From Clacton, to Washington, to Silvertown: the many engines of Britain's new Far Right

The story of the first months of the new Labour era, as told by our colleagues in the media and hammered home by politicians, was an alarming one. Within weeks of a progressive prime minister moving into Downing Street, ordinary streets across the country erupted in racist violence. Mobs trashed shops and libraries, rioters attacked police and passersby of colour, and even attempted to burn people alive. Despite the revulsion many professed at the violence, the substance of their anti-immigration messaging appears to be resonating among as many as 30 per cent of UK voters.

But the rise of the far right in the UK is not confined to street rioters or a tiny clutch of MPs from an upstart party, and beating back Reform or jailing rioters won’t stop it. It’s a tectonic shift, begun long before Labour’s election victory and set to continue well into the next election cycles. Sometimes it manifests abruptly and violently, but mostly it moves so monumentally and so slowly we tend not to notice - until it’s too late. And it’s not to say it’s all a grand conspiracy, although there’s plenty of organising work, too. Britain’s drift to the right is helped along by patient work across many arenas and methods: organised street violence, yes, but also policy papers, fundraising drives, influence operations and national and international networking, including influxes of American funds and know-how. But it also moves with the corrosion of our democracy by the very people now claiming to be working to fix it. It’s driven not just by proactive, deliberate agendas but by global changes that Britain is desperately trying not to see or hear, curling up on its little island. And it’s tangled deeply in the search for Britain’s very soul.

The fascists of years gone by have us looking for a British Hitler, a Mussolini or a new Enoch Powell. But this search for an easily identifiable bad guy can be a distraction. Today’s far-right is more amorphous, more complex, more adroit. Its influence spreads with the haptic click of a donation button, gliding confidently below the radar of liberal class prejudice. Mostly, it doesn’t even need to produce compelling new political figures; it spreads into existing and familiar ones, through stories and silences. It doesn’t need Reform UK to grow into a majority party, when it is well underway in taking over the Conservative party, with all its funding, legitimacy and clout – and has begun infecting Labour’s thinking, too.

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Welcome to The Drift, our column about the rise of the far-right in the UK on all these fronts. We will cover the actors, the methods, the stories, the half-truths, and the lies; those who get corralled into the hatred, the fear, and the weaponised nostalgia; and those cracking the whips. Expect analysis and exclusive reporting from me, Diyora, and friends of The Lead, who are some of the best-informed experts on the far-right in Britain and abroad.

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Reform UK is coming to a town near you. It’s probably already there.

Last month, a friend texted me to say that anti-ULEZ protesters gathered on our high street again. I went down to check out the commotion, as I had previously reported on this issue, but to my surprise it wasn’t an anti-ULEZ rally. Instead, I found a stall run by Reform UK campaigning for a brand new traffic issue with Sadiq Khan at the heart of it – the new toll charge on the Silvertown and Blackwall tunnels. “We are here to stop Sadiq Khan and his proposed tunnel tax. We are trying to get as many signatures for our petition as possible,” one of the campaigners, who doesn’t drive, informed me.

I’ll be writing on this encounter in more detail in a later instalment, but what got me thinking about it now was a deep dive into the speeches at the Reform UK conference in Birmingham last week. One clear strand ran throughout, alongside the usual bogeymen of immigration and ‘wokery’: the party’s new priority is not just grow, but professionalise at it looks to gain more ground in 2029. Their tactic? Focus on local issues.

“We are going to build a grassroots election-winning machine,” said Zia Yusuf, chairman of the party and multi-millionaire businessman. The self-professed “British Muslim patriot” has a clear affinity for the armed forces, peppering his speech with allusions to planes, ships, and the so-called “people’s army”. It reflects the mood of the audience, who are ready to put up a fight with the amorphous “elite”. They loudly cheer every word of Lee Anderson’s repetitive speech about wanting his country back from immigrant men who have “broken into our country”, 6’5 drag queens and Jesus-sandal-wearing JSO vegans.

But while Anderson and Richard Tice’s speeches marked culture wars the party plans to wage in the near future, Nigel Farage was unusually focused on the party’s infrastructure and strategy, as well as its journey so far. He announced that the party is no longer a private company with Farage as the majority shareholder but now a non-profit.

“We weren’t big enough, wealthy enough, professional enough to vet general election candidates properly,” he said, likely referring to the many Reform UK campaigners mired in racism allegations. “We haven't got time, we haven't got room for a few extremists to wreck the work of a party that now has 80,000 members and rising," he said, signalling that the party seeks to scrub itself of controversy and present itself as just about palatable – at least on the surface, and at least for now. “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think that way, because we represent the silent, decent majority of this great country." Like other right-wing leaders in Europe, Farage thinks he can win the nation's votes in 2029 based on “Judeo-Christian” values of family, community and country and lists opportunities in various parts of the country, including Wales and Scotland.

Some unexpected praise went to the Lib Dems, who, according to Farage, have no policies and yet managed to pull in a historic number of votes due to how they organise locally and strategically target seats. “I never thought I’d say this, but we have to model ourselves on the Liberal Democrats.”

Local recruitment is Reform UK’s next big focus – and with that, the party now says it’s zeroing in on setting up 266 constituency associations to build teams, raise money, find good political candidates and be part of the local community, not just a national political party. This is the real danger for the Left: previously, Reform UK didn’t have the time or capacity to organise on the ground ahead of this year’s election. Now, it has five years to prepare for the next one - and it’s not planning to spend the time speechifying and pontificating. Some local campaigns are already underway, with elections taking place next year in all county councils – and in the Doncaster metropolitan district council, which Farage is eyeing up as its next big prize. Considering that Reform came second in 10 Yorkshire seats, a shock takeover from Labour is not at all far-fetched. This would position Reform UK as a national opposition party in its own right, rather than merely the runt of a Conservative litter.

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