This is much more than "a protest".
What the elite class get wrong about the revolt erupting in England
Matt Goodwin’s newsletter goes to 78,800 subscribers from 181 countries. Like our stuff? Then for the equivalent of buying us a pint become a paying supporter. Help us make a difference while gaining access to the full archive, exclusive posts, events, discounts, comments and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are pushing back. You can join us on YouTube, Insta, TikTok, X and Facebook.
Over the last few days, England has witnessed one of the most significant political revolts in the entire history of its two-party system. 677 local council seats. Ten councils. Two mayors. And one new Member of Parliament.
That’s what Nigel Farage and Reform UK, a movement founded only four years ago, just won. It really was a remarkable achievement.
Reform won the largest number of votes. It won the largest number of seats. It won overall control of most of the councils that held elections, while pushing many others into ‘no overall control’ by surging into first or second place. And it just finished ahead of the two big parties —Labour and the Tories—that have dominated politics in this country since the early years of the twentieth century.
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) never managed this. The Brexit Party never managed this. The Liberal Democrats have still not managed this. And nor, for that matter, did the Social Democratic Party (SDP), in the 1980s, which despite mounting an impressive challenge against the two-party duopoly never came close to dominating local elections in the way Nigel Farage and Reform just have.
Which leaves Farage —the man who’s been consistently mocked, insulted, and derided by the elite class in this country— as not just the only politician in British history to have won two nationwide elections with two different parties --having won the 2014 and 2019 elections to the European Parliament with UKIP and the Brexit Party, respectively—but the only party leader in modern history to have finished ahead of Labour and the Tories at local elections.
And yet, for much of the last few days the elite class in this country has visibly struggled and failed to make sense of the sheer scale and strength of this revolt.
Consistently, everybody from Kemi Badenoch, who is leading the Tory party into oblivion, to the Financial Times, which has spent the last decade refusing to accept that many people do not want liberal globalism jammed down their throats, have described this revolt as “a protest” and Reform as “a protest party”.
But this is completely and utterly wrong.
Why?
Because, for a start, the word “protest” implies that millions of people out there are merely voting against the system, rather than for something.
It also suggests that these voters are irrational, that they have no clear and coherent motivations of their own, and that Reform is just a short-term ‘blip’, a temporary outburst that will soon disappear once normality resumes.
But this could not be further from the truth.
As anybody who has bothered to look at the evidence knows, Reform voters are not merely reacting against the system –they are voting for something. And this thing is clear, coherent, rational, and entirely legitimate.
They are voting for an end to the extreme policy of mass uncontrolled immigration that’s being imposed on them from above, with no democratic mandate, by an indistinguishable political, cultural, and legacy media elite that has moved sharply to the cultural left over the last two decades and lost touch with the rest of the country.
They are voting for the only thing that makes a nation-state and social contract between the people and their rulers possible and sustainable over the long-term —a nation with strong borders that prioritises the safety and security of its own citizens, and removes foreigners who openly and flagrantly break the rule of law.
They are voting for the only thing that will also ensure people in this country remain willing to support the welfare state and trust the system in the years ahead —a principle of ‘national preference’, whereby it is the hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding majority that is prioritised and rewarded, not those who choose not to work, who do not pay tax, and who do not respect our laws.
It is this principle of national preference, by the way, that would not only ensure our leaders deliver things such as a dedicated, national, statutory inquiry into the rape gangs —the absence of which has now become a powerful symbol of how the political class is no longer willing to prioritise its own people—but also ensure they avoid some of the truly absurd things we are now witnessing in this country, such as the British state using taxpayers’ money to outbid British people in the housing market and prioritise illegal migrants who break our laws.
Nigel Farage’s voters are not simply voting against Westminster —they are voting for an alternative to this shocking sense of unfairness that now defines a country that has long considered fair-play a central aspect of its underlying identity. In this sense, they are voting for the thing they have always known and cherished, but which they now feel is being consistently violated and abused on an almost daily basis.
And at a much broader level, by voting for all these things, Reform voters are also clearly voting for an alternative to the elite consensus that has governed this country, on both the Left and Right, since 1997.
Reform is not just a reaction to Keir Starmer’s remarkably unpopular Labour government that took office last July, even if this government is clearly exacerbating many of the divides that are now opening up in this country.
Reform, more accurately, should be seen as vote for something other than the political, cultural, and media zeitgeist that has been imposed on this country in a highly authoritarian fashion ever since New Labour came to power nearly thirty years ago.
A pro-immigration, pro-globalisation, pro-liberalism, pro-Net Zero, pro-Woke, pro-trans, pro-London, pro-middle-class, pro-graduate consensus among the ruling class that chimes with the values of an elite minority, that at best represent no more than 15 per cent of the country, but angers and alienates the much larger forgotten majority.
It is both amusing and highly symbolic, for example, that the highest share of the vote in the entire country for Nigel Farage and Reform this week came in a ward located within Tony Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield in northeast England.
Why? Because Reform, at root, represents a vote for an alternative to everything that Blair and pretty much everybody who has followed him into Number 10 Downing Street ever since, whether on the Left or Right, imposed on the country.
A big blob of social liberalism and technocratic progressivism mixed with an unfettered celebration of globalisation, identity politics, open borders, mass uncontrolled immigration, and universal liberalism, all of which has not only been backed up with authoritarian overreach (hate laws, non-crime incidents, expanded taboos, and concept creep to try and control and minimise dissent) but has also eroded the once distinctive foundations of this country and left its people deeply demoralised.
Once you grasp that, once you grasp the fact that millions of people in this country now want to vote for a “factory reset”, for an England and a Britain that is no longer defined by this post-1997 revolution, then you begin to grasp the potential that Reform’s revolt has to completely upend and reshape the political landscape.
Indeed, just look at the results of these local elections.
Contrary to the misleading narrative, loved by the left, that Farage and Reform are merely eating off the Tories, Reform on average won 32 per cent in former Labour wards and 32 per cent in Tory ones. It is, in other words, now hitting the entire two-party system. It is punishing everybody who has presided over this elite consensus.
And nor will this revolt disappear as quickly as it has arisen. On the contrary, if you look at the coalition and political map that Farage is now putting together it looks set to remain as a permanent fixture on the landscape for years, maybe decades, to come.
It should be remembered, after-all, that the tendency to view populist parties merely as “protest parties”, first emerged in the 1980s and the 1990s, when scholars across Europe were struggling and largely failing to explain the first significant wave of public support for populist outsiders in post-war Europe.
It was only when these populist outsiders, from the French National Front to the Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party of Austria, turned out to be far more durable and successful that the mainly left-wing scholars who studied them were forced to concede their voters might have clear and coherent motives of their own.
And now the same thing is unfolding in England, even if much of the elite and media class have failed to keep up. Nigel Farage is not leading an ephemeral protest group; he’s become the de facto leader of a much deeper and longer-term realignment of our country’s politics, one that has been a very long time coming.
You can see this, too, in the local election results.
Reform’s vote surged to 45 per cent in the most pro-Brexit seats but fell to 19 per cent in the most pro-Remain seats. It rocketed to nearly 40 per cent in the most blue-collar parts of England but only 19 per cent in the most professional. And it jumped to more than 42 per cent in areas filled with people without degrees but fell below 20 per cent in areas filled with graduates.
What this shows, in other words, is that Nigel Farage and Reform, as I’ve argued before, are now becoming the main beneficiary of the post-2016 political realignment that not only delivered Brexit but also propelled Boris Johnson into Number 10 Downing Street, in 2019, with an enormous majority.
So long as Farage and Reform are zooming in on the same issues that powered this realignment in the past –tapping into people’s entirely legitimate desire for something other than mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, the loss of our national sovereignty to foreign courts and conventions, the imposition of two-tier policies that undermine our country’s long-held belief in equality before the law, and the growing willingness of our political class to prioritise foreign criminals and illegal migrants over tax-paying, law-abiding British citizens—then make no mistake, Farage and Reform will have every chance of winning a parliamentary majority that is just as big as the one Boris Johnson mobilised, in 2019.
Much like how Brexit voters lined up behind the now discredited Boris Johnson, the more this coalition switches to Nigel Farage and Reform, the more they will be able to outflank the Oxford-Cambridge-London-Brighton elite class in a first-past-the-post system and end up in Number 10.
This is because the people who are now voting for Reform are not scattered thinly across the country; they are heavily concentrated in particular areas of the country —across the Red Wall, along coastal England, through the Tory shires and into Wales—which is what is giving Farage such strength in a system that both encourages and rewards this kind of concentrated support.
So, just like in 2019, when the elite class similarly underestimated and laughed at a charismatic populist who (at least then) understood the mood out there, in non-London England, the next general election, as these latest results underline, could deliver a political earthquake that is just as big and just as consequential.
The only question is whether the elite class will realise what is going on before it is too late to do anything about it.
A refreshing shift of allegiances that gives real hope for the future of our nation. So why am I increasingly worried? Because I fear that the Labour Party will accelerate their hateful and damaging policies realising that two terms is increasingly unlikely.
Because I fear that they will move to class Reform as a " Far Right" organisation akin to terrorists and ban them from being duly elected - France and Germany being examples.
And because I fear that at the very least they may ditch the first past the post system in order to thwart Reform's chances of winning an outright majority.
The gloves are off and I strongly suspect things are going to get very dirty indeed.
I couldn't agree with you more Matt.
However, Reform needs to be about more than against mass immigration, whether legal or not.
Which is why I found Douglas Carswell's seminal Telegraph article recently so valuable. Carswell outlined in his article how a right-of-centre party might approach becoming the government next time around. In his article he outlined the steps by which such a government would best address the numerous obstacles it would face from what might be called the 'deep state'. A Reform or Reform-Tory government would face immense opposition from the civil service, judges and lawyers, media, academia, the House of Lords and of course the Labour Party.
I sincerely hope his wise words will be listened to by a party that is great at capturing the public imagination, but which sometimes seems a little thin on details.
I hope Nigel Farage accepts that a Reform government will need more than him, and him alone. In the best of cases he'll be Prime Minister after all. Not President.