It might seem as if there were two general elections here in the UK last week. One was staged in the fantasy Britain of the political and media establishment; in this make-believe election, the Labour Party reportedly won an “historic landslide,” giving new prime minister Keir Starmer a “huge mandate for change.”
The other election took place in the real Britain where voters live and work. In this, actual, election, the majority of voters and non-voters rejected both the Tories and Labour as two wings of the old establishment. The sort of ‘change’ millions voted for was best reflected in the overnight breakthrough of Nigel Farage’s insurgent sovereigntist party, Reform UK.
In less than a month, and in the face of a sustained campaign of political slander from the ‘Farageophobic’ elites, Reform won more than four million votes, finishing third with 14.3% of the popular vote. The undemocratic vagaries of the UK electoral system meant that translated into just five Reform MPs; by comparison, the misnamed Liberal Democrats got half a million fewer votes than Reform yet ended up with 72 seats in parliament.
But nobody should be in any doubt that Reform was the real story of the election. Farage electrified a zombie election campaign and effectively turned the July 4th poll into a referendum on the old two-party political system. A referendum that the Tory-Labour axis lost. Proof that the popular revolt that won the Brexit referendum eight years ago, and has since shaken up politics across Europe, is alive and kicking in allegedly boring old Britain.
A glance at the real numbers behind the “Labour landslide” headlines illustrates what we are talking about. True, Starmer’s Labour ended up with a remarkable 411 out of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. But it did so by winning just over a third—33.69%—of the votes cast. In fact, Starmer’s supposedly moderate, popular Labour Party won fewer votes (9.7 million) than Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour did when losing both the 2017 and 2019 elections (12.9 million and 10.3 million votes respectively).
The closer you look, the worse it gets for them. The collapse of the Tories and the lack of enthusiasm for Labour meant only 59.9% of the UK electorate voted at all last week—the second-lowest turnout since universal suffrage was introduced in 1928. So, Starmer was elected PM with only a third of the votes on a 60% turnout; in other words, Labour won with the support of just 20% of the total electorate.
Even those who did vote for Starmer overwhelmingly expressed a negative, anti-Tory sentiment rather than a positive endorsement of his party. When YouGov pollsters asked voters the primary reason why they had voted Labour, more than 40% said it was to get the Tories out; just 5% said it was because they supported Labour’s policies.
Throw the shattered Conservative Party’s miserable 24% into the electoral mix, and another telling truth emerges. Labour and Tories, the two establishment parties of Britain’s century-old political duopoly, managed a combined total of 58% of the votes cast. That historically low figure contrasts with 75.8 % the duopoly won in 2019, and 82.4% in 2017. To put these numbers in some longer historical perspective: when Sir Winston Churchill was elected prime minister back in 1951, the Tory and Labour parties together took no less than 96.8% of the votes cast, on a high turnout of 82.6%.
This time around, millions of voters decided either to stay at home or to vote neither Tory nor Labour, opting instead for the likes of the Greens or for independent candidates (including, worryingly, several sectarian Islamists standing on a ‘pro-Gaza’— i.e., anti-Israeli—ticket). And most strikingly of all, many chose to vote for Reform UK.
Throughout the short campaign, the UK political establishment displayed what my friends at Spiked-online.com called Nigel Farage Derangement Syndrome, or what we might think of as Farageophobia. Driven by their terror of Farage’s popular appeal, they threw everything they could at Reform UK, accusing them of being ‘far-right,’ racists, Putin supporters, even Nazis, etc, etczzz.
On election night, the conformist panels of liberal-left pundits in all the TV studios were torn between trying to play down Reform’s results and expressing their horror at so many voters making the “wrong” choices. Labour grandee Baroness Harriet Harman objected that Reform were ghastly populists and that it would be “frightening to have their menacing presence in the Commons.” Scary stuff, this democracy business, for the Westminster elites.
Yet none of the slanderous mud-slinging from the top could dissuade more than four million ordinary Brits from voting for Reform UK, a party many had never heard of a month ago. And as columnist Alison Pearson pointed out in the Telegraph, they did so not just as a protest vote, or as an anti-Tory gesture:
Most people voted Labour because they wanted to teach the Tories a lesson they’ll never forget. … Most people voted Reform to get Reform. That’s the difference.
A declaration of interest; I spent some of the election campaign in the Reform UK London HQ, as I did for Farage’s Brexit Party in 2019. Just before the election last week, I went canvassing for him in his constituency of patriotic Clacton, on the Essex coast. Knocking on doors in the district of Jaywick, often called the “most deprived area in the country,” we met many working-class people who had either always voted Tory, or had never voted before. What they shared was a fury at politicians from all the major parties who have treated them with such contempt. And a genuine enthusiasm for Reform. “Nine of us are going up together to vote for Nigel, it’s a family outing” was one pretty typical doorstep response. Back at the Clacton office, I said that, if they all came out to vote, he’d win in a landslide. And he did, overturning a huge Tory majority with a 45% swing.
The demand for ‘real change’ that led these people to vote Reform was largely based on ideas that would have been considered common sense not so long ago. Ideas such as standing up for country, community and family, knowing what a woman is, defending free speech, rejecting woke indoctrination in schools; and, perhaps most importantly, taking control of Britain’s borders and ending the uncontrolled mass immigration, legal and illegal, that Reform argued Britain cannot afford either economically or culturally.
Farage was the only political leader to run anything like a public election campaign, from speaking at wildly enthusiastic mass rallies to enjoying a pint in local pubs. As others pointed out, he was the only leader to get close enough to people to have a milkshake and building site rubble thrown at him, while the rest cowered in their TV studios and behind their orchestrated stunts with a few party loyalists.
This ability of Farage to connect with people in the real world, his appeal to Brits to “vote with your heart,” is what terrifies the disconnected political elites. Their Farageophobia really expresses their fear and loathing of the ordinary voters whose lives they cannot comprehend and whose minds they cannot control.
As the UK campaign showed, and as we have seen in France and elsewhere in Europe, the political establishment will try anything to thwart the upstart sovereigntist parties, even trying to subvert democracy or ignore election results. But as the UK election confirmed, every time the elites try to declare the death of populism, the populace—the demos—refuses to do or vote as they are told. More power to the people’s revolt.
Establishment ‘Farageophobia’ Is Really Fear of Ordinary Voters
Photo: Oli SCARFF / AFP
It might seem as if there were two general elections here in the UK last week. One was staged in the fantasy Britain of the political and media establishment; in this make-believe election, the Labour Party reportedly won an “historic landslide,” giving new prime minister Keir Starmer a “huge mandate for change.”
The other election took place in the real Britain where voters live and work. In this, actual, election, the majority of voters and non-voters rejected both the Tories and Labour as two wings of the old establishment. The sort of ‘change’ millions voted for was best reflected in the overnight breakthrough of Nigel Farage’s insurgent sovereigntist party, Reform UK.
In less than a month, and in the face of a sustained campaign of political slander from the ‘Farageophobic’ elites, Reform won more than four million votes, finishing third with 14.3% of the popular vote. The undemocratic vagaries of the UK electoral system meant that translated into just five Reform MPs; by comparison, the misnamed Liberal Democrats got half a million fewer votes than Reform yet ended up with 72 seats in parliament.
But nobody should be in any doubt that Reform was the real story of the election. Farage electrified a zombie election campaign and effectively turned the July 4th poll into a referendum on the old two-party political system. A referendum that the Tory-Labour axis lost. Proof that the popular revolt that won the Brexit referendum eight years ago, and has since shaken up politics across Europe, is alive and kicking in allegedly boring old Britain.
A glance at the real numbers behind the “Labour landslide” headlines illustrates what we are talking about. True, Starmer’s Labour ended up with a remarkable 411 out of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. But it did so by winning just over a third—33.69%—of the votes cast. In fact, Starmer’s supposedly moderate, popular Labour Party won fewer votes (9.7 million) than Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour did when losing both the 2017 and 2019 elections (12.9 million and 10.3 million votes respectively).
The closer you look, the worse it gets for them. The collapse of the Tories and the lack of enthusiasm for Labour meant only 59.9% of the UK electorate voted at all last week—the second-lowest turnout since universal suffrage was introduced in 1928. So, Starmer was elected PM with only a third of the votes on a 60% turnout; in other words, Labour won with the support of just 20% of the total electorate.
Even those who did vote for Starmer overwhelmingly expressed a negative, anti-Tory sentiment rather than a positive endorsement of his party. When YouGov pollsters asked voters the primary reason why they had voted Labour, more than 40% said it was to get the Tories out; just 5% said it was because they supported Labour’s policies.
Throw the shattered Conservative Party’s miserable 24% into the electoral mix, and another telling truth emerges. Labour and Tories, the two establishment parties of Britain’s century-old political duopoly, managed a combined total of 58% of the votes cast. That historically low figure contrasts with 75.8 % the duopoly won in 2019, and 82.4% in 2017. To put these numbers in some longer historical perspective: when Sir Winston Churchill was elected prime minister back in 1951, the Tory and Labour parties together took no less than 96.8% of the votes cast, on a high turnout of 82.6%.
This time around, millions of voters decided either to stay at home or to vote neither Tory nor Labour, opting instead for the likes of the Greens or for independent candidates (including, worryingly, several sectarian Islamists standing on a ‘pro-Gaza’— i.e., anti-Israeli—ticket). And most strikingly of all, many chose to vote for Reform UK.
Throughout the short campaign, the UK political establishment displayed what my friends at Spiked-online.com called Nigel Farage Derangement Syndrome, or what we might think of as Farageophobia. Driven by their terror of Farage’s popular appeal, they threw everything they could at Reform UK, accusing them of being ‘far-right,’ racists, Putin supporters, even Nazis, etc, etczzz.
On election night, the conformist panels of liberal-left pundits in all the TV studios were torn between trying to play down Reform’s results and expressing their horror at so many voters making the “wrong” choices. Labour grandee Baroness Harriet Harman objected that Reform were ghastly populists and that it would be “frightening to have their menacing presence in the Commons.” Scary stuff, this democracy business, for the Westminster elites.
Yet none of the slanderous mud-slinging from the top could dissuade more than four million ordinary Brits from voting for Reform UK, a party many had never heard of a month ago. And as columnist Alison Pearson pointed out in the Telegraph, they did so not just as a protest vote, or as an anti-Tory gesture:
A declaration of interest; I spent some of the election campaign in the Reform UK London HQ, as I did for Farage’s Brexit Party in 2019. Just before the election last week, I went canvassing for him in his constituency of patriotic Clacton, on the Essex coast. Knocking on doors in the district of Jaywick, often called the “most deprived area in the country,” we met many working-class people who had either always voted Tory, or had never voted before. What they shared was a fury at politicians from all the major parties who have treated them with such contempt. And a genuine enthusiasm for Reform. “Nine of us are going up together to vote for Nigel, it’s a family outing” was one pretty typical doorstep response. Back at the Clacton office, I said that, if they all came out to vote, he’d win in a landslide. And he did, overturning a huge Tory majority with a 45% swing.
The demand for ‘real change’ that led these people to vote Reform was largely based on ideas that would have been considered common sense not so long ago. Ideas such as standing up for country, community and family, knowing what a woman is, defending free speech, rejecting woke indoctrination in schools; and, perhaps most importantly, taking control of Britain’s borders and ending the uncontrolled mass immigration, legal and illegal, that Reform argued Britain cannot afford either economically or culturally.
Farage was the only political leader to run anything like a public election campaign, from speaking at wildly enthusiastic mass rallies to enjoying a pint in local pubs. As others pointed out, he was the only leader to get close enough to people to have a milkshake and building site rubble thrown at him, while the rest cowered in their TV studios and behind their orchestrated stunts with a few party loyalists.
This ability of Farage to connect with people in the real world, his appeal to Brits to “vote with your heart,” is what terrifies the disconnected political elites. Their Farageophobia really expresses their fear and loathing of the ordinary voters whose lives they cannot comprehend and whose minds they cannot control.
As the UK campaign showed, and as we have seen in France and elsewhere in Europe, the political establishment will try anything to thwart the upstart sovereigntist parties, even trying to subvert democracy or ignore election results. But as the UK election confirmed, every time the elites try to declare the death of populism, the populace—the demos—refuses to do or vote as they are told. More power to the people’s revolt.
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