What If Reform Wins?—A Political Scare Story

Most speculative literary political dystopias down the years have imagined what life would be like under what Jack London, in his own seminal contribution to the genre, called The Iron Heel of totalitarianism. In the Islamised France of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, a form of sharia law is imposed; in the fascist USA of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, the Jews are persecuted and destroyed; and, in the Faragist UK of Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins?, Lee Anderson, MP, is banned from a curry house after making an off-colour remark about Indians. 

This final exercise in imaginative fiction hits British shelves this very week, just ahead of the UK’s May 7 local council elections in which Reform is widely expected to triumph. I should note here at the outset that I haven’t actually read it—I’m not the kind of sceptical reviewer its writer’s publicity agents would be likely to have sent a preview copy out to. Written by a very Reform-sceptical broadsheet journalist named Peter Chappell, it is being marketed by its publishers, Bloomsbury, almost as though it is a horror story: apparently, it is “terrifying” and “a compulsive, chilling non-fiction [sic] thriller” which “imagines what might happen if Reform wins a majority at the next general election.” 

And what might happen then? Besides the new Reform Home Secretary Lee Anderson being denied access to his evening korma, Prime Minister Farage defunds the BBC to such an extent that it is obliged to cancel all future broadcasts of The Antiques Roadshow. Distressing stuff.

In his bad books

Chappell clearly does not like Reform, warning of how the party will “collide with the British state” sometime soon if the polls are correct. A warning to which many UK voters would respond, ‘Good, the sclerotic British state needs colliding with.’ 

Based upon “dozens of new interviews” with Reform insiders, civil servants, and nervous men in dinghies who don’t want to go back home, Chappell’s book adopts a journalistic live-reportage narrative style, taking us “day-by-day, minute-by-minute” through the first two years of a Reform UK government, which ends in predictable disaster with Nigel Farage’s forced defenestration, potentially at the hands of the police and armed forces. At this point, “it takes a year for the next Prime Minister to get the smell of cigarettes and red wine stains out of the [10 Downing Street] carpet.” How long will it take Keir Starmer’s successor to get the smells of engine oil, burnt circuit boards, adrenochrome, and oozing extraterrestrial slime out of his own soft furnishings? 

According to early reviews, at the 2029 general election, Chappell imagines Reform winning a slender outright majority of 20, bagging a total of 335 seats. As soon as Reform MPs line up to enter the appropriately named Commons, however, only to glance at them is to be clear they will not succeed; Labour’s previous impeccable lawyer-led government of mature and responsible adults is replaced by a sickeningly vulgar and childish one of “[military] veterans, self-employed accountants, professional landlords, driving instructors, pub landlords, farmers and call-centre managers.” Just imagine that. Having a driving instructor running the country, as opposed to, say, someone like the eminent credentialed human rights barrister Lord Hermer, whose previous professional life prior to entering politics was entirely without reproach. 

You can see the source of Chappell’s anxieties here. How on earth would an ignorant ex-soldier be qualified to make informed decisions about the nation’s military, or a mere farmer about agricultural policy? If Chappell had really wished to imagine a political dystopia in which unqualified oiks are handed inappropriate levels of control over the levers of national power, he could have written a far more disturbing text called What If Angela Rayner Wins? 

Political plotting

The morning after victory, Farage addresses a trembling nation to lay out his plan for government: withdrawing from the ECHR and the UN Convention on Refugees, deporting illegal immigrants, scrapping Net Zero, repealing the Human Rights Act, slashing welfare benefits, and slaying the firstborn. Or, in other words, in a truly radical and horrifying departure from recent political tradition, Farage pledges to actually attempt to implement his promised manifesto to voters instead of doing the precise reverse of it, as previous, more professional incumbents of Number 10 over the past 30 years have done.

Farage’s chancellor, Richard Tice, then sends the markets into a Liz Truss-shaming freefall by announcing a rise in the personal income tax threshold to £17,000, to be inadequately funded by the twin means of an abolition of pension guarantees for old people and placing a charge on NHS services, none of which are currently Reform policies at all. A green light for fracking also badly pollutes rivers before the EU imposes various retaliatory tariffs on UK goods and services and Farage nearly gets the Falklands invaded by Argentina again, only this time without any meaningful navy to defend them with.

Most disastrous of all, naturally, is Reform’s ‘fascistic’ policy upon immigration. Left-wing mobs protest about all the planned deportations, culminating in a fiery riot at Kent’s Manston Detention Centre, in which the police get violent and migrants escape into the English countryside to intimidate the terrified locals—an English countryside which Labour is already flooding with migrants to intimidate the terrified locals off the printed page anyway.

One major subplot is that of rogue Reform advisor Dan Sambrook, who secretly puts together a policy paper laying out plans for the forced remigration of thousands of non-white British ‘paper citizens’—a policy which many people planning to vote Reform idly think the party possesses anyhow, and will be mightily disappointed to find they don’t, should they ever genuinely win office. In the book, once Farage and his high-ups in the Reform hierarchy—e.g., the Iraqi-born non-white paper-citizen Nadim Zahawi—hear of Sambrook’s plans, they seem shocked and dismiss them out of hand.

So, that’s Chappell’s imaginary, fictional mass immigration policy conspiracy dealt with. But what about the genuine, non-fictional mass immigration policy conspiracy which took place behind closed doors for real the last time a genuine sea-change regime came to power in Britain back in 1997, with the election of Tony Blair? Famously, according to 2009 revelations from Blair’s New Labour speechwriter Andrew Neather, in private, the party plotted to throw open the borders of the then-still 94% white nation so as to “rub the right’s noses in diversity” and “make the country truly multicultural”.

Nobody got sacked by Blair for laying such plans—because he himself approved of them, for both cultural and demographic vote-rigging purposes. Instead, they were implemented, and the country flooded with millions of incomers without the electorate even getting a vote on the matter. By one reckoning, cumulative net immigration into the UK went from 68,000 in the 25 years before Blair’s election to 5.89 million in the 25 years following it, and this was before the Boriswave. 

Just not so stories

If, in 1996, some enterprising conservative-minded English author had decided to pitch a novel imagining life in a post-Blairite political dystopia and had suggested the colossal numbers above, he would have been asked by editors to dial them down substantially for the sake of not appearing too fantastical. With this in mind, the idea for another political sort-of-sci-fi book springs to mind. Instead of What If Reform Wins?, my own proposed new cosy reverse-horror novel would ask instead, What If Blair Hadn’t Won? The likely answer to this question? No need for Farage in the first place. 

Imitating Peter Chappell’s literary model, the book would be an extremely (and deliberately) boring “day-to-day, minute-by-minute” account of how the borders still worked; the economy was stable; house prices were affordable; schoolgirls weren’t getting gang-raped; men in dresses weren’t being let into women’s changing rooms; Britain still had a proper army; nobody was rioting; free speech still existed; utility bills were low; and all the nation’s lights stayed on.

Chappell’s new account does not all sound like wild liberal scaremongering, to be fair. There are definitely some genuine legitimate concerns, which the author seems to reflect fairly, about what an administrative mess of things Reform UK might potentially make, should they indeed form Great Britain’s next government. The majority of its likely MPs will have zero practical experience of governing, after all—a few Tory deserters like Nadim Zahawi aside, of course, and look at what a catastrophe they made of managing things previously. This fact alone does raise the question, though: could Reform really create a bigger, zombie-apocalypse-style national dystopia out of the ailing Yookay than the country’s much more ‘professional’ leaders since Tony Blair have done? 

Perhaps the true horror story title here should not be What If Reform Wins?, but What If Reform Doesn’t Win? Or, maybe even worse, What If Reform Wins, But Nothing Much Meaningful Changes Anyway?

Now that really would be a scary prospect.