With the rump Conservative Party assembling in Manchester, so begins what is effectively the fifth Reform conference of the year: for Farage’s immanent presence now suffuses the entirety of British politics, turning the probability of an incoming Reform government into a near certainty. If European philosophy, as A.N. Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, British politics is now merely a series of hesitantly defiant ripostes and sassy fact checks to Reform. From late-life TikToker and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s bizarre claims that Reform will import America’s culture of school shootings, to noted Labour intellectual and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy’s hurriedly retracted assertion that the younger, and presumably time-warping Farage once “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, the waning forces of British Left-liberalism have retreated onto the comforting plane of fantasy, as their worldview crumbles into dust.
For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial centre. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalisation would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.
But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalisation was always just a superficial Americanisation, from which America itself has now withdrawn. Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.
It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron: rightly, Reform’s new signing Danny Kruger has characterised the insurgent party’s domestic foe as simply “late-stage liberalism”. In Britain, at least, the result is likely to be the diminution of Labour and the Conservatives to minor regional parties centred on London, the last ideological stronghold of the old regime. A year ago Keir Starmer delivered the Conservative Party a historic defeat; today he is the most detested prime minister in modern British history. There is no prospect of Starmer winning the next election, and little prospect of him leading the Labour Party into it.
Yet Starmer, devoid of an individual personality, ought not take any of this personally: he is simply a stand-in for the collapsing Nineties System, of which he is the robotic final avatar. Everything that Starmer represents, even if presented in human form, would be just as roundly detested. Blair himself has transitioned from the fantasy vision he imposed on British politics to the technocratic, enlightened despotism of his proposed Gaza Mandate, in which a combination of economic growth and digital surveillance will contain the volatile nationalism of the Palestinian people: in his plans for digital ID, it is not hard to see Starmer following suit, albeit without the growth.
Trapped between loyalty to a collapsing imperial ideology, and the upsurge in nationalist sentiment its implementation produced, the Labour front bench, disconsolately waving the various flags of the United Kingdom for the cameras, finds itself forced to spout incoherent slogans. The country is not broken, and to claim that it is is dangerous rhetoric: but the country also requires total renewal, indeed reforging into a “New Britain”. Reform stokes division, and yet the country is also at a “fork in the road”, from which Labour will conjure up unity from diversity. The Boriswave was a terrible mistake, but to undo it would be fascism; nativist sentiment is the preserve of a tiny internet minority, but also of the country’s most popular party; Reform is racist but its voters are not. The Home Secretary declares that “ethnonationalism” is a societal evil to be defeated, while Starmer endorses its basic principle in asserting that Israel and Palestine require two separate nation states to prevent their two peoples from slaughtering each other. If only they could have bonded over slicing half-time Jaffa oranges together, perhaps things would have been different.
The party’s messaging, as it enters full election mode just one year into its term, is entirely incoherent because it must triangulate between the roundly despised, and entirely illusory worldview of its leadership on the one hand, and the newly aggrieved mood of the country on the other. The central axis of British politics is now the basic, essential stuff of national identity, which is not a battleground favourable to Labour. Indeed, there is something late-stage Soviet in Wes Streeting vowing to defeat the combined forces of English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism through a “return to the spirit of 1945”, even as he waits to lose his seat to a “Gaza independent”. But then all British politics in 2025 has become the fantasy pronouncements of those waiting to lose their seats, in what is now merely a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government.
“All British politics in 2025 has become the fantasy pronouncements of those waiting to lose their seats, in what is now merely a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government.”
Through having implemented its worldview, and forcing the nation to live with the results, the Labour Party is doomed. But for the Conservative Party, the immediate outlook is just as grim. Having rid his party of conservatives, that self-described “Heir to Blair”, David Cameron, condemned the Tories to share Labour’s fate: the collapse of the two parties, viewed in narrow partisan terms by the Westminster lobby, is more accurately the collapse of the shared ideology they undertook, between them, to impose on Britain.
Starmer’s assertion that the Conservatives are the less threatening rival is based on the perception that they are, if not technically the same party as Labour, the product of a shared worldview. There is no threat, for Blairism’s last disciple, of them rolling back New Labour’s constitutional and demographic vandalism. Indeed, considering the party’s governing record in deepening and accelerating New Labour’s cultural revolution, Starmer’s backhand compliment to the Tories could just as easily be a withering broadside by Farage. Such is the shifting popular mood, Labour now even feels free to attack the party’s governing record of excessive liberalism. In disparagingly deploying the online-Right term “Boriswave” to critique Tory governance, no doubt to the despair of his remaining supporters on Bluesky, Starmer has at least put paid to any lingering ideas of a Johnson comeback.
Like a nation, a party can survive many setbacks: but enough of them together and the result is fatal. While Kemi Badenoch was evidently the wrong choice for leader — as I warned at the time of her election — it is far from clear that a belated Jenrick coronation can now do much for the party’s near-term fortunes. A counterintuitive case, though not a strong one, could perhaps be made that Badenoch’s laissez-faire attitude to management has at least allowed the Jenrick wing to experiment with forging a harder-edged, more Right-wing faction within the party. The modernising, developmentalist, even self-proclaimed Anglofuturist faction around him, now calling themselves the “New Centre Right”, present a compelling vision for 2020s Conservativism. Their greatest appeal is that they can present the same offer of radical reform as Reform itself, but with more competent implementation: but it is a difficult task to campaign on renouncing your own party’s record, and in any case Reform can now convincingly argue that a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote for continued Labour rule. Besides, whatever its strengths, on current polling trends many of the New Centre Right’s brightest stars cannot expect to keep their seats.
The options available to the party last year are no longer on the menu, and those that remain are unappetising. A gamble could be made that Reform will rest British politics onto a plane more amenable to future Right-wing governance, and that the losses of the next election may in time be recouped by the rump party that survives. One plausible future, at least for Jenrick’s wing, by far the most energetic and convincing Conservative faction, is playing a similar role in relation to Farage to the one Farage himself once performed against the Tories: as a purist pressure group, punishing any deviation from Rightist principles from the luxury of the sidelines. Another is as a more successful SDP, a predominantly internet-based party, with more support from commentators than voters, producing high-quality policy documents to be plagiarised by their electorally successful rivals. Yet if it wishes to remain in Parliament, the New Centre Right faction also presents, for Reform, the only attractive set of potential Tory defectors, in a path already smoothed by their erstwhile ally Danny Kruger. Extinction or co-option? Neither prospect is attractive, yet both now seem more probable than renewal. Outpaced by history, the politics of the ancien régime has another four years to further discredit itself, with every grim daily headline passing verdict on its failure. Gathering in a city that, this week, bloodily displays the UK’s very worst dysfunctions, the Conservative Party’s only chance is that our current path of extreme political volatility may still, against all the odds, extract the party from the grave it so eagerly dug itself. The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.
