Last week’s local elections were about the Labour Party’s loss of faith in its leader, prime minister Keir Starmer, but they were also about the right-wing insurgent Reform UK winning a shade over 1,400 seats across the country.
Reform feels like the de facto opposition party for much of the United Kingdom outside of the confines of Westminster, which is an incredible feat of smoke, mirrors and mind-capture when you consider the party still has only 8 MPs compared to the 116 seats held by the Conservatives.
To understand just how Reform UK, and its leader Nigel Farage, have effectively driven the political conversation in the UK for the past two years, I caught up with Daniel Trilling, a journalist who has covered the far-right for years and author of the new book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable.
This interview is an excerpt from openDemocracy’s In Solidarity podcast. Click to listen to the whole interview from our website, or find In Solidarity wherever you get your podcasts.
Aman Sethi: We just had local elections where Reform had a really strong showing. How are you reading the local election results?
Daniel Trilling: So this year's local election results, I think the overarching story is actually one of political fragmentation. It's not that long ago that Britain had a very, very stable two-party political system, where the Labour Party and the Conservative Party dominated the landscape. That's broken down in recent years, but it's really accelerated and, and these local elections are a sign of that more than anything else.
I think, you know, we now have five or six party politics, depending on which bit of the country you're in. Both Labour and the Conservatives are really suffering from this. The Conservatives haven't really recovered from their huge defeat in 2024 and Labour are feeling pressure from both left and right because lots of people are just very unhappy about the fact that things in Britain are getting more expensive. There hasn't been this turnaround in the economy or in public services that Labour promised it would deliver when it took power two years ago. And voters have gone to lots of different places now.
Within that, Reform has emerged as the largest party in terms of vote share and they're a right-wing populist party. Like similar parties in other bits of the world, they've built up support by appealing to a mix of traditional conservative voters and traditional Labour voters. They present themselves as a way to punish traditional political elites, which at the moment means Labour, most of all. You know, they're now the largest such party we've ever seen in British politics.
The other thing that’s significant about these elections is that Reform is no longer the only self-described anti-establishment challenger in English politics.
The Green Party, under its current leader Zac Polanski, has taken a sharp left-wing turn and is pursuing a version of what Polanski calls eco-populism. So again, challenging the established political class and trying to mobilise people's discontent over things like the economy as much as it is over environmental policies.
India went through a period where the dominant Indian National Congress started crumbling. We entered an era of coalition politics and that era was actually seen as a democratising moment. How are you reading the fracturing of the two-party kind of consensus in the UK?
The answer is quite complicated. You can see this as a moment of democratisation. There is a sense that more is at stake here than there has been for quite a long time. Local elections in England, in particular, are not usually considered glamorous or exciting or even that controversial.
And I would say that these local elections, I don't think I've ever seen people so engaged politically about them. So at least fleetingly, it has kind of reinvigorated democracy. The two big problems you have with that, though, are, first of all that in England, these are elections for administrations without much political power.
And then the other problem that complicates this and stops it from being simply a process of democratisation is that we have got, in most parts of the country, a First Past the Post voting system. So the results of elections don't accurately reflect the proportion of the votes that have gone to the different parties. The argument in the past was that in a two-party system, first past the post provides stable government, particularly at the national level, because it is a ‘winner takes all way’ of voting. If that was true in the past, it certainly isn't anymore.
I want to go from here to your new book: If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. As someone who is not from the UK, I'm fascinated by the idea of the British establishment. Are you part of the Establishment? Am I part of the Establishment? Who's in, who's out?
It's one of those classic concepts that people always apply to others and would never include themselves in. But it's a useful concept because it refers, first of all, to the established class of politicians that we have running the country.
Britain, like most other wealthy countries over the past 50 years or so, has seen this shift towards a professionalised class of politicians and technocrats. That goes for both the Conservative and the Labour parties.
It refers to the people who run the institutions that surround formal politics as well. So the media being a huge one there, but also kind of the major cultural institutions of the country [and] anywhere where there's this kind of administrative class running public institutions or private businesses.
The reason to think of that as an establishment is not just because that describes a group of people who all have a fair amount of power in the country, but because there is an older tradition in Britain of those people being drawn from a fairly narrow social background. So, you know, the kind of classic establishment life trajectory would've been to go to one of the English private schools, perhaps even a boarding school. If people are familiar with John le Carre spy novels, he is a keen observer of that traditional British establishment. These were the people who were trained from a young age to administer the country, administer the British Empire in the days of the British Empire and so on. So the senior levels of the civil service running government departments, but also the BBC, major art galleries, all of these things.
In recent years, particularly from the nineties onwards, there was a sense that Britain should be more of a meritocracy and that we should still have an elite, but that it should draw from a wider range of the population. That's happened a bit, but if you look at, for example, the reports done by the Sutton Trust, the British elite are still drawn heavily from the same kinds of narrow backgrounds as in the past.
So the media is overwhelmingly staffed by wealthy white people, many of whom share that kind of traditional establishment background. The reason why this all matters politically – apart from more general questions about opportunity and social mobility – is that cultures that come from fairly narrowly drawn backgrounds will tend to develop certain habits and attitudes and ways of behaving over time.
I think what we have seen in Britain, and what I've tried to show in my book, is how these ways of behaving have contributed to the political problems that have allowed far-right politics in various forms to first gain a foothold and then become quite a significant influence on British political life.
One of the things I sensed when I moved to the UK four years ago was that the UK, like India, has a punitive state. A state whose connection with its citizens and the people that it administers is, in some sense, still feudal.
You are absolutely right to pick up on that, and oddly, I think it's something that's got much more pronounced in the last few decades as well.
So there's this idea of English people having sort of inherent rights, you know, this idea of the Freeborn Englishmen and that people should have their liberty, and the state shouldn't be overbearing and so on.
And parallel to that has been an acceptance, almost kind of unremarked on, that the state has got this right to interfere in your business and fine you and threaten you with punishments for things. I do find it interesting how we in the UK have almost got used to holding them both in our heads at once, even though they're quite contradictory.
The mentality I think in Britain is it's always about somebody else, not you. You know? Well, we should have strict rules for say, well, I mean, this is the biggest of them all at the moment, immigrants who don't follow. There should be punishments for people like that, but also for working-class citizens who don't behave well. Antisocial behaviour, as it's called in policy terms, is a thing that needs to be cracked down on with punitive, restrictive measures.
So this kind of mix of the state should stay out of our lives, but also people should follow the rules and it is terrible if they don't and they should be punished for it is, I think it's very present in British culture.
It's really interesting that you juxtapose these two ideas because it almost feels like, while reading your book, that this is the friction on which you see a kind of populist far-right upsurge. I'm really interested in your reading of Nigel Farage because he's this guy who doesn't follow the rules, but of course, at the same time, is constantly talking about how, you know, immigrants need to follow the rules.
From my perspective, he seems like one of the most consequential politicians of his generation, and I've also been really surprised to realise how much he's accomplished by being in opposition. As I understand, this is someone who has never actually been in government.
You are right that Farage is one of the most influential politicians of his generation. He has done that through pioneering methods of working outside the mainstream. He has also had a big helping hand from the mainstream, which is kind of going back to this idea of the establishment, in that his ideas and his style and his rhetoric have been heavily favoured by media outlets.
He works very well as a form of entertainment, but also the political themes that he really pushes on are the perennial themes of Britain's right-wing press as well. And. I think he absolutely embodies what we've just been talking about. This kind of dual mentality that he's very good at tapping into.
A huge part of Farage's appeal over the years has been exactly the fact that he's not a mainstream politician. Farage is from an elite background, he was privately educated at Dulwich College, which is one of the leading London private schools, he was then a city trader, you know, made a decent amount of money for a city trader. His father was a stockbroker. So he comes from a section of the affluent upper-middle class.
The Establishment…
Yeah, in some ways the establishment, but at the same time, both in his persona and his political stances, he has cast himself as antagonistic to the establishment figures that we see at the top of politics. Some of that, I think, is his ability to tap into these ideas of Englishness.
Something that I think came out very strongly, from a recent biography of Farage written by the political journalist, Michael Crick, was that Farage got his start in politics in the 1990s, campaigning against British membership of the European Union, when that was a really unpopular cause. Basically, at that point, it was fringe right-wingers and nobody else. It meant he had to spend years going up and down the country, talking to people in person at public meetings, small town hall meetings, which at the time the emerging professionalised political class was moving away from.
The other politicians of his generation, and particularly the ones that are a bit younger, didn't cut their political teeth doing that. They probably had a start in student politics at their university. Then they went to work for an MP or a think tank. Then they got a seat in Parliament, and so their whole kind of political life has been through these professionalised organisations, whereas Farage did a much older school version of politics, which is to go out and talk to people and kind of argue with them.
So he's got this very good sort of sense for the parts of the public that he wants to connect with, and one part of that is his kind of libertarian postures. You know, he's kind of this boozy, fun-loving, libertarian. That is the kind of persona that he encourages, and that kind of plays into some of these ideas about English liberty.
It's a kind of, ‘We are sick of the nanny state telling us to stop smoking and eat our five a day fruit and vegetables’ and all of these kinds of things while at the same time being happy to propose extremely authoritarian measures for certain groups of people in society. So he's, he's tapped into that very well.
I think the other part of it is that he also understands the English attitudes to racism, national identity, and right-wing politics very well.
There is a settled understanding in Britain that, you know, ‘Racism is a thing of the past. There was maybe some unpleasantness in the past, but we don't want to dwell on that. But we can all agree now that that's bad, that being racist is bad.’
So no one would ever want to be thought of as racist. In fact, being accused of being racist is almost worse than a racist act itself.
That's the everyday understanding of it. And so if you are trying to form a project that is coming from the right wing margins of politics (which when I use the term far right, I'm trying to refer to all of the different things that you would see on the right that sit outside the traditional mainstream) you have to be very careful to tread that line and stick within the kind of common understanding of racism and common attitudes towards it.
One thing that Farage has done from quite early on in his political career was make it very clear that he himself, and the movements he was part of, had nothing to do with the fascist tradition in British politics. So the tradition of parties that were directly inspired by the ideas of Hitler and Mussolini and sought to revive a version of that in, in their own time. There is that tradition in Britain and at one point it was the more prominent part of the far right.
So when I started off as a journalist in the late 2000s, my earliest reporting was on a party called the British National Party, who come from that fascist tradition but adopted a version of right-wing populism. They softened their public message and started campaigning for elections, but they never dropped their underlying beliefs.
Farage by contrast, doesn't believe in any of that stuff. You know, he's got this commitment to democracy, at least as a kind of idea, and to working within the electoral system.
But at the same time, he stands for something that I would argue is racist and divisive. I think he's got a narrow idea of what English identity is and should be. He is happy to stress the fact that he doesn't mind what your background is or what skin colour you are and so on — so that's kind of anti-racist in one sense — but I would argue quite a superficial sense.
And at the same time, he is quite happy to indulge in ways of behaving politically that single out and vilify particular groups of people on the basis of their backgrounds in a way that ultimately casts them as inherently different from the rest of us.
The kind of anti-immigration politics that Reform has pursued is not racist in that crude sense but it is doing all of these other things that I think are actually inherent to racism and racist politics.
But Farage knows very well how to tread that line of mainstream respectability while at the same time I think pushing things further to the right. That's the process that we've seen as his political movement has grown. And as other things outside of parliamentary politics have grown, the whole discourse around immigration, race, identity, perhaps even gender, more recently, have been moving kind of further and further, right.
I want to stay with this because I think you're touching on something very interesting. On the one hand there is the idea that the way to fight the far right is to fix the country. If we fix it, there will be no space for the far right.
On the other hand, as you kind of talked through Farage's career, one can't keep escaping this question of immigration. There is a simplistic way of reading this question of immigration, which maybe I have also been guilty of, which is to say, this is just race.
Is this just racism? As I read your book, there seems to be something slippery here that I'll be honest, I just can't quite put my finger on.
It's tricky. This book is the result of my thinking about this and writing about this for a long time and trying to figure it out myself. I think the thing that oddly gets kind of left out of conversations about far-right politics and right-wing populist politics is the fact that they're all very heavily nationalist.
Before it is about anything else, this is about nationalism, which is always about collective identity. It's a way of talking about who we are.
Right-wing nationalism and particularly what comes from the far right, which is a more radical spin on ideas of national identity, is on the one hand, seeking to redraw the boundaries of who belongs and who doesn't more narrowly, but also has this very heavy dose of an idea that the idea that there is a threat to the nation and that it's somehow existential.
When you look at this new wave of far-right populism around the world, immigration is not always the central point of their campaigning. It wasn't in Brazil for Bolsonaro, I don't think it has been with the Hindu nationalists in India.
But what is always there is this idea that the nation is under threat and there needs to be some kind of radical action taken to exclude the threat or to silence some kind of internal enemy, some kind of anti-national.
So immigration in the UK stands in for all of these other issues as well.
There has [also] been a decline in the ability of politicians and of our cultural institutions, like media institutions, to talk about people collectively in a way that actually makes sense to most people living in the country.
There was one point in Britain's not so distant history when there was a very powerful alternative way of thinking about ourselves collectively — or at least for a large proportion of the population — which was through the Labour movement and the Labour Party.
The Labour party wasn't just a form of retail politics that sought to appeal to voters based on what the opinion polls told them and what focus groups said they wanted and so on. But the Labour party was a thing that emerged from mass trade union membership and people from lots of different kinds of backgrounds, and in lots of different parts of the country, thinking of themselves as part of a single working class that had common interest. There's been a huge decline in that.
Other factors, like the fact that Church of England attendance has fallen hugely in the last 50 years. And there was a time when in the parts of the country where the Conservative party was very strong, so-called Middle England, where being a member of your local conservative association and going to church every Sunday was just, you know, a routine part of life for many, many people. These forms of collective life have declined.
The situation we're in now is that as we are faced with much more serious economic and social pressures, the ability to form political movements that give people a collective voice seems to be very much weakened.
Attitudes to immigration in Scotland are very similar to attitudes to immigration in England. So the idea that Scotland is this kind of progressive paradise where everybody uncomplicatedly welcomes immigrants is not true. If you look at polling long term, and as you've seen in the recent elections, people there were prepared to vote for Reform in fairly large numbers this time around.
Yet Scottish nationalism has not had a strong anti-immigration component to it in the way that British and English nationalism has done. That's because people have made it into a political project where they have found a way to connect with people, and get at least a decent chunk of Scottish people to think about themselves collectively in a way that says, ‘Our collective identity is that we are more progressive than the Westminster political elite. And we are more welcoming to immigration, to immigrants than the UK national political culture is.’
But that just shows you, it's kind of there to be made rather than an automatic process.
Towards the end of the book, you talk about ways in which one can push back. Something that I think is animating a lot of thinking on the progressive side is: If these are long historical processes, then is the answer that one waits out a long historical process? You suggest there are ways to hasten this kind of reckoning and perhaps move forward.
I am not somebody who sees history as a kind of long, unfolding, inevitable process. And so I absolutely think if we wait for it to change, it won't change. It will get worse.
But you have to recognise the longer-term processes in order to think about where you intervene to push things back.
The kind of long-term answer is we need to be talking about ways in which we can make ourselves feel more empowered but also preserve the principle that we can be collective, but also diverse. Coming together and working as a collective does not mean excluding people who don't fit.
The way that you actually achieve that politically is through reconnecting politics with things that are material concerns in people's lives — not because they are real and identity isn't, but because you don't really have any authority to talk about identity and talk about collective belonging unless people are convinced that you actually are part of their lives already.
The kind of key political thing here in the UK at the moment is that by this autumn, food prices are going to be 50% higher than they were when Russia invaded Ukraine at the start of 2022. We're all aware that that's happening.
But the right-wing populists like Nigel Farage are very quick to pick up on these things. And because they've already got that authority to speak for the people, at least with a certain section of the population, they can move quickly on this.
A counter to this has to be rooted in those same concerns that people have. Well, how are we going to make sure that things cost less and intervene in ways that will do this without dividing people in the UK further? The established political class are stuck in this loop that they've been stuck in for several decades, where any kind of meaningful intervention in the economy is regarded as either extremist or just something they wouldn't even conceive of.
Where I see signs of hope emerging are political movements, you know, actually within parts of the Labour Party, but also outside Labour with the Greens; the nationalists in Scotland and Wales who take a more progressive stance.
Then finally – this something that takes a while – you know, building new political projects.
In terms of responding to the growth of Reform or the growth of far-right politics outside of Parliament, these political projects themselves are weak and contradictory. They succeed when people are too scared to confront them, and there is a value in just standing up and saying, ‘We reject this way of doing things politically’, and people have done that repeatedly, and it has had effects.
So after the 2024 riots in response to the Southport murders, you had a huge outpouring of opposition to the rioting and those attempts to attack asylum seekers and attack mosques and so on, and it really did change the tone of things within a few days.
Another way where Reform has a big potential weakness at the moment is that they've won all of these seats in local government, they've won control of several dozen councils around the UK. Now they have to make decisions about where resources are gonna go and they're promising people completely contradictory things. Holding them to account for their decisions is something that all of us can do by informing ourselves about what's going on, where we live, and you know, complaining or campaigning about it.
So I think there is plenty to do in both, like the short and the longer term.
