most conservative of countries, cannot continue to engage in a world of nothing, which means nothing. Does Britain want to become a country of trick questions? Or does Reform want to sit down with the other main parties and define what Britain is? Blake said that when we try to become more than men, we become less than beasts. Farage and his party define themselves as transcending the political world. They work for the nation and for the market. They’re bigger than politics and promise the freedom that only the market can bring to the nation. But if this capitalist prosperity can only be gained by degrading people in detention camps, where is the freedom in that?