Charlie Kirk Was Right About the British ‘Revolution’

In May, just months before his political assassination at a U.S. university, Charlie Kirk visited Britain to take part in the famous Union debates at our two top universities, Oxford and Cambridge. 

Reflecting on his trip afterwards in the Spectator magazine, the American national conservative made a bold and prophetic prediction: “Make no mistake: Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK.” 

Kirk said that his Oxbridge experience had taught him that, “just like in America, the students of the elite university may be the last to realise” how far and fast things are changing. But he was clear that “In Britain at large, a very different attitude prevails.” 

Unlike the woke student elites whom he debated, the normal Brits Kirk spoke to were palpably “angry” about the energy prices and economic stagnation caused by the establishment’s Net Zero crusade and “furious” about the mass immigration inflicted on their society by both the previous Conservative and current Labour governments.

“Over and over,” Charlie Kirk concluded, “they told me they were ready to smash the British party system and elect a Reform prime minister. The great turn in Britain is coming.”

Charlie was right. The great turn in Britain is happening now, and there seems to be nothing that those out-of-touch elites in academia, the media, or politics can do to stop it. 

Reform UK, the party led by Nigel Farage, has captured the imagination of millions of voters by pledging to scrap Net Zero targets, “detain and deport” thousands of illegal immigrants, and make Britain a country to be proud of once more. In the 2024 UK general election, Reform won 14% of the vote and elected its first five MPs. In May, Reform won the English local elections, the first time in memory that a party defeated both the Tories and Labour.

Farage’s party has now topped more than 100 consecutive national opinion polls. Reform is on course to win next year’s elections to the Welsh assembly (which Labour has ruled since it was created 26 years ago), and its support is also soaring in Scotland, long a supposed no-go zone for right-wing British patriots.

However hard establishment pundits may try to wish it away, this is no “protest vote” or temporary rebellion. It is the start of the political “revolution” that Kirk was talking about, as British voters finally take it upon themselves to overturn the long-established two-party system. Proof that, even in “boring” British politics where nothing is ever supposed to change, anything can now happen as national populism sweeps the West.

In fact, the UK started the popular revolt against the political establishment with the 2016 Brexit vote (months before Donald Trump was elected U.S. president for the first time) and then the victory of Farage’s Brexit Party in the 2019 elections to the European Parliament. 

Even then, however, it seemed that the Tory-Labour ‘Uniparty’ of the British establishment still controlled Westminster and ruled at home. But the Uniparty’s power has now been exposed as a hollow sham. The Labour government is in freefall after little more than a year in office. Yet the Tory party, which dug its own grave during 14 failed years in government from 2010 to 2024, is a dead party walking, with no prospect of recovery—and no sense of how much lower its support can still go.

Today, Reform UK is the real opposition and the firm favourite to win the next general election, whenever it comes. The mainstream media is desperately trying to rubbish Reform as a ‘one-man show’ unfit for government. As I pointed out in a recent panel discussion with former top Tory advisor Dominic Cummings, even if that were true, Reform would still have one more real leader than the other parties put together. 

In reality, however, Reform represents much more than that. Farage is the embodiment of a mass movement for real change that is sweeping the country; that is perhaps the real parallel with Trump. As Nigel himself is fond of saying, “something is happening out there,” far away from the elitists plotting in the smoke-free rooms of the Westminster parliament and Whitehall government offices.

Reform’s national conference last weekend was a two-day demonstration of how Farage’s party has given people hope and won over Middle England. As even astute media observers had to concede, the Reform activists who packed the vast National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham looked and sounded far more like the Great British Public than the strange species that make up the political class.

Contrary to the story told by the media and the Labour Party, these people have not been misled by a ‘demagogue.’ No political party started the protests outside hotels housing illegal immigrants. No political party launched the Operation Raise the Colours movement that has plastered the country with British and English flags, to the consternation of our self-loathing elites.

These are ordinary people who have had enough of seeing Britain and Britishness rubbished by the petty authoritarians who are supposed to represent them. As those who started the flag movement in Birmingham put it, they want to “show Birmingham and the rest of the country how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements.”

The silent majority is finally finding its voice, despite the authorities’ attempt to censor everything. Reform UK has become their people’s army.

At the Reform UK conference, Preston Manning, founder of the original mould-breaking Reform Party of Canada, reminded members that Britain has an unrivalled historic record as the nation that exported such revolutionary ideas as free speech and democracy to America and around the world and pioneered building bottom-up movements for change. He handed the Reform baton on to Farage.

Charlie Kirk will not be here to see Britain bring the “revolution” he predicted home. But as he said, it is coming, make no mistake.