🔗 Share this article

This time last year, I had just returned home to Britain from the US and was experiencing the nearly universal envious looks of American friends. While they were staring into the muzzle of a another Trump presidency with its assurance of chaos and division, we had elected Keir Starmer by a huge majority and were feeling quite content with ourselves. I remember people congratulating me on the prescience of my move, which I absolutely took even though political considerations had not been part of my choice.

Growth of Reform UK

Maybe the response to that is Nigel Farage and his Reform UK, which has somehow managed to channel the resentment, letdown and shame felt by large numbers of people who backed and were then let down by Brexit, and are now in pursuit of a new fire to ignite. To this extent, the foundations of the rightwing march last weekend and the rise of Reform generally appear largely of a similar nature with their US precursors.

This represents a scenario, at least in part, of people clutching at anything that pledges to overthrow a establishment that has repeatedly failed to serve them.

What has felt shocking to many of us this year, though, is how quickly the political landscape seems to have shifted in this nation, and how a leader as shallow as Farage could persuade people to support him anywhere, much less in the direction of No 10.

Superficial Figureheads and Political Ridicule

And by frivolous, I don’t mean in the populist demagogue style. You can oppose those men while acknowledging their talent as mass communicators. Farage, by contrast, is a jackass, a smirking fool openly ridiculed to his face by Democrats in Congress earlier this month when he appeared, at the invitation of Republicans, to give evidence before a House judiciary committee on free speech.

Farage did not organise the ‘unite the kingdom’ rally on Saturday, of course; that was Tommy Robinson, the former BNP member with criminal records for assault, drug possession and fraud – facts that, British media outlets were at great effort to point out on Monday morning, shouldn’t label all those who participated at his march with the same reputation.

Similarities and Divergences with the US Political Scene

US observers will recognise this as a pivot-point: a parallel moment to that phase of Trump’s rise in popularity during which his supporters were given endless sympathetic portrayals in the US national press, and asked to explain why supporting a man who said monstrous things didn’t make them in the least bit venal or awful.

Meanwhile, the whiplash speed of Reform and Robinson’s rise means that the nation Trump is visiting this week is seemingly very changed to the one he went into business with in January. There may be a point when the US president stops to admire his own work, and he will certainly be gratified to see British white nationalists rising in influence.

But he is also a man who abhors and is eager to distance himself from “losers” – a category into which, perhaps, his friend the prime minister currently falls, and who we can assume he will abandon as quickly as he embraced him.

Looking Ahead: Momentum and Cultural Differences

For the majority of us, it is a question of biding our time to see how much support our own version of the Maga movement will have. There are significant contrasts between the two nations that leave certain voter bases who came out in the US for Trump without direct British equivalents.

• British white nationalism acknowledges to the Christian church as an influence, but conservative religious movements has no purchase in a nation where, traditionally, rural issues is a bigger divisive topic than abortion.
• I can’t see JD Vance’s pronatalist stances, based in his fervent Catholicism, being much of a viable option here, either.

Actually – and this may be pure jingoism on my part – Vance seems like the kind of American who even Britons on the far right might regard instinctively as a odd little character. On the other hand, if enough people are willing to swear loyalty to a thug or an opportunistic pub bore, these are distinctions that may barely matter.