Britain is sullen. Last year the Labour Party won the general election in a landslide that was a mile wide but only an inch deep. That vote, which gave Labour a commanding majority on a vote share of 34 percent, reduced the Conservative Party to a rump of just 121 seats and, for the first time ever, elected five lawmakers from the far-right anti-immigration Reform U.K. party. Still, the outcome was widely viewed with relief: Britain had been granted a reprieve — five years to show Britons that the center could still work for them.
Almost a year in, Labour is flailing and unpopular. Britain’s struggling public services need vast amounts of spending, which the party had promised to finance not with higher taxes but with sustained growth that has proved elusive. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been warily triangulating an unpredictable American president with invitations from King Charles III and plans to increase spending on defense. Culture wars have continued to rage, groceries are still expensive and housing is costly and scarce. Aggrievement has settled over the land like dust.
Local elections on Thursday are an opportunity for voters to register their discontent, and Reform U.K., which is standing candidates in almost every contest, is polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. If the party performs well, it will be a clear signal that 2024 was merely a reckoning postponed.
A few weeks ago I took a train from Cornwall, where I live, to the Midlands, to attend the launch of the Reform U.K. local election campaign in Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city. In 2023 the Birmingham local council effectively declared itself bankrupt and is now both raising taxes and cutting services — a paradigm of the nation and fertile soil for Reform U.K., which had the good fortune to be holding its conference during a garbage worker strike, as thousands of tons of rubbish piled up across the city. “Rats ‘bigger than cats’ are roaming Britain’s second-biggest city,” CNN reported.
In an aging sporting and entertainment arena, many party members and supporters wore its signature turquoise, which is slightly bluer than Tory blue. Nigel Farage, Reform U.K.’s leader, has suggested that the party could take over the Tories, and the turquoise is a tank on the lawn. In the greenish-blue sea of cocktail dresses and ties I spotted a red jacket emblazoned with “Make Britain Great Again” and a few union jack suits.
The stage was set with street furniture illustrative of various grievances: large trash cans and piles of uncollected garbage; a fake pub, the Royal Oak, with a “To Let” sign; a cinema showing a film called “Tax Me if You Can.” The number of unfilled potholes in Nottinghamshire, a nearby county, at one point flashed up on a large screen: an alleged 62,288!
Reform U.K. grew out of the Brexit Party, which Mr. Farage founded after abandoning the U.K. Independence Party, a movement that in 2010 had policies that included only allowing three foreign players on the starting line up of every British football team and “a return to proper dress for major hotels, restaurants and theaters.”
If much of the political class laughed then — mirth had helped to see off Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and his sister-in-law Nancy Mitford even wrote a novel mocking him — they aren’t laughing now. For one, they know that the American political class laughed at Donald Trump in 2016, too. And they know that Conservative collapse and Labour stasis has ceded a space in Britain that an extremist movement could fill.
Whether Reform U.K. is that movement is less clear. The party is certainly chaotic. In 2024 two parliamentary candidates were dropped for racist remarks. In March The Guardian reported that the party’s new head of vetting had said Adolf Hitler was “brilliant” at inspiring people, President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s use of force in Ukraine was “legitimate” and Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s recently toppled dictator, was “gentle by nature.” Last month a Reform U.K. lawmaker was expelled from the party after he was accused of threatening violence against the party chair. Some of its manifesto, even now, is either a baffling hodgepodge or definitive evidence of the horseshoe theory of politics. It would, for instance, both abolish inheritance tax for estates under £2 million and nationalize British Steel.
But it is remarkably adept at channeling outrage. In Birmingham the emcee, David Bull, a TV presenter and the party’s former deputy leader, said that Britain is in terminal decline, and that Labour had broken it. Audience members screamed and stamped their feet — and these were not the polite cheers of other party conferences I’ve attended. This rage was real.
The party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, asked the crowd: “Do you want to make Britain great again? Do you want to make our brilliant, strong leader, Nigel Farage, the next elected prime minister of the United Kingdom?” The crowd howled their longing. But there were a few more rounds of speakers before Mr. Farage appeared onstage on a shining yellow digger, grinning widely. A jaunty savior arrived to fill Britain’s potholes.
Mr. Farage, a former commodities trader, is that peculiarly British thing: a character. (Boris Johnson was better at it, but he is gone.) He has 1.2 million followers on TikTok. (The @UKLabour account has a little over 200,000.) And he boarded the MAGA train promptly in 2016, posing with Mr. Trump in front of a golden door, which, I think, must lead to oligarchic nativism the way the wardrobe led to Narnia. In recent months the MAGA connection has been a little bumpier — Elon Musk is not a fan of Mr. Farage, and Mr. Farage was forced to correct Vice President JD Vance when he appeared to call Britain “some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” Mr. Farage issued a statement: “JD Vance is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
But MAGA continues to inspire. In Birmingham, Mr. Farage pledged to implement a British version of Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and railed against the teaching unions that, he said, are poisoning the minds of children. The Conservatives, he said, could not be forgiven for betraying the people on immigration, and the Labour Party could not be forgiven for betraying the people on the economy.
After the speeches ended, I parsed the crowd. “DOGE was one of the things that came to me,” David Gooding from Devon said. “You see what’s happening in America with Elon Musk? We need the same thing happening here.” I asked Mr. Gooding who he thinks the British version of Mr. Musk should be. He said at first that he didn’t know, then landed on Arron Banks, a wealthy businessman, mayoral candidate and co-founder of Leave.EU, which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016.
Mr. Farage “is speaking for the general people of this country,” Colin Boyles from Oxfordshire said. “People who have been here for hundreds of years who feel that our country is being taken over. And we don’t have a say in it. I feel it’s our last chance.”
Reform U.K. is an inchoate answer to a yearning. The party will let you scream your rage, and scream it with you. It will be a vessel for your fury. It will watch sympathetically as you point at things that are broken and say that it sees them, too. But it’s plagued by the same lack of real answers that the far right seems to suffer from everywhere. I wonder whether that will matter.
In Birmingham, when Mr. Farage said that his party was “full of optimism!” the cheers were muted. The audience members knew they weren’t optimists; that’s why they were there. The woman sitting next to me asked if I believed I live in a democracy. I told her I did, for now. She seemed hurt.
