As Reform’s advance falters, Peter Ramsay investigates why populism cannot provide the politics Britain needs, and elaborates the alternative.
‘…the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions. This will be a people vs the establishment by-election. It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire Establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.’ Nigel Farage, (Press statement, 7 July 2026)
‘Reform everywhere stands for the populist revolution that this country is so desperate for.’ Danny Kruger (Interview with Harry Cole, 26 June 2026)
Reform’s Danny Kruger is right that Britain needs radical political change, and soon. Our existing cosmopolitan elites have no solutions to the UK’s stagnant economy, its fiscal impasse, its dependence on mass immigration and its resulting Ulsterisation into warring sectarian factions, or its increasingly exposed geostrategic position as the old order of globalisation fragments. It is not clear how long a state can persist with the degree of state failure that ours is now experiencing. Without new ideas, the regime is drifting towards ever more authoritarian means of governing. Reform seems to be the only party that might be in a position to head off, or even just slow down, this accelerating disaster in the near future. The urgent question is, can Kruger’s ‘populist revolution’ succeed?
In the interview quoted above, Kruger himself is impressive in his clear grasp of the primary requirement for a Reform government to tame the blob and get democratic control of the state machinery in order to be able to get anything substantial done. But is the rest of his party in any way ready to govern or capable of governing?
At the time of writing, the Westminster regime has been trying to discredit Reform’s leader Nigel Farage, and create conditions for a recall election in his Clacton seat, with accusations that he broke rules requiring him to declare a £5m personal gift from a crypto billionaire, and stories concerning other dubious sources of financial support. It’s a classic blob manoeuvre. Fearful that they cannot defeat him politically, they reach for codes of conduct and smears. Farage denies any rule-breaking. But, even if that is true, a stitch-up by the blob, in the form of the Parliamentary Standards Committee, is to be expected. Farage has tried to outflank his opponents in classic populist fashion by resigning and calling a ‘people vs the establishment’ by-election himself. However, his counter-attack appears quickly to have descended into farce as the regime parties refused to contest what they say is merely an attempt on his part to evade proper scrutiny. This grim affair sums up the dire state of our politics.
Whatever we think of Farage’s claim that he broke no rules in not declaring the gift, or of the hypocrisy and bureaucratic cowardice of the old order in relying on rules, standards and Count Binface rather than fighting Farage politically, it should nevertheless have been obvious to someone with a realistic chance of forming the next government that the public has an interest in who finances him; and it should have been equally obvious that not declaring such a large personal gift would land him in serious political trouble. Farage claims he needed the money for security. The criminal assaults that he himself has suffered, followed by the brutal murder of high-profile Reform member Ann Widdecombe, make Reform’s need for security measures palpable. But if Reform needed the money for protection then the gift could have been very publicly announced and a fund set up for that purpose. Nor is it credible for Farage to claim that being persecuted over his personal dependence on a crypto billionaire should be a cause celebre of popular revolt against the Establishment. He will probably be re-elected in Clacton, but the affair confirms the suspicion that, notwithstanding Kruger’s realism, Reform are not very serious about governing. Farage has been a persistent and effective political campaigner for decades; he can claim the largest share of the credit for Brexit and to have brought down at least three prime ministers; but, for all that, he remains an unreliable and ultimately lightweight political figure.
Farage’s lack of political weight afflicts Reform more generally, as evidenced by their recent electoral performance. Farage’s third prime ministerial scalp is Keir Starmer, undone by Reform’s substantial victory in local elections in May that led to Andy Burnham’s successful move to unseat Starmer as prime minister by getting himself elected to parliament. The Makerfield by-election was the result. In a constituency that is exactly the type that Reform needs to capture, Labour comfortably saw off Reform’s inexperienced candidate Rob Kenyon. Of course, everybody understood that electing Burnham was a way to elect a new leader of the Labour Party and therefore get rid of the widely loathed Starmer. Farage himself observed, after Burnham had beaten them, that Reform’s own slogan in recent elections had been ‘Get Starmer Out’, and so he and his party had been ‘hoist with our own petard’. But Farage’s response sidesteps a deeper problem. His ‘Get Starmer out’ slogan was itself indicative of a key weakness in Farage’s populist politics. Rather than offering an inspiring programme to overcome the grave problems facing the nation, ‘Get Starmer out’ took the political line of least resistance; and that is why it was so easily co-opted by Labour Party insiders. Populism is a reaction to the failure of the old technocratic globalist order, one that gives expression to that decaying order’s discontents, but struggles to articulate an independent and inspiring political vision.
Reform’s campaign in Makerfield exemplified the problem. It included pledges to reform social housing provision and national insurance, and to end Net Zero commitments, ‘two-tier justice’ and EDI policies. Reform is not wrong to be raising these questions. Favouring British citizens in housing provision, favouring the employment of British workers over foreigners, achieving colour blind justice are all essential if we are to rebuild Britain. But in Reform’s hands, the framing of these policies is, like ‘Get Starmer out’, negative and reactive. All Reform’s policies tend to be framed in the terms of a culture war between the Westminster elite and the common people: ‘putting two fingers up to the Establishment’, with the old populist staples of immigration and crime always to the fore. Reform promises to end all the wokery, but what kind of Britain does it promise to build? This remains vague.
Faced with a contest between two versions of slippery opportunism, the post-Blairite Burnham or the populist Kenyon, Makerfield chose the post-Blairite. And that should set alarm bells ringing for all who see the urgent need to be rid of our sclerotic and authoritarian ancien regime. Reform can claim that Makerfield was a one-off, but their candidate didn’t even come close in territory they need to win if they are to form a government. And this is against a background in which, taken together, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and Plaid, (ie, the ancien regime parties) consistently outperform the populist parties, when it comes to opinion polls and elections (and that’s even before we take the entirely unreliable Tories into account).
Reform just don’t convince where and when they need to. As they struggle to create a more professional operation by integrating former Tories like Kruger (and stacking up the billionaire donors), a significant section of populist-leaning voters sense that Reform is being co-opted, and that section is heading for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, leeching votes away from Farage’s party. Labour is given a new lease of life yet again, as it was by Boris Johnson’s inability to convert the populist surge of 2019 into any sort of programme for government. Of course, we can wait around for Burnham to fail in his turn, but this is not a strategy unless we are sure that Kruger’s ‘populist revolution’ will come up with something better than Reform is currently managing. We have good reason to doubt that.
It is not simply that this or that group of populist politicians are not up to the job. It is that populism itself is inherently liable to the misadventures of charlatans, opportunists and lightweights. Ironically, populism’s fundamental political inadequacy is confirmed by a recent effort to defend it. Neoconservative sociologist Frank Furedi’s book, In Defence of Populism, identifies several of populism’s virtues, but his account of each of them only emphasises that populism lacks what is needed to reverse the drift to authoritarian state failure in Britain.
Furedi recognises the weakness of politicians who are described as populist, and so he distinguishes them from an underlying ‘spirit of populism’ that he seeks to defend. He finds this populist spirit abroad among ordinary citizens and he hopes a more professional and effective populist politics might yet be fashioned from it. The virtues of the populist spirit, according to Furedi, include its affirmation of ‘the lifeworld of people and the pre-political dimensions of a community’s experience’ (p.16); its ‘advocacy of ideals such as popular and national sovereignty, majoritarian democracy, respect for tradition and solidarity’ (p.15); and its ‘egalitarian impulse against oligarchic tendencies’ (p.16). For Furedi, ‘Populism is…above all…the people’s answer to those who would dispossess them of their national identity.’ (p.87) His defence of populism centres on the claim that ‘without the influence of this movement, democracy would be robbed of its representative content and become an instrument of the managerial technocratic elites.’ (p.15)
This description of the populist spirit incorporates aspects of populism that should be defended by anyone who wants to reverse the decay of the state and rebuild a nation in Britain. Populist movements and parties have pressurised the political class by interjecting the views of those many citizens who are unrepresented by the mainstream parties, disrupting elite liberal political discourse and thereby preventing the complete failure of the representative system. But this is no more than keeping representative democracy on life support, in a condition that continues to weaken. The spirit Furedi describes is inadequate to the political task of replacing the failing states of globalism with something better; populism is not, of itself, capable of generating the politics that we need.
Take populism’s affirmation of ‘national identity’ and the ‘pre-political dimensions’ of the ‘community’s experience’. Furedi makes much of pre-political communal life as the site of solidarity among citizens without which democracy is not possible. But what exactly are these ‘pre-political’ communities and this national identity, and where do they come from? Beyond gesturing at localities and faith communities, Furedi doesn’t say. In truth the communal norms of everyday life are as much post-political as they are pre-political. A people like the British people with our particular habits and customs, and any national identity we possess, is an inheritance from the efforts of previous generations living on the island of Great Britain to understand themselves and to represent themselves back to themselves as a singular ‘people’ or a nation rather than just a multitude of different clans, regions, religious denominations, social classes and so on. This is above all an effort of political imagination, on the one hand, and the institutionalisation of the imagined national community, on the other.
Before the (thoroughly political) Act of Union 1707 there was no Britain, and no British people. We were created as ‘a people’ over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries by an aggressive mercantile elite that eventually achieved a high degree of popular unity and national identity among the disparate English, Welsh and Scots. They did this through the weaving together of several elements: a decidedly partial invocation of the English people’s ancient liberties; a sovereign parliament combined with a constitutional monarchy; Anglican and Protestant hostility to Catholicism (itself the result of an earlier political project called the Reformation); the suppression of Jacobite rebellion; and relentless war against their commercial rival, Catholic France (see Linda Colley’s Britons for a seminal account).
By the nineteenth century those enterprising traders who formed the British elite had got together with British engineers to pioneer the Industrial Revolution, and with the British aristocracy to conquer a huge colonial empire. The British were for almost two centuries an industrial and an imperial people. On the other hand, if today there is an egalitarian spirit among the British that appears to be a pre-political aspect of the people’s communal life, it is a result of two decidedly political projects. The first was to achieve the universal franchise, a long struggle that was commenced by the Chartists in the 1830s and completed by the Women’s Suffrage Union almost a century later. The second was to pressure the state to provide welfare to those who could not work, and health and education services for those who were not paid enough to provide for them themselves. These were political efforts that conjoined the movement of organised labour with the imperialist liberals of the early twentieth century.
There is a strong top-down aspect to this story. It is those who make claims to represent and lead ‘the people’ (from Tory prime ministers to Chartist leaders or women’s suffragists) who shape what is otherwise a multitude into recognising itself as a singular people, or into a nation with a national identity. The nation is a political activity first and an identity second. Any national identity is the outcome of the political activity. A people needs to be continuously engaged in this activity, and this is why the populist recourse to national identity in the present will fail. Most of the elements that went into the formation of the old British nation and its identity have decayed either because, like the empire, they could not be sustained or because, like the sovereignty of parliament or the Union or British industry, they ceased to be valued by those who represent us in the state and who therefore determine the nation’s path.
The Protestantism and the Empire were long gone even by the 1980s. Industry and the labour movement followed under Thatcher. In the following three decades our political class and state elites came to believe in the cosmopolitan and globalist fantasies of neoliberal economics, intergovernmentalism and human rights; and, as a consequence, the British national identity has weakened and fragmented. The sovereignty of parliament was replaced by rule through the European Union, and parliament is now held in contempt by most voters. The Union was fragmented by devolution. Our deindustrialised culture was Americanised, as Thatcherite and Blairite globalists presided over the sell-off of British business to American business, something they celebrated as foreign investment. The low-wage service economy that remained then sucked in millions of migrants from poorer countries into this already much weakened nation, something both Labour and Tory globalists celebrated as multi-cultural diversity.
Furedi’s populist spirit is not really defending a coherent national identity. Populism is more like a traumatic reaction to the weakening and fragmentation of any national identity, to the increasing incoherence of an entity that might be called a British people. But even if the national identity were more coherent than it is, there is a deeper problem with responding to globalism with a defence of national identity. This is because national identity is at the end of the day, just another identity. The liberal cosmopolitans do indeed strive to erode solidarity with mass immigration, multicultural diversity and identitarian politics. To resist this by defending national identity is a response that is trapped in its opponents’ ideological framework. National identity is, in one important respect, like the racial, gender or other identities preferred by the cosmopolitans as a means of undermining the nation. As soon as national or local identity is translated into the realm of politics, it becomes, like the others, a claim of vulnerability. Populism invokes the national identity as something threatened.
Furedi emphasises that ‘a sense of belonging’ to a particular place is critical to national populism since as he puts it ‘people’s sense of existential security emerges within the boundary of a particular place.’ (p.135) If local and national identities are a matter of ‘existential security’, and populism is, as Furedi describes it, ‘the people’s answer to those who would dispossess them of their national identity’ then the spirit of populism entails a claim of existential insecurity or vulnerability.
The point is not that national or local identities are not vulnerable, or that indigenous have no cause to feel insecure (any more than migrants, racial minorities or religious minorities are necessarily wrong to claim factual vulnerabilities and existential insecurity). For what it’s worth, I share the populist fears for my homeland that are caused by the indifference or, worse, hostility expressed towards it by its current rulers. My point is that a politics based on this particular existential insecurity, on the vulnerability of national identity, becomes another variation on the identitarian status quo. And, given the domination of the official intersectionalist identitarianism, national identity can itself be framed as a source of divisiveness because it is another passive identitarian call for protection by the authorities from the claims of those who are said to threaten the identity. Politics descends into a bleak dystopian competition over who is the most vulnerable and victimised (poor migrants or white victims of crime?), and who is to blame (racists and Putin or foreign migrants and their elite enablers?).
What Furedi describes as national populism’s fundamentally egalitarian and democratic aspirations are trapped in a politically naive orientation to the purportedly pre-political world of local community in which ‘the people’ is supposed to be formed, and in the passivity and divisiveness of the world of vulnerable identities promoted by the enemies of the nation. This frustrates its potential as a political movement, and nowhere more so than in the question of popular sovereignty to which populists aspire.
‘The people’ that would exercise popular sovereignty does not pre-exist the political process of representation. What the history of the British people summarised above should teach us is that ‘the people’ as a self-conscious entity capable of exercising sovereign self-government is itself produced and reproduced through the very process of political representation. The ‘King is the people’ declared England’s greatest political philosopher Thomas Hobbes just before the English Civil War. What he meant was that a people only comes into being when it is represented by a sovereign – through sovereignty itself. Hobbes was wrong about the King part, but he was right about the underlying principle. In the event, it was the sovereign Crown-in-parliament – a settlement cooked up in 1688 by the Whig merchants, the big landlords and the Tory squirearchy – that did the work of representing the British people as a people in the centuries after 1707.
If the people now appears to be something that must lie outside and prior to the representative process, then that tells us that the representative process has failed, and the people that could exercise popular sovereignty has begun to disintegrate. This has happened because, for the past three decades, our globalist parties – Thatcherite or Blairite – have not been in the game of representing the British people. In these circumstances, the populist invocation of popular sovereignty, as if ‘the people’ could be plucked wholesale from some pre-political world, cannot in fact resolve the fundamental problems of the state. Instead, we need to reconstitute the people as a political force out of its fragmented and decayed state.
The current electoral position is a symptom of this fundamental impasse. Not only, as noted above, do the ancien regime parties – the parties that back the policies that continue to degrade and fragment the nation – continue to command a majority of the popular vote between them, but the polarisation between them and the populist parties is extreme. In the wake of the Brexit referendum, it became clear that the losing minority that contained most of the state’s elite was very reluctant to consent to the result. Rather than face up to why they had failed to convince a majority of voters, Remainers convinced themselves that Brexit was a xenophobic, proto-fascist counter-revolution against their virtuous cosmopolitan liberal order. Brexiteers responded in kind with the populist denunciation of Remainers as ‘enemies of the people’. In the years that have followed, this polarisation has only intensified with Labour and Green-aligned organisations inciting violence against the allegedly ‘far right’ populist opponents of mass immigration and populists responding with accusations of terrorism and treason. Both sides regard themselves as existentially vulnerable to the other.
In this bitter conflict, democrats will no doubt usually find themselves on the same side as the national populists. Indeed, Furedi claims that ‘populism serves as the most effective line of defence of democracy’ (p.190). He would be more accurate to say that populism is the spontaneous line of defence of democracy. His ‘populist spirit’ is a spontaneous response by a very large part of the population that has experienced the indifference and contempt shown towards them and what they value by the political class. But it should be obvious that we cannot rebuild a nation on the island of Great Britain on the basis of a polarisation driven by elite withdrawal from representing the nation and the spontaneous consciousness of those left behind. This promises only a descent into ever more authoritarian rule by one side or the other, or indeed civil war.
National populism is one wing of this national impasse, and it cannot break it because it lacks the intellectual resources, as Furedi’s attempt to defend it only demonstrates. Populism’s ‘people’ remains a poorly defined, passive, victim identity, leftover from an earlier abandoned nation; an identity to be adopted by those with nothing to gain from the cosmopolitans’ preferred identities. It generates no stable or coherent vision of the nation’s future, of its political economy, of its constitution, of its foreign policy. For that reason, those who seek to represent the populist reaction politically tend to be lightweight and unreliable, while their electoral offering tends to be vague, negative and less than compelling.
The alternative to national populism as a means of escaping the burgeoning cosmopolitan dystopia is the politics of nation-building. This seeks to overcome the particularism of identities, with their mutual vulnerabilities, by asserting the interests of the nation as something more all-encompassing than a particular vulnerable identity. Nation-building entails a concept of nationhood that is more than a passive inheritance from the past in need of protection. Nation-building is instead a future-oriented project of political imagination and collective effort, a project to maintain and expand our freedom as the sovereign political community that a nation is. This is a project that invites the agency of all citizens to its realisation, and that depends both on them exercising their political freedom as individuals and, crucially, on them stepping beyond their narrow cultural inheritances and identities with their attendant vulnerabilities. It is open to anyone who puts their shared citizenship with others on this island before their local, cultural or religious identity.
At the core of nation-building is not a politics of national identity but a politics of national interest. The politics of nation-building disputes the questions of which political economy, constitutional arrangements, foreign policy, and so on, will serve the national interest, and in this way orienting political life around who we think we are, or should be, as a singular sovereign people, as a nation. We will not all agree on exactly what the national interest consists of but by implementing the policies thought by the democratic majority to serve the national interest, a sovereign parliament begins to reconstruct a singular British people on that specific basis. Minorities are free to dispute this, and they may eventually succeed in changing the collective vision of who we are as a nation, but an understanding of our shared interests is always at the forefront of our political disputes sustaining us as a people.
Nation-building is a project that is not hidebound or nostalgic about national traditions, but it will confirm and reproduce national traditions wherever they can serve the national interest. Nation-building is being political and discriminating about tradition. It does not merely reverse the liberal discourse, putting a positive wherever the cosmopolitans put a negative. Nation-building embraces those traditions that strengthen its project (for example, the sovereignty of parliament, civil liberty and the rule of law, the Union of England, Wales and Scotland); but nation-building is more than willing to abandon national traditions if they weaken the nation (the House of Lords, the civil service, the union with Northern Ireland, empire and global force projection generally).
For Kruger’s ‘populist revolution’ to evolve into a democratic nationalism, with the political depth to unify a nation and the statecraft to steer it through the stormy waters ahead, it will need to be a revolution against some of populism’s own assumptions as well as those of its enemies. The spirit of populism just isn’t enough to achieve its own inchoate democratic and egalitarian aims. To achieve them populism would have to become something other than itself, it would have to become nation-building.
The urgent task then is not to defend national populism but to provide a perspective that is capable of nation-building. That is a perspective that will genuinely politicise populism’s advocacy of sovereignty, democracy, tradition and solidarity by liberating those ideas from their spontaneous populist framing. Time is short. What we need is a national-democratic alternative to national populism.
The Northern Star 
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