What is Faragism? The five key areas where Reform aim to outflank the big parties
With only 17 days to go, Reform releases its 'manifesto'
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The Conservative Party is fully imploding. Electorally, philosophically, ideologically, the party is completely lost. It no longer knows what it is. It no longer knows what it believes. It no longer knows who is voting for it, or why. And it no longer knows where it should head next --after what looks set to be a very heavy, historic defeat.
Into this space has stepped Nigel Farage, whose return has been made possible by the failure of the Conservative Party to be what its name implies. Had the Tories not put mass immigration on steroids, had they not lost control of Britain’s borders, had they not failed to transform levelling-up from a cheap slogan into a serious strategy for the non-London regions, had they not helped the left mainstream woke ideology in public institutions then, put simply, there would be no Nigel Farage.
But what is Faragism? To his critics, Farage is little more than a cheap populist, a single-issue xenophobe, an intellectual lightweight who has no guiding philosophy. Those closest to him, in contrast, say that ever since Brexit he’s been on a political journey —that unlike in the past his time campaigning in America, his time observing the Trump takeover of the Republicans, his time studying the Tory collapse, his time on the international conservative conference circuit, and his time talking with new and younger members of his team have pushed him to broaden out his traditional pro-Brexit message. People around him also say Farage now realises it’s no longer just about the UK; that the West, because of the rise of the radical woke left and radical Islamism, now faces a much more serious and sustained assault on its culture, history, values, and ways of life, and that he is probably the only person in British politics who can play a meaningful role in mobilising a serious pushback against this.
And we saw glimmers of this during Farage’s recent speech, when he declared he was running in the 2024 election. For me, having known him a long time, what was the most interesting aspect of his speech was not Farage’s decision to stand but his acknowledgement that he now needs to do two things he would never have talked about in the past. First, he talks about pulling together a broader coalition of thinkers, campaigners, and activists, some of whom will not have been involved in the Brexit wars at all; and, second, he is talking about passing the baton down to new generations of Millennials and Zoomers who have no memory of the 1980s and 1990s, and who are often motivated by an array of other concerns, from the housing crisis to the imposition of identity politics in the educational and governmental system.
The Farage of old, the Farage of the Brexit era, would simply never have said these things. He was never really open about his limitations nor fully aware of the need to pull a much bigger team together. Which raises the obvious question: if Farage really is on a journey then what is Faragism in 2024? What ideas are driving this revolt? And how does Farage plan on outflanking not just the Tories but the incoming Labour government and both of the big parties, the ‘Uniparty’, in the years ahead?
Well, today, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, home of the industrial revolution, we got our first glimpse of what this post-Brexit Faragism looks like as Reform launched its ‘Contract With You’. Here's what I think, based on that document, are the five key principles that will drive this growing populist revolt against the establishment in the years ahead—the key dividing lines which Farage wants to embed into the heart of British politics over the next few years. And along with them are my own thoughts about why all of this is significant and different from what we’ve seen in the past …
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