Falling for Farage
With Reform UK’s victory in England’s recent local elections, significant – and surprising – sections of the media are also now embracing Nigel Farage’s politics. Adam Bienkov reports
When Keir Starmer called an early morning press conference to recently announce his “tighter” immigration policies, he promised to reduce migrant numbers “significantly”. Attacking his predecessors, he said that the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tough action, and that his policies would “finally take back control of our borders”. Shortly after his statement, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper gave an exclusive interview to GB News on the plans, before heading to the House of Commons to set out how the Government would stop Britain’s “one-nation experiment in open borders”.
It is not hard to imagine Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson doing the same if they were to be elected to power in 2029.
The Reform UK Leader and his party may hold just five seats in Parliament – only one more than the Greens – but, in terms of their influence over what happens in Westminster, it sometimes feels as if Farage is already calling the shots in No 10.
Indeed, just one year after Starmer – who became Labour Leader on a promise to “defend migrant rights” and free movement – entered Downing Street, Farage is setting the terms of political debate in a way that few would have predicted 12 months ago.
That we would get to this point was not inevitable.
One of the first moves made by Starmer’s Government was to scrap the previous Conservative Government’s Rwanda scheme for deporting asylum seekers, while dismissing calls to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Yet, in the months that have followed Donald Trump’s re-election as US President, Starmer’s rhetoric and policies have taken a decisive turn towards those of Farage and Reform.
This is no accident.
For those around the Prime Minister, the return of Trump has presented an opportunity to transform perceptions of the Labour Party for good.
Starmer’s chief advisor Morgan McSweeney is a leading advocate of the so-called Blue Labour strategy that seeks to embrace the anti-globalist, anti-immigration rhetoric of the Farageist right, to kill off perceptions of Labour as being ‘soft’ on migration, welfare, and other cultural issues.
So far, it doesn’t seem to be working. Rather than helping to nullify the threat from Farage, Labour’s plan merely appears to be amplifying it.
In the run-up to England’s local elections in May, the Labour Party paid for thousands of online adverts announcing the large number of migrant deportations the Government had processed since the election – alongside an image of queues of migrants, in an apparently deliberate echo of Farage’s infamous ‘Breaking Point’ poster during the EU Referendum campaign.
At the same time, Cooper unveiled a series of plans to restrict migrants and asylum seekers from claiming British citizenship, while briefing about further proposals to restrict the legal application of the ECHR in asylum cases.
Similar pledges were made by Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, which also embraced Farage’s commitment to scrap the net zero climate commitment.
Despite this, Reform achieved the biggest set of local election gains of any of the parties Farage has led over the last decade – with Labour losing one of its safest parliamentary seats in the country to him in Runcorn; and the Conservatives suffering the biggest proportional fall in their support of any party in the history of modern British elections.
Based on the local election results, Reform would likely win a sizable majority of parliamentary seats were another general election held today.
To understand how we got here, we need to first understand quite how successfully Farage’s ideas have permeated Westminster in recent years.
Shifting Into the Mainstream
Having originally gained traction on the far-right, Nigel Farage’s ideas on migration have increasingly entered the mainstream of British centre-right politics, before now gradually inching over into the centre and even far-left.
This can be seen in how Westminster’s established political institutions and media organisations have taken to dealing with Farage.
Once dismissed as the leader of “fruitcakes and loonies” by former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, the Reform Leader is currently being embraced by Westminster in a way few saw coming.
Inside Parliament’s Portcullis House – where journalists and lobbyists jostle with senior politicians over cups of coffee and subsidised lunches – Farage and his colleagues have become highly sought commodities, with Westminster’s big players competing with each other to get their ear.
Such is the rush to ingratiate themselves with the media that even relatively obscure former Reform staffers are now being regularly wined and dined in the exclusive clubs and restaurants surrounding Parliament.
A similar approach is happening in the media, with even nominally left-leaning publications competing with each other to apparently talk up the Reform Leader and his party.
The New Statesman magazine, which for years was regarded as the bastion of the soft-left of the Labour Party, is now increasingly turning more towards the right. Its former Editor Jason Cowley, who published his own favourable interview with Farage last year, is now one of the leading champions of the Government’s Blue Labour strategy. Meanwhile, his successors as Editor and Deputy Editor of the title are both alumni of the UnHerd website, which is owned by GB News and Spectator owner Sir Paul Marshall.
Relatively obscure former Reform staffers are now being regularly wined and dined in the exclusive clubs and restaurants surrounding Parliament
The mainstreaming of the GB News media ecosystem has continued apace since Labour’s election, despite an investigation by the anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate last February which found that Marshall had liked and shared multiple far-right and Islamophobic conspiracy theory tweets.
Starmer’s Government has abandoned its initial blacklisting of the channel, the journalists of which are now regularly among the first to be called at Downing Street press conferences. It was telling that, in the hours following the Government’s latest announcement of tougher migration policies, Yvette Cooper gave her first broadcast interview not to the BBC or ITV, but to GB News.
The influence of Marshall and his channels has extended beyond the centre-left.
The website Novara Media, which was an early champion of left-wing Corbynism, is led by an employee of not just one Marshall media outlet but two. Aaron Bastani, a columnist at UnHerd, can also be regularly found on GB News, alongside Farage and Anderson, where his attacks on the Government are also shared by the channel’s booming social media accounts.
Bastani has defended his place on the channel as a means of spreading left-wing ideas. Yet his commentary has become increasingly Reform-sympathetic. In the days following the party’s local election victory, the Daily Mail published a double-page spread setting out Reform’s new “manifesto” for the country. Responding to the article, Bastani raised reservations about some of its ideas before telling his followers that it’s “really worth reading … policy-wise, it’s substantial”.
Concerns have been raised about Reform’s policy agenda because of its unfunded commitments and unworkable proposals. A recent analysis by The Economist magazine found that Farage’s economic proposals – which mainly consist of considerable tax cuts for the better-off – would leave a black hole of about £100 billion in the public finances, dwarfing that found in Liz Truss’ mini-Budget. Paying for this would either result in the biggest wave of austerity cuts ever seen in the UK or the effective bankrupting of the national economy.
Neither would be a result Bastani would previously have been expected to describe as “substantial” or worth considering.
Hidden behind the current wave of Farage-mania gripping Westminster is the reality that the Reform Leader and his party are eminently beatable. Tied to an unpopular US President, and proposing policies that could bankrupt the UK, it is likely that Reform could be easily defeated at the ballot box should its rivals switch to a policy of countering Farage’s ideas – rather than enabling or copying them.
But, far from making arguments against Reform’s stance on the economy, foreign policy, climate, and immigration, Nigel Farage’s political opponents appear intent on co-opting him, and therefore legitimising him.
The result is that, with more than four years still to go until the next election, it is starting to feel as if Farage and his party are already moving their bags into No 10. ■
