Reform UK Doesn’t Just Have a Racism Problem - It Has a Racism Infrastructure
Why focusing on Farage’s past misses how racism is incentivised, normalised and repeatedly rewarded in the present
Accusations and allegations of racism, Islamophobia, anti-semitism and xenophobia have been, it’s fair to say, swirling1 around Nigel Farage and his party over the past… well, since UKIP 2.0… I mean, Reform UK spawned into existence in 2021.
To characterise the steady flow of these as a “drip feed” would be to understate to the point of irresponsibility. Not a week, it feels like, goes by without yet another councillor, MP, volunteer or their very own leader finding themselves in a spotlight that they don’t like.
People may have noted that I’ve been a bit more on the quiet front when it comes to the running series of allegations from Farage’s younger days2 when he was but a blossoming bigot. The reason for this is twofold:
One, I’m intensely bored of writing about the odious weasel. To the damned back teeth of it if I’m being perfectly frank.
Two, the recent comments he made when he was an adolescent feel… beside the point, to a certain extent. It’s important, but it’s been too sanded down.
It’s been run through the same process of referring to someone as a “character” to imply that they’re a “problem” so much by the media ecosystem in the UK that it feels like we’ve already taken all the oomph out of it3.
And, more importantly, it’s also not the important bit of the story.
Because even if you took every story about an adolescent Farage, lock it in a box, sink it in the Thames and salt the water for good measure, the broader issue of racism not only in Reform but in the UK still stands. There is almost zero reason to put on your archeology hat to find Farage branded racism - all you have to do is look at what’s happening in the present day, right now, both in and around his party, and the rhetorical paradigms that he has spent decades feeding like a man lovingly tending a rancid little fungus farm4.
The real issue isn’t past Farage or that his party is regularly embarrassed by rogue councillors with social media addictions and no internal filters - it’s the pattern that we’ve been seeing in Reform for a long time now. The actual recurring story of a culture created within a party that keeps creating the same kind of headlines for the same kind of reasons. It has now become, in modern parlance, a feature, not a bug.
The broader pattern that we’ve seen matters a fair bit here, because the thing about patterns is that they don’t happen in isolation - they’re the product of incentives, of learned behaviour, of allowability.
They’re encouraged by leadership classes that send signals that a certain type of bigotry is acceptable, just so long as you frame it in the right way, aim it at the right people and deny loudly and strategically enough afterwards.
The problem that Reform UK has isn’t that it occasionally attracts bigots - every political party has that same issue to a greater or lesser degree. The issue is that Reform keeps them - they elevate them, defend them until the last possible moment and then act terribly surprised when yet another person linked to them accidentally says the quiet part out loud to a microphone.
And the issue is that we don’t see the racism in the 1970s format - it’s evolved into something modern5.
Anti-semitism as an example is not done in a crude, cartoonish version that everyone rightly recoils from, but a slipperier, far more insinuating sort that has cropped up around Farage and his ilk. Stuff that’s always framed as “questions”, “concerns” or “just asking why we can’t talk about it.” Comments about “globalist elites”, about shadowy networks that somehow manage to sound both ancient and sinisterly relevant at the same time - always delivered with a far too familiar shrugging cadence of “I’m not saying it, I’m just pointing it out.”
Islamophobia, though sometimes expressed quite openly (a la 30p Lee Anderson), is more often expressed as civilisation anxiety than necessarily open hate speech. Reform has become adept at framing our fellow Muslim citizens not as people, neighbours or voters, but as a demographic force. They’re framed as something that’s happening to the country rather than within it. Mosques become symbols, hijabs become shorthand and whole communities are reduced to a kind of ever-present ambient threat that must be “managed”, “controlled” or “stopped from growing.”
And when a Reform councillor, volunteer, candidate or MP does inevitably cross the line from dog-whistle to fog-horn to talk about “invasions”, “replacement”, “too many brown and asian people on the telly” or entire faith groups being incompatible with British life at large, the response has to date not been any sort of immediate moral clarity. No, no. There’s a sequence.
Suspension pending investigation6.
Expressions of disappointment.
A bad apple analogy thrown into the mix.
An insistence that the views expressed don’t 100% represent the party’s values or that they wouldn’t have said it that way themselves.
Swiftly throw up culture war flack so people will just move on from the bloody issue.
And then there is the outright racism - the comments that don’t even bother to dress themselves up as “valid concerns”, like Reform candidates spreading misinformation about “Sharia Controlled Zones”, talking about black people who should “get off [their] lazy arses” and “stop acting like savages” and calling for our current Foreign Secretary to “go home to the Caribbean”.
Reform tells us that these in particular are isolated incidents, but it’s now clear to anyone with eyes that they have now formed the heartbeat of the party that only become newsworthy when they become too explicit to ignore.
The fact that these incidents happen is already worrying enough, but the predictability of it all should give us all pause - because what Reform UK has managed to build since morphing from the Brexit Party, is a very deliberate political ecosystem that thrives on grievance without accountability or responsibility.
Its entire offer now rests on the premise that Britain has been weakened, diluted, betrayed or changed from the glorious nation it once was - and that the people that have done so are always someone else. Immigrants. Minorities. Activists. Liberals. Lefties. The woke. Sometimes obliquely jews. Often Muslims. Black people from time to time. Every now and again it’s all of the above, bundled together into a vague sense that someone else has taken something that rightly and always belonged to you.
That kind of environment, that narrative paradigm, doesn’t need members to be explicitly racist - it just needs them to be comfortable in a space where racism is tacitly accepted as a feature of “common sense”, where the worst excesses might be rhetorically disowned, but quietly still relied on to keep that grievance engine running at full rev.
Which is why I think focusing on Farage’s past bigotry, teenage views and adolescent remarks becomes, not completely irrelevant, but obfuscatory in its own way. The question isn’t whether he was a rancid little racist at sixteen, it’s how he came to build a political brand that so successfully normalises suspicion, resentment and exclusion - and how he is still able to act so terribly wounded (and get away with it) when the people that are attracted to that brand express it too honestly.
The larger point is that Reform UK isn’t undermined by bad apples, it’s actively harvesting exactly the thing it planted in the first place, and the reason why it’s been such a successful crop is our propensity in the UK to treat racism as a personality flaw, and not the systemic, infrastructural issue it really is.
In our mission to pull back the growing influence of right-wing populism, we’re making the mistake of looking for evidence, screenshots and gotchas instead of incentives. We argue about language and whether or not something is actually considered racist (it usually is) instead of looking more closely at the outcomes - the 116% increase in racial abuse towards nurses who have the audacity to not be white, the greater number of hate crimes we’re seeing occurring on our streets and the continue isolation and villainisation of migrants and the “other” that’s even seeped into mainstream politics.
We need to shift our focus from the archeology of racism, as satisfying as it may be, and start investigating how a party was able to build an entire political infrastructure that fosters views that are as dangerous as they are disgusting.
Because until we manage to make that shift, we’re going to be stuck in the same loop of conversations - another councillor or MP says something racist, another carefully worded disavowal, another insistence that the orchard is fine even as we can see the rot happening.
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At this point in time I think even swirling is a bit of the wrong word as it implies movement instead of what has become a state of permanence.
Please don’t mistake this as restraint or personal growth, it’s far more related to exhaustion and the fact that I paid nearly £500 for a picture of Nigel Farage and the less I’m reminded of that, the better.
Also known as “Please don’t make us draw any conclusions on a subject, it makes us intensely uncomfortable”.
If this particular analogy feels indulgent, I regret to inform you that the fungus more than likely is real and will more than likely be standing as a Reform candidate sooner rather than later.
This is the type of progressive move forward we really could do with far less of.
Rough translation: Please stop talking about this.
The story of Farage's revolting inclinations as a schoolboy has been around (thanks to Led By Donkeys) for quite some time. Odd that it's coming into focus now when apparently the govt have somewhat belatedly decided to go on the attack against Reform.
But yes, you're right. There is plenty of evidence to show that Frogface is every bit as much of a racist now as he was then so the focus on what that monumental prick was like as a child is of questionable relevance.
Too right.