Reform UK’s recent electoral victories are the latest sign that the global populist surge is not slowing down. Last week, Nigel Farage’s party won control of 10 local councils, won two mayoralties and even managed to win another MP in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. Clearly, populism remains a major political force.
Indeed, British voters have long been at the forefront of the anti-globalist revolt. The triumph of Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum unleashed a populist energy that continues to haunt the political and cultural establishment to this day. Brexit demonstrated that the people’s voice could no longer be silenced by those who believe that there is no alternative to the status quo.
In retrospect, Brexit marked the beginning of the end of the cosmopolitan order, personified by ‘Davos Man’, the archetypal attendee of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Writing in Forbes a month after the 2016 referendum, journalist Kenneth Rapoza correctly characterised Brexit as ‘The populist revolt against “Davos Man”’. ‘Brexit proved once again that Davos Man isn’t all-knowing’, Rapoza argued. Not only did the elites not see the Leave vote coming, their apocalyptic predictions of Brexit-induced economic doom also never came to pass.
Brexit caused no end of consternation for the cosmopolitan elites. This sense of alarm was well-captured a month after the referendum by economic commentator Anatole Kaletsky. Kaletsky noted that ‘Europe’s fear of contagion is justified, because the Brexit referendum’s outcome has transformed the politics of EU fragmentation’. He lamented that ‘Brexit has turned “Leave” (whether of the EU or the euro) into a realistic option in every European country’.
The elites have tried to dismiss Brexit or the election of Donald Trump in the US as blips or one-offs. At successive annual meetings of the WEF, participants expressed optimism that the threat posed by their populist opponents had waned. Indian American commentator Fareed Zakaria was once hopeful that ‘2023 could be the year that exposes populism for the sham that it is’. Around the same time, leading British Remainer Andrew Adonis claimed we had ‘passed peak populism’.
Yet almost a decade on from the Brexit referendum, populist movements have continued to gain considerable momentum. Across Europe, support for populist parties continues to rise. And of course, Trump’s spectacular victory in last year’s presidential elections proved that populism is not merely a European phenomenon.
Even now the elites are remarkably complacent. Reacting to Reform’s recent success at the ballot box, the Guardian has observed that ‘many voted for [the] party as [a] protest against [the] government’. This overlooks the real dynamic at play. Reform voters may well wish to protest against Labour and the current state of the UK. But they are also making a bigger statement about their determination to take control over their lives.
The motivation for populism is best understood as the aspiration to take control. Populist sentiment arises out of a mood of despair about the fact that people have no influence over the decisions that really matter. One of the major reasons why Reform is so successful is because it is able to articulate sentiments that are rejected or not taken seriously by the political establishment. Millions of British people feel disrespected and patronised by the managerial, technocratic elites who run society. They resent being told that their values are outdated and that taking pride in their community and nation is symptomatic of a cultural backwardness.
Many people intuitively grasp that they have been betrayed by their nation’s elites. During the past half a century, Britain’s rulers have systematically adopted a way of life and a set of beliefs that have distanced them from ordinary people. To make matters worse, they have developed a contempt for those who have refused to follow their globalist ideology and retained a commitment to the British way of life.
This has coincided with the moral and intellectual unravelling of the left. Since the late 1970s, a movement that was once organically linked to working-class people has become a centrist, technocratic movement of professionals. The left has not only become psychically distant from the working class, but it has also adopted attitudes – particularly in the form of identity politics – that are actively hostile to the values and lifestyles of ordinary people.
The working classes were betrayed by their former parties and left without a medium through which they could voice their concerns. No wonder that populist upstarts, expressing genuine empathy with ordinary people, have been able to rise to prominence.
In Britain, Reform is fast becoming the vessel for those who want their voices heard and their values respected. That is the essence of populism. Whatever happens to the party next, the mood it has tapped into is clearly here to stay. This was no mere ‘protest vote’.
Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.
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