Sam Knight writes:

Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. Party—the latest incarnation of the right-wing, anti-immigrant political movement that he has led for twenty years—has been atop the British polls for the past six months. It is currently polling at thirty per cent, ten points ahead of the Labour government. If there were a general election tomorrow, there is a plausible chance that Reform would win hundreds of seats in the House of Commons; that the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives, which has ruled British politics for a century, would be broken; and that Farage, once nicknamed Mr. Brexit by his friend Donald Trump, would be Prime Minister.

There are plenty of sane, sensible arguments for why this won’t happen. For one thing, according to the law, there doesn’t need to be a general election until the summer of 2029. But British politics haven’t been sane or sensible for a long time—since Brexit, really, the last time that Farage jolted the country’s traditional two-party system off the rails. So, instead of looking upon the rise of Reform with resolve or equanimity (the Party currently has five members of Parliament, less than one per cent of the total), everyone is losing their mind. Whether out of shock, revulsion, or genuine affection—according to the polling firm YouGov, Farage is the most popular politician in the country—all that anyone can talk about is the unthinkable possibility of a Reform government, thus making it more thinkable by the day. The political center, occupied by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and what remains of the moderate wing of the Conservative Party, is the most morbidly mesmerized of all. Watching mainstream British politicians obsess over the threat of Farage is a bit like watching the video on the internet of the guy standing motionless on the beach in Thailand, the water draining around his ankles, waiting for the tsunami to arrive.

Farage, who is sixty-one, doesn’t need the help. He is already the country’s most capable politician by a mile. Earlier this month, I went to see him speak at a Reform Party conference in Birmingham. Britain’s main political parties generally stage conferences in the fall, to debate policy, raise funds, and gird themselves for the parliamentary year ahead. In Reform’s case, the gathering felt more like a celebration: the culmination of a long summer of Farage-led stunts, interviews, and speeches that had successfully bored their way into the nation’s brain.

The Party’s messaging isn’t subtle. In July, while Parliament was in recess, Farage had staged a Lawless Britain campaign, during which he claimed, variously, that people were afraid to walk the streets of London after 9 P.M.; that “droves of unvetted men,” a.k.a. asylum seekers, were loose in the country, posing a threat to women and girls; and that crimes such as shoplifting and cellphone theft now go unpunished by the police. Parts of the country, Farage warned, were facing “nothing short of societal collapse.”

The following month, Farage announced Operation Restoring Justice, Reform’s plan for the deportation of six hundred thousand illegal migrants. Caught on their heels, neither Labour nor the Conservatives particularly objected to Farage’s diagnoses of Britain’s problems, just his methods for addressing them. [Continue reading…]