Reform’s victory shows the Brexit spirit is alive and well

The results of Thursday’s local-council elections not only confirmed the end of the era of the Labour-Tory duopoly; they also showed the consolidation of a significant populist bloc throughout the UK.

This populist bloc first began to emerge during the referendum on European Union membership in 2016. Millions of people were prepared to reject their traditional party affiliations in support of Brexit, and embrace a cultural outlook that was antithetical to that of the ruling elites. It was then that these British patriots started to find their voice. Over the course of the past decade, their voice has become an electoral force that has surpassed the influence of the legacy parties.

At present, it is Reform UK that represents the aspirations of this populist bloc and its largely working-class social base. Unsurprisingly, support for Reform is much higher in wards that voted heavily to Leave than in those that backed Remain.

Furthermore, the relatively impressive polling numbers for Reform in Scotland and Wales indicate that it can no longer be dismissed as a predominantly English party. Indeed, compared with Labour and the Tories, Reform can now claim to be a genuinely national party.

The consolidation of a populist bloc also highlights the emergence of new forms of social polarisation within British society. There are two social spheres that have proved resistant to the spirit of populism – namely, the wealthy and the formally educated sections of society, concentrated as they are in inner, urban areas and university towns. They both regard Reform with a mixture of hatred and fear. This has meant that the traditional political polarisation between left-leaning working-class voters and centrist middle-class ones now takes the form of populism versus technocratic managerial centrism.

In this regard, it’s worth noting that the animosity towards Reform from the mainstream media and representatives of the legacy parties is not merely directed at Nigel Farage and his party’s leadership. It is also directed at Reform’s supporters. They cast the working-class’s patriotism and their identification with national traditions as manifestations of racism and xenophobia. The political and media elites’ hatred for ‘these people’ should be understood as the latest version of the classical anti-democratic contempt for the demos.

In my new book, In Defence of Populism, I focus on what is truly inspiring about populism – namely, its quest for a voice and for social solidarity.

Populism has no doctrinal ambition. Instead, it draws on people’s common sense and experiences. An egalitarian impulse infuses the populist spirit, something its detractors misinterpret as simply anti-elitist and anti-­pluralist. As academics Arthur Borriello, Jean-­Yves Pranchėre and Pierre-­Étienne Vandamme astutely note, this egalitarian impulse is ‘mainly defensive-reactive in nature and rooted in a democratic commonsense, rather than in a fully-fledged ideological worldview aiming at the establishment of a radically new social order’.

Populism affirms democratic common sense. It rests on the conviction that citizens possess the capacity to judge issues and policies that concern them.

Although populism lacks a systematic doctrine, there are certain attitudes and ideals shared by all today’s national-populist movements. Above all, its values are antithetical to those of the political and cultural establishment. As the political theorist Margaret Canovan has pointed out, unlike so-called social movements, populism challenges not just the holders of power, but their ‘elite values’, too – hence, populists tend to be opposed to ‘opinion formers and the media’. Often the populist response to elite values involves a rescuing and defence of the customs and traditions that the technocratic-­managerial class have discarded as outdated.

There have been suggestions that the Greens are also populists, and that their so-called eco-populism is the leftist alternative to Reform. But unlike genuine populists who oppose the values of the cultural elites, the Greens affirm them. This is why they are treated so favourably by the legacy media – because the Greens share the worldview of the cultural and political establishment.

The Green Party’s combination of identitarianism and Islamism bears no relation to populism. Indeed, its outlook directly contradicts the outlook of populism. Bringing together supporters of political Islam and the middle-class young, the Greens are fervently anti-patriotic and consciously hostile to the British way of life. And, as the local-election results show, the Greens really are not as popular as their media cheerleaders would have had everyone believe.

Reform’s triumph is the story of this election. With the emergence of the populist bloc, a durable political realignment favourable to the interests of the British people has become a very real possibility.

Frank Furedi’s In Defence Of Populism is published by Polity later this month.