Yes, Reform UK is “Anti-Establishment”

Like some other readers, I imagine, I am increasingly irritated by journalists and broadcasters who mock Reform UK leaders like Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf for attacking an ‘Establishment’ to which these leaders allegedly must also belong because of their wealth or educational background or because, in the case of Farage and Tice, they are MPs. People who say these things seem to think that in doing so they are also demolishing Reform’s policies, dismissing the concerns of its supporters and somehow landing a killer blow against populism, or at least hope these will be the effects of their criticism. 

Having more influence than the rest of us may well be the result of wealth, a top private school education and being in Parliament. That, however, doesn’t grant Reform UK leaders any meaningful ‘Establishment’ status in a country in thrall to a dominant ideology, promoted by a British Establishment spread across multiple institutions and with a cast of tens of thousands, and which it is Reform UK’s political raison d’être to overthrow. In this sense of the word – the usual one – the fact that a party has some very wealthy leaders and donors is absolutely no guarantee of Establishment status, though it may bring advantages (and also, sometimes, disadvantages) and should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other political party.  

The British Establishment includes all those, whatever their educational, economic or social background, with a commitment to or role and vested interest in the maintenance of this dominant ideology. The leaders of a populist party, such as Reform UK, that challenges a dominant ideology that has gained control of most of the levers of power are quite appropriately therefore described as ‘anti-Establishment’ or if you like, a ‘counter-elite’, which is how Pareto, the early 20th century sociologist of elites who believed that an elite to be effective needed to be kept on its toes by a ‘counter-elite’, might have described them.

The main beliefs of the British Establishment which Reform UK is committed to challenging can be roughly summed up as follows:

• mass migration brings great benefits
• diversity is our strength
• multicultural societies can be made to work
• we would be better off in the EU
• we must prioritise international law 
• nationalism is a dirty word 
• Islam is a religion of peace
• Britain has been and still is a racist country
• we must apologise for the bad things Britain did in the past
• the world is divided into oppressors and victims
• minorities are victims and must have priority
• we must strive for equality of outcome, not just opportunity 
• state action is the best way to solve society’s problems
• the rich are more of a liability than an asset
• free expression should be curbed to protect victims from their oppressors
• we believe in democracy but will do anything to stop hostile ‘dark forces’ from gaining power. 

A roll call of the commanders, officers and foot soldiers of the British Establishment promoting or failing to challenge these beliefs would include (the list is far from exclusive) the following:

• Conservative and Labour politicians who have facilitated mass immigration and championed woke causes
• civil servants who undermine ministers not fully committed to the dominant ideology
• boards and chief executives of quangos set up to limit Parliament’s scrutiny of government
• members of the judiciary whose interpretations of the law reflect their sympathy with woke causes 
• bishops of the Established Church of England more concerned with reparations than with their parishes
• a police force that has come to see its main role as protecting minorities
• philanthropists and their trusts that subsidise Establishment causes
• funders and staff of all the bodies in the Net Zero 2050 ‘climate change’ industrial complex
• heads of major cultural institutions keen to apologise for Britain’s racist, sexist and homophobic past
• university vice-chancellors who have failed to allow diversity of opinion and adopted student application policies that discriminate against the majority
• head teachers who have come to think that the main purpose of schooling is not the transmission of knowledge but the indoctrination of children into Establishment ideology
• HR departments that use the 2010 Equality Act to discriminate in favour of minorities
• publishers, librarians and bookshops which restrict what we can read
• advertising companies that send the message that we are a country in which the indigenous population is already in a minority and in which most British couples and their children are multi-racial
• journalists, broadcasters and media personalities who, wittingly and unwittingly, pass on Establishment assumptions to their audiences.

To me this looks like a very powerful Establishment by comparison with which the manpower and weaponry available to Reform UK is meagre, even when the large donations to the party and its leader currently under obsessional Establishment scrutiny are factored in. If any political party is a David facing an Establishment Goliath it is Reform UK, both because of the disproportion between its support in the country and the level of its representation in Parliament and because the Establishment seems determined to treat it uniquely among parties as a pariah and as a threat to the country’s very existence.  

Keir Starmer’s talk over the last year of preventing Reform from taking the nation “down a very dark path” and creating a “toxic divide”, and thus of the need to fight Reform in “a battle for the soul of the nation”, has conjured up for the historically-informed the old Protestant trope of the country’s chief enemy as an anti-Christ but with Nigel Farage now playing the role instead of the Pope, Charles I or Napoleon. The effects of an Establishment uniquely demonising Reform, instead of countering it in robust debate, have been all too apparent in recent weeks, both (it would seem) in the murder of Ann Widdecombe and in the appalling response to her death on social media.

The kind of language used against Reform has been deliberate and systematic, Starmer opening the New Year in January with an instruction to ministers to target Reform with the message that it was a party feeding on “grievance, decline and division”. Such language may have the desired effect on some people, as no one likes to hear that they are associated with a sinister movement that others will shun them for supporting. Ultimately, it is a tactic that people will see through and thus backfire. The British Establishment may well find that what people tell their families, neighbours and pollsters is not what they do in the voting booth. 

It will be interesting to see whether Andy Burnham’s wish, in his first speech as Leader of the Labour Party, to initiate a “new politics” which avoids “point scoring”, extends as far as the British Establishment ceasing to treat as ‘untouchables’ supporters of the party that still consistently receives more support than any other in opinion polls. I am not hopeful.

Dr Nicholas Tate has been an adviser to both English and French ministers of education and recently to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. He is the author of The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current and Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does and Education for Virtue and Other Essays.