This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10.
Is Britain on the brink? In the late 1970s we certainly seemed to be. All the clouds of the 20th century were by then raining down upon us. Our empire was gone, our economy was bust and our politics was borderline post-parliamentary, as ministers bargained, generally in vain, with trades union barons before they presumed to govern.
All of this changed with Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, such is the scale of her achievement in arresting Britain’s precipitous decline that few can properly see the nature of it — precisely because they can scarcely now believe the extent of the problems she faced and, as often as not, successfully faced down.
Are what today passes for our governing classes — the leading politicians, the foremost explainers of politics, senior, permanent officialdom, our most learned men in the universities, the owners of industry and property and the masters of finance still domiciled here — terrified?
If they are, is that in addition to being incapable? As it is their rule, and their justifications for it, which have brought us to where we are now.
Knowing whether we teeter on the edge of an abyss is critical because it determines the answer to the political question of our time: what, if anything, is Reform here to do?
If Britain is an irretrievably self-Balkanised country, what can our rulers do if they can’t do anything about that? Thatcher could not only turn the clock back in terms of reversing democratic socialism’s supposedly inevitable ratchet effect, she could do so in an achingly traditional and constitutional form.
She governed from Westminster, passed laws there, and her writ — which lawyers did not take upon themselves the right to subvert — ran the undevolved length of the country. Are the problems we face today to be solved by the means she employed then, even were those powers restored to Westminster?
What could a government led by Nigel Farage do if submission to the rule of lawyers were reversed and if Parliament again became the legitimate source of politics, rather than simply one constrained entity competing with others?
Let us momentarily dispense with the how, as that presupposes the will and the means. Instead, focus relentlessly on Reform’s diagnosis of the problem — of the very things which it’s commonly assumed have brought them to the fore.
What has gone wrong with Britain and what could Prime Minister Farage, with his looming parliamentary majority, do about it which the Conservatives did not do during their wasted 14 years?
We can assume he won’t just replace then ape the discredited Tories. What would be the point of that? They’re in third place in the polls, and fifth place in terms of how many seats that share would get them in the Commons.
That is a consequence of the “steady the Buffs!” attitude of those who believed Rishi Sunak would prove the reassuring and unimaginative figure Britain needed in difficult times. We said otherwise. They ended up just where we said they would.
Yet still the Tory “one more heave” fantasists live in denial of their record and the view the public have come to hold so fiercely of it. Even a lesson as severe as last year’s general election taught them nothing.
“’Tis but a polling blip” these Pythonesque knights assure their leader and her frightened followers. Let us then consider the sorpasso of the last time the Tories were in third place. At the end of 1981, and start of 1982, the SDP/Liberal Alliance was in first place, Labour second and the Tories third.
However, and very much unlike now, their poll rating seldom dipped below 30 per cent, and only fractionally so when it did. Their seat share, as far as can be guessed, would still have been substantial, rather than the few dozen they’re cruising towards on the showing of current polling.
Thatcher showed she had seen people’s fears, and delivered what they wanted
In the conventional telling, the Tories were rescued by the Falklands War. But note how the polls were beginning to turn even before the Argentine invasion. The bourgeois and patriotic Britain with something it wanted to defend and hold on to, began to thank Mrs Thatcher for her evident progress in finally bringing inflation under control.
“Our people”, in her words, saw that she had seen their fears, stood by them and delivered what they wanted. There is no chance Kemi Badenoch can do from opposition what Thatcher struggled manfully to do in office.
The current Tory leader can’t even disavow the record of 2010–24, and she is backed and cheered on by many of the same people whose poor judgement was responsible for that long debacle.
She is the conceited and idle opponent Farage would pay good money to keep in place. So if the Tories can do nothing to arrest the rise of Nigel, will Farage do that himself?
In typically transatlantic fashion, some supporters of the great patriot have already begun to worry about his being “Trumped”. In other words, the lethally efficient establishment we plainly don’t have might bump Farage off, thinking him an intolerable threat to their otherwise palsied rule.
This seems unlikely, but it brings us to the matter of the moment: if what’s happening is real, if the popular upswell in support for Reform is both determined and set to be unameliorated by anything Keir Starmer’s Labour does, then Reform can’t be a one-man band.
One view contends that Reform — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — is a personality cult. Without Farage, it is just a momentary form of British Peronism which would dissolve with his departure.
Yet this is very much not what the apocalyptic explanations for the rise of Reform rest on: that there’s a crisis of the state (or, more likely, of society) which requires a reaction “the uniparty” of the traditional offerings can’t give — and wouldn’t want to if it could.
To observe the streets of this country is to see that something has gone very badly wrong. The darkest formulation proffers that we do not live the way we used to do because we as a nation are no longer who we once were.
Acid critics of Mr Farage as well as his keenest ideologues interpret demography and its challenges as the explanation for why an unhappy country’s most popular political party is Reform.
What would Prime Minister Farage do about any of this? We don’t know what he’s plausibly going to do about the economy. We can’t see what he’s realistically going to do about society or with the help of which men and women of competence he is going to tackle even these known unknowns.
In this issue John McGuirk explains the need for a better right-wing elite; one which can seriously wrestle with the problems so many Western states face.
No one can doubt the toxic discontent the main political parties face, after having contributed so much to the state we’re in. But nor can anyone honestly say they feel confident about the “kto kogo?” of Reform.
Who are the new men and women of this new Right? To whom will they do whatever they do? For Brexit to be won, Nigel Farage had to be kept well away from the Referendum campaign he would certainly have lost.
As most Brexiteers who delivered Leave knew, it was a third-order issue: the problems we face are overwhelmingly here at home. The Tories in office squandered their chance to address most of these problems, and, incredibly, made others incomprehensibly worse. The public, as the Tories somehow still don’t know, are in no mood to forgive.
This then is the challenge Reform faces: admit the problems; prepare the solutions; do something with the popularity the intolerable Tories have gifted you.
Thus far there is no sign that Nigel wants to be unpopular. In this he is no Mrs Thatcher.
