Reform UK Doesn’t Just Have a Racism Problem - It Has a Racism Infrastructure

Accusations and allegations of racism, Islamophobia, anti-semitism and xenophobia have been, it’s fair to say, swirling 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 days 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 it . 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 farm . 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...

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