I’ve been thinking a great deal about the ‘rise’ of Reform and their recent media saturation. The unbridled racism. The use of Twitter as a megaphone.
I have two main theories that can point to a more hopeful future, if we don’t accept the Reform narrative:
1) Reform are allowing those who were suppressed in the late 80’s and early 90’s by a change in our societal views, to re-vent their inherent racism. In the UK it became unacceptable to be racist. It was eradicated to a more tolerant mindset; or so we thought.
The recent removal of guardrails from twitter has allowed more and more people to start using the language they had in the 70’s and 80’s. The Alf Garnet mob and their families and offspring.
Their racism never went away. It lay dormant. It was socially unacceptable to be outwardly racist. Or sexist. Or homophobic. Or misogynistic. Or transphobic. But the views were still there.
Schrödinger’s racist: they exist in their own homes and we don’t see them [their superposition] – at that point, they are simultaneously racist and non-racist. We only see a version when we read their tweets or when we meet them in the shop or on a bus. It is still not acceptable to talk in an openly racist way in public. So when the twitter door opens – racist. But the real world door opens – not racist.
Mr Musk has reignited, within his own platform, the latent hatred of all those years ago. He’s the world’s biggest enabler. By weaponising ‘free speech’, it is now becoming acceptable, in the twitter-sphere at least, to be openly racist. To hate freely.
We’re still at the stage where, for the most part, the profiles are anonymous and so it is difficult to separate the bots/trolls from the humans, but there are giveaways if you care to look. The hateful humans tend to have a lot of numbers in their profiles, a lot of flags and more frequently, religious symbols. The bots/trolls use a lot of Ai – they love an Ai generated image.
They are both united in their increasingly dark language. I read a thread by the excellent, Sunder Katwala, that prompted some thoughts on this. He was reporting on the failure of twitter [I will never call it X] to sanction a, clearly, racist tweet by an old Stephen Yaxley-Lennon coward, James Goddard. Goddard is a virulent racist and professional agitator, although, he once ran away from two ladies in Liverpool when they challenged him; I believe he ended up climbing a tree to escape – he’s not bright. He is currently to be found, living in Thailand … irony, right.
Back to the point – Sunder’s tweets showed that twitter refused to action, multiple, blatantly racist posts from Goddard and that their in-action after promising better standards after the Euros in 2021, had come to nought. What struck me, more than even the posts by Goddard, is the number of replies to Sunder that were defending the racism and even going further. One account, using a viking name and an Ai image [a very popular style choice with the trolls] was particularly tenacious because Sunder engaged with it. Their assertion was that because the tweet referenced black, British women, they were actually African and not British. Pretty grim, right? The users of these accounts pose questions around the technicalities of race and ethnicity etc. They try to claim that a black or brown person could not, possibly, be British because their skin is not white. Aside from the obvious, if you point out that we all, as a species, came from Africa, they will tell you that that’s too far back, too long ago; that it doesn’t count. So essentially, they’re arguing over an arbitrary point in time that suits their discrimination. There is no logic to racism.
So twitter is letting those in the country who have always been racist or homophobic to start saying the quiet bits out loud again, and they’re finding that they can get away with it; online.
The summer riots, Farage Riots if you will, proved to me one thing … they are not legion. Whilst what we saw for a few days in July and August was grim, it was nothing like the rioting that occurred in 2011. Nowhere near. I lived in South East London then, it was scary. The handful of scruffy racists that turned out this summer were, just that … a handful. They made a lot of noise for a bit and, for the most part, attacked the police, but it never looked like spilling over into mass disorder across the country.
Similarly, when the far-right come to London, it’s another handful of scruffy racists. They arrive, drink loads, fight the police for half an hour and go home.
There is no mass movement afoot.
This is where Reform are using their twitter savvy team; to amplify the noise. Scrolling twitter now, you would think that the entire country is supporting them, that they have millions upon millions of supporters. This takes me to my second theory.
2) Saturation. Flooding the zone with shit, Steve Bannon called it. This is where Reform are making the biggest gains. They have clearly employed an army of social media managers that write and schedule tweets all day, every day on behalf of the main players.
Farage, Tice and Anderson are omnipresent across twitter, 24 hours a day. They are shitposting continuously. It’s a tactic that worked for Trump and the right in the US.
Genuinely, I don’t think it can work here. Thankfully, in the UK, the majority of us are peaceful. We are kind, considerate and thoughtful.
If you follow politics closely, as I do, it may not seem that way though. The skill that Reform and its team have, is to make it feel like they are the biggest party [ltd. company] out there and that you’d be mad not to hop on board. In reality, I think, Reform have a measurable ceiling and I think they are it it, or almost at it, now.
Let’s see how Nigel Farage’s previous incarnation, UKIP, faired in the 2015 General Election.
UKIP were/are an anti EU protest party that floundered for years until the arrival of a certain, Nigel Farage in 2006. They began to move toward the anti immigration stance then and it had, limited, success.
In the 2015 General Election, UKIP managed to secure ≈ 3,900,000 votes, giving them one seat in Parliament – Douglas Carswell. This was no mean feat and gave the populist agenda a great deal of publicity, as well as boosting the profile of Farage and helping him wrangle the brexit vote in his direction in 2016.
In 2015 the UKIP vote share was 12.6% of the total.
In 2024 the Reform vote share was 14.3% of the total.
A 1.7% gain … in nine years of campaigning.
This is the fine margin of increase that they are now touting as a political tsunami. My contention is … it’s more of a small ripple.
You see, I think the UK population is not, inherently, racist, we’re not split straight down the middle like the USA. We are much more tolerant and and inclusive here.
Reform though are on the charge. They are flooding the zone with shit and bringing the worst of their supporters to the forefront; on twitter at least.
They are brazen; utterly unashamed by anything they say or do and when challenged, respond by shouting down their challenger with tetchy language. They bat it away. How can you argue against someone who will never back down, no matter how much evidence is shown to them?
I saw Farage being challenged recently about his vetting [non-vetting] of candidates and how it allowed for an MP to be elected whilst hiding a violent criminal past; he shouted angrily, blamed someone else and ultimately ignored the question. This is their method. Same goes for Tice and Anderson, they lie unabashedly and never respond to criticisms.
They have no policies. They are still the same old, UKIP protest party.
Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage are friends, this is not a coincidence. The Bannon playbook that got Trump elected, twice, is being used here by Reform and to be on twitter you’d think it was successful … I would counter that.
They are making a lot of noise. More than anyone else, but it’s not changing anything significantly. They will crow about polling numbers and billionaire backers, but in reality they are still the same old UKIP, appealing to the same ≈ 15% of the country.
The same 15% that I believe, are the ones being racist online. The same 15% that were present at the riots or attend far-right protests.
My contention is that they can never win, if we don’t let them.
Lots of people have deserted twitter for Bluesky recently to escape the stream of abuse and racism that’s rearing its ugly head. Who can blame them? I’m there, infrequently still … it’s pleasant, quiet like a library feels when you come in from a busy road outside. But that has its pitfalls; talking politics with only those you agree with can create its own difficulties and, in all honesty, can be a bit boring sometimes. But I do get it.
Not many people have the stomach to see the daily racism or be attacked for being kind to minority groups. That is totally understandable and I thought about leaving twitter too, for the same reasons. But I won’t.
I won’t leave. I’m nobody in the grand scheme of things. I don’t command the noisy rabble that many of the far-right troll accounts do, but I will stay to remind them of their failings – at every opportunity I can. I can take the abuse from Dave34572820; he’s a sad, lonely racist, sitting at home trying to be part of the Reform populous. He hides behind an anonymous profile picture, screaming slurs at anyone he can think of because, Farage and Musk have emboldened him.
But, Dave34572820, you are being duped. Reform are telling you that you are part of a ‘political tsunami’ … I’m sorry to break it you you, it’s not happening. Not really. Not outside of your echo chamber.
There may be polls that show Reform ahead of the Tories or Labour sometimes, but nothing changes the make up of the people of the UK. 15 – 20% is all it’s ever going to be for UKIP; I mean Reform.
I wholeheartedly believe that we are better than that. Yes, the hatred is noisy and frequent now, but it can be put back in its box. It has been before and we can do it again.