Populist and far-right parties across Europe share many of the same traits, says Ros Taylor. But Reform has not yet embraced the pro-natalist agenda of a lot of its counterparts.
The Reform party does not go in for detailed policy documents, so students of the populist right in the UK were interested to hear of a new think-tank which wants to influence its agenda. Resolute 1850 (the title will probably change) is named after a Royal Navy ship that got stuck in Arctic ice. Some of its timbers now form part of a desk in the Oval Office.
Founded by an energy investor, Mark Thompson, and led by Reform ‘s former chief operating officer, Resolute 1850 says its “mission is to foster stronger transatlantic relationships” and attract donations from the US as well as the UK. Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, often boasts of his relationship with Donald Trump. Given its history of contempt for the European Union, Reform instinctively looks west rather than east for inspiration and allies. But it has a lot in common with rising radical right parties in Europe, too — and it has learnt from their tactics.
What Reform shares with its European counterparts
Scholars find three common ideologies among Europe’s populist right: nativism, authoritarianism and populism. In terms of policy, all these parties share an opposition to immigration, though their demands vary from an end to most immigration (Reform’s position) through to Alternative für Deutschland’s far harsher deportation plan. “That’s not to say the other parties don’t believe it [the more extreme position],” says Stephanie Luke, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. They just can’t say so. In the UK, deportation is too closely associated with the National Front, a fascist party that gained a small amount of support in the 1970s and 1980s but was almost universally condemned for racism.
All these parties also share a common scorn for net zero targets. It is not entirely clear whether Reform denies that climate change is caused by humans, but it is adamant that the cost of reducing carbon emissions is too great a burden for western societies to bear.
Deep Euroscepticism still pervades Reform, even if there is no realistic chance of the UK rejoining the EU in the next decade. “In their manifesto, Reform outline that they’re still about enforcing Brexit and not having a closer relationship with the EU,” says Luke. Farage will be alert to any hint that Britain’s proposed security deal with the EU infringes British sovereignty, especially on fishing rights and free movement. But other European countries have learnt from the failure of the Brexit project to improve Britons’ standard of living. France’s Rassemblement National (RN) no longer talks about Frexit. Even Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, while rejecting many of the EU’s values, is not actively trying to leave.
Noticeably, when Farage was an MEP, he was wary about co-operating with far-right parties in the European Parliament, even the long-established RN. “He was always slightly to the side of these efforts to bring the far right together,” says Marta Lorimer, also a political lecturer at Cardiff. Europe, after all, was the enemy.
Reform is less interested in birthrates
While Reform is undoubtedly a nativist party, its stance is somewhat less authoritarian than some of its counterparts — at least outwardly. This is partly due to the personality of Nigel Farage, who shares Boris Johnson’s professed contempt for ‘bossiness’. But Reform also feeds off popular distrust in the ability of the state to improve people’s lives. This is clear in the party’s support for private health insurance and a more limited role for the NHS and is the most obvious way that it looks to the US, rather than Europe, for policy ideas.
It is also why Reform has never seriously dabbled in pro-natalism. Britain’s benefit system penalises poorer families who have a third child, and (unlike, say, France) it has never rewarded bigger families. Childcare and housing are extremely expensive. By the same token, the right to abortion — which has been legal since 1967 — is not under attack. In recent months a number of voices on both the right and left have asked whether the UK should adopt more pro-natalist policies, but it is not yet something that preoccupies voters. The AfD, on the other hand, is explicit about its desire to address falling birthrates and its dislike for abortion.
Likewise, Nigel Farage rarely talks about religion, except briefly last year when he said he had stopped going to church because the Church of England had become too ‘woke’. He deploys standard populist rhetoric about ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ and complains about young Muslim men failing to integrate, but focuses on a perceived threat to British values rather than attempting to codify those values or explicitly link them to Christianity.
This may change. Reform, in its various incarnations, has already travelled a long way since the UK Independence Party merely wanted the UK to leave the EU. The UK birthrate is falling, and Reform no longer depends on the over-55s for most of its support. For a party so dominated by men, pro-natalist policies would be difficult to sell. But Farage will be watching to see whether they gain any traction in northern Europe. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Reform jumped on the opportunity to make this an issue,” says Lorimer. Like the leader of Britain’s Conservative party, Farage is an admirer of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who “always makes the point of being a woman in a man’s world”, says Lorimer. The Italian PM refuses to use the feminine form of her job title, but also likes to be seen as a mother.
Pragmatism trumps ideology
Most of all, Reform is focused on what gains traction with the public, rather than internal ideological consistency. This has enabled it to back the recent nationalisation of British Steel, for example, despite its association with Labour governments.
“It’s not like they have a major intellectual heritage,” says Lorimer. “Far-right parties are not the most intellectually engaged bunch.” Could CPAC Hungary be a forum for sharing far-right ideas? It looks unlikely. A month before the conference is due to start, there’s no agenda or list of speakers, apart from Orbán. The National Conservatism conference in Brussels was shut down by police in 2024 and has not announced an event for 2025. Perhaps the organisers feel that with Donald Trump back in the White House things are going well enough already. Then there is the fact that nationalists, for obvious reasons, are not very interested in working with each other in supranational groups and institutions.
Reform also has to operate in an electoral system that makes it harder for smaller parties to gain a foothold. “They can’t rely on European Parliament elections [any more], they don’t have that fallback,” says Luke. “Europe is no longer a scapegoat.”
Unlike some of its counterparts, Reform is untested in government. It does not control a single council and has never been in coalition. If, as is widely expected, the party wins control of councils in the local elections in early May, that will change. Other parties hope that exposure to power and responsibility will be Reform’s undoing.
That may be optimistic. A few years ago, Nigel Farage’s continuing popularity was unthinkable. Now Reform, Labour and the Conservatives are all polling in the low twenties. The idea that Brexit would quell Britain’s drift to populism proved to be wildly mistaken. Reform’s ideological flexibility has served it well.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.
