Published by The i Paper (8th September, 2025)
The tone was set for my entry into the world of Reform UK when I walked in to be confronted by a crowd loudly applauding David Starkey. He is, you may recall, the racist historian who disappeared from public view after claiming that slavery wasn’t genocide because of the survival of “so many damn blacks”. Yet there he was at the first of two appearances at their party conference, pontificating about the welfare state being “the tragedy of the twentieth century” and proclaiming his “absolute indifference” to events in Afghanistan or Gaza.
This cantankerous character was being interviewed by Mark Littlewood, the think tank boss who was the brains behind Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership. Starkey stated that Nigel Farage was “99 per cent certain to win the election” and would then need to declare a state of emergency and emulate Donald Trump. He railed against judges, spoke of the need to deal with the “insurrectionary religion” of Islam, spat out distaste for politicians who obeyed rules and insisted they would need to shut down “vast swathes of the state”.
It is easy to dismiss nonsense spewed out by an attention-seeking controversialist at a conference fringe. Yet in so many ways, Starkey set the mood for Reform’s big gathering in Birmingham – from that hubristic assumption they would attain power through to their core discomfort with modern Britain. Despite all the flags, national anthem and declarations of patriotism, this is a party at its heart that dislikes how its nation has evolved and wants to turn back the clock. “Sometimes the old times are the best,” said Starkey, claiming our country was a role model in the 1950s.
These attitudes were echoed throughout the two-day event as Nigel Farage’s latest insurgency lured thousands of new followers to Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre. When I entered the main hall, three young councillors on stage were being asked about bringing back national service 75 years after its abolition. One waffled about indoctrination in schools – a common theme of the conference. Another said he had been in Israel the previous week, meeting soldiers proud to fight for their country, winning cheers at his mention of the Israel Defence Force despite the atrocities and starvation in Gaza.
“I want my country back,” thundered Lee Anderson, one of the party’s four MPs, in his keynote speech. “Do you want your country back?” The audience roared back, “Yes.” Anderson told them about growing up in a tough mining community at a time when people were taught to be proud of their history and culture. They did not complain about anxiety or stress, he said, let alone get long sick notes for mental health. “We didn’t have 6ft 5 drag queens reading us fairy stories. If any of them weirdos had been at my school, they’d have been dragged off to the funny farm.”
His show of sensitivity was rewarded by Farage with public anointment onstage as welfare spokesman. Benefits will be the next issue targeted after focusing on crime over the summer. The tactics are paying off at present with a 15-point poll lead and undeniable momentum. In the hall, there were pantomime boos and cheers as news was shared of the cabinet reshuffle after Angela Rayner’s self-destruction. Labour – like its shambolic Tory predecessors – seems determined to assist Reform’s rise by inflaming the mood of widespread electoral discontent over Westminster’s ineptitude and sleaze.
The conference was an attempt to display depth and substance in readiness for government. “Let me tell you – every single person in this country is talking about Reform UK,” said ebullient party chairman David Bull, a point I rapidly disproved in a bar outside their back-slapping bubble. It was brash, energetic and slick, clearly influenced by the American populist right like many of its ideas – from ceaseless talk of “Making Britain Great Again” through to constant targeting of transgender people.
Reform, so reliant on its leader’s appeal, sought to demonstrate it is not just a one-man band, promoting speakers who were not older white men – although this effort was undermined by all the turquoise “Farage 10” football shirts that dotted the audience. One 19-year-old Barrow councillor bewailed how leftie friends thought she was “racist, fascist, sexist” for joining Reform. “I’m none of those things,” said Sienna Churcher plaintively, before claiming she was too scared to go out at night.
This theme was taken up by her fellow “Women for Reform” panellist Laila Cunningham, a Westminster councillor with Egyptian heritage, reportedly viewed as Reform’s London mayoral candidate. Never mind that Farage fawns so obsequiously to Trump, a man legally branded a sexual predator who boasted of using fame to abuse women. Cunningham declared that our own government is failing to protect women. ‘That’s why it is an illegal government. The country does not belong to the illegal immigrants, the sexual offenders. It belongs to us.’
It was this kind of sentiment, this Trumpite talk of an illicit government and sinister linking of crime to foreigners and minorities so hideously familiar from dark periods of the past, that stirred my nagging sense of unease.
I met many lovely and decent citizens among Farage’s recruits, genuinely and often-understandably concerned by their nation’s direction. Yet almost all had joined for one reason. “I am here because the country has been ruined by mass immigration. It’s ruined my community and other people’s communities,” said Maureen, a former hospital manager in her fifties from Bewdley “Their culture is completely different to us.”
Many adopted the newly hardened language of Reform’s leaders that shows how the hatred promulgated by the far-right is polluting public discourse. “We are being slowly invaded, one boat at a time,” said Philip, 70, from Basildon in Essex. His younger friend, also called Philip, was a former Labour voter and Remainer who had become a “big fan” of far-right agitator Tommy Robinson. “I know he’s done things wrong in the past – violence, breaking laws – but he mostly talks from the heart,” said this boss of a digital marketing firm. “I would be considered a right-wing thug by the media. But I think a lot of my views are logical and rational.”
The previous day Farage’s sidekick Zia Yusuf gave an especially hardline speech about Britain “being invaded” by “tens of thousands of fighting age males” who he claimed were being “rewarded for this by a treacherous political class” with hotels and food. Later that day, asked at a fringe event to pick between Robinson and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Reform’s policy chief astonishingly chose the far-right troublemaker over a democratically-elected MP on basis that he “has said things about the rape gangs for years and deserves some credit for that.” There were some cheers, shockingly, when a journalist from Middle East Eye said two colleagues had been killed the previous week while asking a question on Gaza.
The next day, there was more dog-whistling from the MP Sarah Pochin when she attacked Labour’s definition of Islamophobia on the basis that it might lead to prosecution “for saying anything critical of Islam” before proclaiming that “we are fundamentally a Christian country.” Then the conference lionised Lucy Connolly – a woman jailed for urging people on social media to set fire to hostels housing asylum seekers at a time of national tension. At least this former childminder had sufficient humility to rightly argue that much of the cash being blown on imprisoning people would be spent more wisely tackling their mental health and housing issues, puncturing Pochin’s earlier demand for more prisons and tougher sentencing.
This conference showed clearly how Farage is infecting Britain’s body politic by mimicking Trump’s divisive brand of self-serving populism – complete with the sordid promotion of anti-vaccination quackery and insidious spreading of rumours about the royal family’s health by a main stage speaker linked to the White House.. And certainly it is easy to jeer the hypocrisy that sees them repeatedly attack the Online Safety Bill only to embrace its architect Nadine Dorries when she defects from the Tories. A woman, incidentally, who served in a cabinet responsible for the highest migration levels in my lifetime.
And yes, we can mock when an “expert” on a panel discussing “climate realism” talks about “countries like Africa” needing electricity. Or when Viscount Monckton of Brenchley sneers in his cut-glass accent that “at last we have found a use for Blackpool” after hailing the discovery of frackable gas reserves under the Lancashire town.
But when he calls for the BBC’s abolition or demands the recording of every school lesson and university lecture to tackle ‘‘communist teachers,” we should remember this buffoonish figure has been a leading light in Farage’s movement from the days before the Brexit disaster as the former deputy leader of Ukip.
Reform’s strategy is inspired by Trump and many members wallow in nostalgia for a past – and probably mythical – golden age. Yet while ostensibly rooted in conservatism and patriotism, this is in reality a potentially incendiary political force whose leaders are flirting with the far-right, stirring up a sense of national emergency and shifting alarmingly closer to the more extreme forms of populism and ethno-nationalism seen elsewhere in Europe.
Farage may be smiling – but this conference showed why we should be wary over his lust for power.