The decision by the right-wing politician to stand in the election will move the campaign to the right and present challenges to the left, argues Kevin Crane

The most divisive politician in Britain today definitely wasn’t standing in this election, until suddenly he was. With just days left to register, Nigel Farage has reversed his previous statements about merely ‘advising’ his rebranded party, Reform UK, to running as the parliamentary candidate for Clacton. The choice of venue is not such a surprise: it has the distinction of being the only seat Farage’s previous organisation. the UK Independence Party (Ukip), ever won, in a by-election. Nevertheless, this is a very sudden change of tune from the man, and the circumstances need to be talked about.

The other winners of 2019

When the hapless unelected prime minister Rishi Sunak made his snap election announcement in May, one of the unknowns was how the Reform party were going to respond. The question most people have been asking about this election has consistently been not if the Tories will lose this election, but by how much they will lose. The position taken by Farage and Reform was always going to be a key variable in that, not least because of the decisive role they had had (in their previous incarnation as ‘the Brexit Party’) in the major Tory win at the previous general election. As polling day loomed in 2019, Farage took the personal decision to stand down all his candidates in Tory-held seats, effectively forming an anti-European Union coalition with the Tories and fatally exploiting a split in the voting base of the Labour Party over the question of the Europe. The Tories got a thumping majority and delivered a hard (albeit barely planned) Brexit.

The Brexit Party had obviously achieved its goals, but also basically liquidated its elected office in the process. Its politicians, including Farage himself, had been Members of the European, not British, Parliaments, so with the British exit, they were literally out of their jobs. Since then, the majority of its politicians have drifted on to other grifts, in some case from the House of Lords due to thankyou gifts from the Tory government. Farage mostly focused on his media career. Despite changing the name to sound less irrelevant, it seemed that the party now called Reform was going to play a very minor role. Which it was, for about two years.

The short-lived triumph of the new Tories

Reforms’ return to prominence could not have happened without the crisis of the Tory Party in 2022. The ouster of the previously popular PM Boris Johnson, over a list of personal and political controversies too long to even rightly remember, saw the Conservatives engage in a battle for the organisation’s soul, and lose.

A short version of what’s happened to the Tories in the past five years is that Johnson, positioning himself as a sort of Donald Trump-lite, persuaded the Tory Party to make him leader in a Faustian bargain to defeat Jeremy Corbyn’s left-led Labour Party. This was a messy process that, in order to secure the strategic alliance with Farage’s people described above, saw Johnson expel a sizeable chunk of the moderate wing of the party and promote a large number of hard-right figures from the Tory fringes. As stated, this worked in the short-term, but at high political cost.

Once the mass of scandals and tensions emerged after the Covid-19 pandemic came and went, the attempts by Tory MPs to move on from Johnson essentially all failed. Ukip politics had been imported into the Tories to beat a socialist Labour. This was true at the top – seeing highly reactionary MPs like Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg brought into high office – and at the bottom. So, a party that had once been made up of hundreds of thousands of very traditional, religious and communitarian-minded middle-class people (mostly women, in fact), was now a party of a one hundred thousand or so highly nihilistic, aggressively individualist people (now mostly men, and mostly in the southern parts of England).

As the omni-crisis that has followed the pandemic drags down quality of life and institutions, and without a unifying cause such as Brexit to reorientate itself, the Conservative Party is widely believed to facing a period of major historic decline. Even its one remaining selling point to a mass electorate, that it is the party of homeownership, is wearing thin, as a result of the failure of two utterly incompetent Tory prime ministers after Johnson to prevent inflation and high interest rates from impacting the middle classes.

The last minute comeback

Farage was not much negatively affected by losing his MEP seat, because he has been more of a media figure than a conventional politician anyway. In that very modern way that public figures have now, he finds ways to stick around in the limelight despite the fact that he really could and should just have vanished. A celebrity in the mould of Jeremy Clarkson or Piers Morgan, he is much loved by the boys’ clubs that run our media, and they will always find any excuse to give him airtime to use as free advertising for his financial punditry, or to earn a fast buck on reality TV.

While he was focusing on his media career, he had left the Reform party in the care of his richer, but less egomaniacal, associate, Richard Tice, a man who had no interest in becoming a politician himself and was openly keeping the project going as a hobby.

Farage’s commitment to Reform, meanwhile, was looking more and more tenuous. He was seen at numerous Tory functions. People openly speculated that he could be invited into the party. Jacob Rees-Mogg went on the record saying that a new alliance between the Conservatives and Reform would be the dream ticket that could reverse their losses and keep the right in power.

The snap election disrupted all this casual chatter. Tice was keen for Reform to make an impact and was happy to raise cash for this to happen, but had still no intention of actually making the strategy happen. So, despite insisting that he was not the actual leader and would not contest a seat, Farage had his arm twisted into returning as the ‘advisor’ to Reform. He stated that he would not be a candidate multiple times. As late as last week, he actually ended up looking pretty stupid on Question Time, when the audience pointed out that, as a non-candidate, it was fairly obvious he was only there because of his cronies in the BBC hierarchy.

So, what changed? Well maybe the accusations of personal cowardice were getting to him, but really the Tory party was being found too wanting, and events were threatening to move too fast.

The Tommy Robinson factor

On the 1 June, Britain’s disparate fascist movement managed to organise itself into the strongest street mobilisation that it has had for some years. Led by long-time agitator Stephen “Tommy Robinson” Yaxley-Lennon and the former actor Lawrence Fox, an openly racist march of thousands of football hooligans took place in Central London. While the branding isn’t as strong as it was a decade ago – they have neither a British National Party nor English Defence League – the far right had managed to unite themselves around a shared hostility to the Palestine solidarity demonstrations, as well as wider issues such as their traditional hostility to immigration and their slightly newer obsessions about LGBT issues.

The mainstream media barely reported the far-right marches – which is astonishing when you consider the unhinged attacks that have been directed against every overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration for Palestinian rights – but don’t think that it didn’t have an impact on the right of politics on this country. For a start, Suella Braverman had already made a failed attempt to co-opt these people for the Tory government back in November, which was the embarrassing disgrace that cost her ministerial post.

Farage’s decision to just go for broke is also strongly influenced by this, though. He is not himself a fascist – it is notable that he and Yaxley-Lennon were never in UKIP at the same time – but that only makes him more determined that it is his right-libertarianism that should be leading the racist and reactionary movement, not those guys. The Tories have made a lot of bluster about banning demonstrations against genocide, but failed to deliver on it. Couple this with everything else they fail to do (anything at all, in fewer words), and it becomes apparent to powerful social forces in Britain that the Conservative Party may be more trouble than it is worth.

Both bad winners and bad losers

The triumph that the Johnson-Farage coalition had in 2019 can be measured in the rightwards gallop of British politics since. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party purges socialists – primarily non-white women – mercilessly and is vastly more excited by the prospect of stopping immigration than it is stopping poverty or climate change. The Johnson-Farage coalition has, however, been proven to be strong but brittle.

It doesn’t help that their coalition was old; probably a tenth of their 2019 voters have simply passed away, but in any case, they were not ideologically committed to anything much past the Brexit moment. Despite what Starmer’s supporters claim, only a minority are switching to Labour according to most polling. Large numbers will simply not vote, but the second largest number of defectors from the Tories could go to Reform.

This is why Rees-Mogg and a few others in the Tories were hoping that a coalition deal of some sort with Reform was the way forward. Indeed, they thought recruiting Farage would simply solve their party-building problems for good. It wouldn’t have: the extreme racism, homophobia and climate-change denial inherent to Reform was not going to restore previous unity of old Tory voters and would have in fact provoked the question of a revival of the Liberal Democrats or defections to right-wing Labour. But that doesn’t matter now, because too many people in the ruling and political classes are smelling the stench of death over the Tory Party.

Farage is moving to establish himself as the sole legitimate leader of a new reactionary right. He has openly said that he will do this over the Conservative Party’s dead body, and this is not something we’ve ever heard him say before. He feels he has to do this, because otherwise Steven Yaxley-Lennon is going to do it in his place. Either way, the race is on to shift this already depressing general election into a freakshow of previously unserious reactionary positions.

The contrast between the 2024 general election and the 2019 election, let alone 2017, is astonishingly stark. Within five years, we are officially expected to believe that there is no legitimate democratic debate on workers’ rights, foreign policy, housing or green transition, and that suddenly the only things that matter at all are border control, strong militaries and drilling for as much oil as is to be found. The gambit Farage is making is that this is a moment of such extreme reaction that he can push it far, far further (albeit without conceding control quite to the heirs of Adolf Hitler).

Farage’s candidacy is a disaster for the Tories, because it has trashed their hopes of repeating a 2019 deal and leaves them with a broken, disillusioned base going into to an already horrific election. It is also, however, the beginning of new established hard right in Britain. Clacton is likely to return Farage to Parliament for the first time, but then for the remainder of his life. It is also a place representative of spaces the left finds so difficult to relate to. Clacton is very old and very white, but note that it is not prosperous (as seaside towns tend not to be).

The problems for the left in this are multiple. Of course, we can have a good belly laugh at the fact that Reform is now poised to crash the Tory Party’s vote in many constituencies, causing many current ministers (all of whom are arseholes!) to lose their seats. We do, however, have to realise that we are not facing a death of the right, but a realignment and conscious radicalisation of the right, one which will pull people in if we do not present better answers. The challenge for the left is to make sure that we do.