Nigel Farage's post-democratic revolt (2024)

Farage announces he's running on Monday (HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s true that Reform doesn’t conform to the 20th-century template for mass-membership political parties. It has, according to Farage, more than 30,000 paying members, but these are recruited online, rather than via local associations. It is also a limited company, and doesn’t have any obvious formal mechanism for forming, debating or voting on policies. Its critics make dark accusations about the motivations of its larger donors.

In all these senses, Reform UK is a political entity of some kind, but doesn’t adhere to the older template for party politics. Does this make it anti-democratic? To this, one might respond that it’s a bit rich to accuse Reform UK of ignoring the wishes of the masses, when its whole raison d’être is remedying just this indifference to electoral wishes among the mainstream political parties. We’re on our third Tory Prime Minister since the party was last voted into power, and the last one wasn’t even elected by the party membership. No vote apart from Brexit has changed anything very substantial in my adult lifetime. Even Brexit only happened against years of shrill establishment resistance, and failed to do the one thing voters wanted it to do.

In this context, we might reasonably ask: what would be the point of forming a mass-membership political party along early 20th-century lines? It should be obvious by now that bottom-up political activism aimed at directing the universally enfranchised voting public doesn’t reliably produce results in line with what that public wants. But if this is so, it raises the question of how different groups are to have their voices heard at all, in the wider political conversation. For it’s not as though even autocrats always get their way over the wishes of the masses. As the political scientist Julian Waller has shown, even regimes that don’t embrace formal democracy typically don’t last very long, unless they have some feedback mechanism for responding to different power blocs.

Prior to the universal franchise, indeed well into the early 20th century, it was common to talk about such blocs as aggregate political “interests”: groups such as the working classes, landed gentry, church, and so on. Further back still, the medieval formulation understood these as “estates”, all of which were — in theory if not always in practice — represented according to their needs and obligations.

Prior to mass democracy, though, no one thought the best way to represent each “estate” or “interest” was “one man, one vote”. Indeed, opponents of the franchise argued that flattening interests in this way would warp the overall political fabric to everyone’s detriment. But they didn’t get their way, and now we have the universal franchise — a franchise, indeed, that is set to become even more universal under Keir Starmer.

Does this mean everyone is now better represented than before? Perhaps not. For at the very moment the universal franchise was granted in the early 20th century, extra-democratic bodies such as NGOs and international regulatory entities began professionalising and proliferating, and in the process draining ever more power into pre-political fields closed to the democratic process. It’s possible that this was a coincidence, of course. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps the patrician preference for keeping popular opinion at arm’s length never really went away, meaning that the arrival of the popular voice in the halls of power necessitated new mechanisms for routing around that voice where necessary.

Certainly, it was striking to see this lordly attitude at full volume, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as the Remainer great and good united in defence of their beloved, extra-democratic, supranational technocracy. And I’m sure you remember, as I do, every well-connected such individual insisting the referendum should be struck down because people didn’t know what they were voting for, and had been duped by the side of a bus.

Since then, though, I’ve started to wonder whether the technocrats were at least partly right. Given that a great many Tory MPs still don’t seem to understand EU regulatory mechanisms, it’s is at least plausible that no one else did either. Hence, the Remainers may have been, like Cromwell in 1066 and All That, “Right but Repulsive”.

The question nags at me: what if post-industrial society really is too complex for elected generalists to grasp its operations in anything like the detail required to make sensible governing decisions? Well, even if this is true, you may accept in principle that technocrats are a necessary evil, spreadsheets and chinos and all — but in practice, you don’t have to be a technocrat with five PhDs to make reasonable inferences as to whether life is getting better or worse. And on most of the metrics that matter, to most people, life under the Conservatives has been getting worse, with the process accelerating with every change of Prime Minister and attendant slide toward spreadsheets-and-chinos “centrism”.

“You don’t have to be a technocrat with five PhDs to make reasonable inferences as to whether life is getting better or worse.”

So even if we do accept in principle that without technocrats things would be even more dire, and hence that the problem isn’t technocrats as such, we may still be dissatisfied with the ones we have. And hence, logically, we still need some mechanism for holding to account whichever technocrats are now tasked with steering this wildly overcomplicated ship of state. But the whole point of technocracy is that it is impervious to such outbreaks of democratic feedback. So how do you course-correct your cadres of unaccountable wonks?

Enter Nigel Farage. My sense is that most of Farage’s supporters don’t want to wield power themselves, and that Farage himself doesn’t really want to be a constituency MP. Rather, Farage’s supporters seek representation, in something more like the medieval sense, as an “interest” or “estate” to be taken seriously. And not without reason: they’re a significant subset of the English polity.

Broadly speaking, Farage represents the English petit bourgeois that lives in villages and small towns, values cultural hom*ogeneity and social trust, and intuits (accurately) that the end of the carbon economy spells disaster for their social class. This group, currently almost entirely voiceless within contemporary politics, would perhaps have been characterised by the now-very-cancelled high imperial writer Rudyard Kipling as the “Saxon” side of the Norman-Saxon hybrid people that has long made up England’s class hierarchy.

As Kipling saw it, the Saxon is generally uninterested in large-scale political power, and content to be governed provided this is done fairly. But the modern-day equivalent of Kipling’s Saxon is ill-served by the modern “Norman”, and is grumbling en masse. Worse still, the Saxon senses the contempt modern Normans have for him, as they sneer at the “bigots” and “gammons”.

This group’s anger was temporarily assuaged by the political realignment we were, however briefly, promised in 2019. But in the end, the realignment we got accelerated the trends that impelled Brexit in the first place: hollowing out the social fabric, draining away real-world jobs in favour of placeless knowledge-work that mostly benefits Normans, and trading in the nation-state and its people for an economic zone populated by fungible, interchangeable human work units — in which the English people have grown increasingly displaced and alienated.

Now, the Saxon is angrier than ever — but, as a consequence of that realignment, also more voiceless. And Farage is variously loved or loathed for his effortless ability to give them a voice. He has become a figurehead and avatar for an entire class, with a role that’s at least as much about symbolic embodiment as it ever could be about the dry legislation-and-policy aspect of politics.

The last time I wrote about him, it was in the context of his appearance on I’m A Celeb. And his return to Reform UK now is a continuation of his I’m A Celeb trajectory: pragmatic recognition that mass politics is both radically defanged, reduced to a branch of entertainment with little to distinguish it from reality TV — and that it nonetheless, paradoxically, still provides avenues for exerting popular pressure on an otherwise untrammelled technocratic class.

What, then, are these avenues? Farage’s modus operandi isn’t grassroots constituency work, canvassing, local associations, policy development and all the other ponderous architecture of universal-franchise-era mass politics. Our obdurate post-Brexit return to uniparty consensus illustrates how resistant such mechanisms have become to deprecated “interests”. Against this, Farage has waged an insurgency on behalf of the English petit-bourgeois class — one now extended, judging by his recent social-media game, to Right-leaning zoomers — via a co*cktail of media spectacle, meme activism, plus hacking formal political systems. The endgame isn’t bums on Commons seats, but forcing reluctant technocrats (whatever their formal political affiliation) towards policies that better reflect those outside the charmed circle. To date, Farage has proved a startlingly effective politician despite being yet to enter Parliament as an MP, purely via such para-Parliamentary methods. And it’s ironic that he should point critically at the “sectarian” political activism now emerging from Muslim groups in Britain, many of which increasingly employ much the same MO as Farage, to get their “interest” on the table.

It remains to be seen whether Farage can pull the Brexit stunt again, or indeed how the Saxon will fare, as an “interest”, against the increasingly politicised British Muslim community. Farage may well succeed on his own terms, with an MP or two and a vote tally that delivers a smack to both cheeks of the uniparty backside. Even if this does happen, though, the “interest” he represents within British post-democracy is unlikely to succeed in tilting policy very far in their preferred direction. But with Farage as their avatar, they at least stand a chance of not being entirely disregarded.