British Fascism, Racial Nationalism and the Rise of Reform UK

SUMMARY

• There is a lack of attention to race, racism and white supremacy in the study of the far right and fascism in the UK.
• Understanding race as a structural social relation highlights Reform UK's continuity with previous forms of British racial nationalism.
• Reform draws on an identifiable repertoire of demographic threat, white victimhood, anti-cosmopolitan populism and the restoration of sovereignty.
• Although the party carefully omits specific ‘biological’ racialism from their official vocabulary, they still operate through racial grammar.

Five members of Reform UK joined the House of Commons following the 2024 general election, in which Nigel Farage's new party and the successor to his Brexit Party won over 4 million votes.

The rise of the party has attracted some scholarly attention. However, there is a lack of attention to race, racism and white supremacy in the study of the far right and fascism; in 2022 out of 2,543 articles on populism and the far right, the term ‘race’ appears in only 11.2 per cent, ‘racism’ in 6.9 per cent and ‘whiteness’ in 0.5 per cent. This marginalisation of race and racism means that analysts are left with inadequate tools. What follows are five sections that, I hope, move the dial towards a race-critical analysis of contemporary nationalist politics.

Dominant frameworks and their limits

When race is understood as a structural rather than ideological or behavioural relation, we can illuminate racial politics in movements that do not, at least officially, deploy biological or mythological race language. Movements that organise, as Reform does, around border governance, demographic anxiety, anti ‘illegal’ migrant ‘common sense’ and the restoration of ‘sovereignty’, often do so without explicitly invoking racial language.

In recent work on populism, terms such as ‘nativism’ or ‘ethnicism’ are invoked to describe the prejudices and behaviours of the populist far right. In Cas Mudde's Populism: A Very Short Introduction, ‘race’ is used only in reference to National Socialism. Defining the radical right by core ideological features such as nativism or populism treats race as one ingredient among others. It is, in fact, the organising principle that other features derive their social meaning from.

Finally, the popular construction of fascism as a foreign pathology, an aberration that Britain fought and defeated has been critiqued by historians. Martin Pugh has demonstrated that British fascism had deep roots in native traditions of imperial and conservative Edwardian politics. The intellectual consequences of unsubstantiated presumptions that fascism is ‘foreign’ are not merely historical. They stifle political analyses and make it impossible to see any ‘indigenous’ British political movement as fascist. This is the unfortunate logic that renders Reform's racial politics largely invisible or misses, in other words, the broader machinations of British racialism.

Britain and its fascisms

Alexander Raven Thomson, the Director of Policy of the BUF from 1933 until its proscription in 1940, was, in important respects, a thoroughly British political thinker. Addressing Britain and the empire, Mosley and Thomson argued that fascism alone could deal with the ‘alien menace’, for fascism alone put ‘Britain First’. It would, perhaps, be comforting to understand this as a fringe sentiment imported from the continent. It was, in fact, the mobilisation of a much older vocabulary of white victimhood, the sense that a space rightfully belonging to one community had been invaded by another.

Britain was ‘for the British’, as BUF slogans had it. Various British heroes were venerated: Cecil Rhodes, Walter Raleigh and Clive of India. In this sense, the study of British fascism historically is also the study of British white supremacism, its various expressions and its recalibrations. British fascism has more often than not attempted a recalibration of racial governance, reasserting that Britain is a white space through the organisation and deployment of violence. This article now turns to conceptions of fascism that gave racialism paramount importance: the anti-fascist analyses of the Black Radical Tradition.

Black Radical theories of fascism

Writing from Atlanta in 1943, reflecting on Nazi persecutions, the ‘father of Pan-Africanism’ W. E. B. Du Bois observed that ‘the race-religion which Germany has suddenly thrust to the front, is but an interpretation of what America and Europe have practised against the colored peoples of the world’. It remains a remarkable formulation. The Holocaust was catastrophically unprecedented in scale and method. Du Bois recognised this in wartime. But fascism, to him, was a fundamentally racial movement.

It is race understood as a way of organising human beings, and the relations between them, that matters here. The contemporary operation of a racial nation does not depend on overt white supremacy and the biological ‘scientific’ racism of the Nazis. Racial language often operates through ‘sliding signifiers’, renaming racial politics as concerns about ‘culture’, ‘security’, ‘integration’ or ‘legitimate grievances’ of particular communities or demographics. In this sense, racial regimes speak through the whole gamut of social and political discourse.

Reform UK and racial nationalism

Reform UK's 2024 general election manifesto opened with a typical populist title, Our Contract with You, the ‘you’ being a synonym for ‘the people’. It called for an immediate freeze on ‘non-essential migration’, a cap on annual net migration, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, detention of all who arrive in Britain by unauthorised means pending processing or deportation and an end to the ‘small boats’, that is, ‘illegal migration’. The language is typically bureaucratic and policy-oriented. A notion of the scientific race and biological racialism typically associated with the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, and ‘classical’ fascism, is absent.

Nonetheless, the populations imagined as the problem—asylum seekers and ‘illegal migrants’ are racialised in the public discourse from which the manifesto draws its resonance. Reform UK's promise to ‘stop the boats’ is received by supporters as a claim about the racial composition of Britain. The statements of policy do not say this but the political grammar, that of racial discourse, does.

Farage has come under scrutiny for prejudicial or, indeed, racist comments for many years. As Reform leader through 2024 and 2025, Farage informed GB News audiences that immigration had led to an ‘absolutely astounding cultural change in our country’, the country had become ‘unrecognisable as English’, and this had occurred without democratic consent. And, of course, that those who pointed out this simple and evident fact were being unfairly suppressed and smeared as racists. It is this last discursive move—that naming demographic change is suppressed by accusations of racism—that is of importance. It is an instance of what Lentin calls racism without racists. It is the insistence that the real victim of racial politics is the person ‘brave’ enough to raise ‘legitimate concerns’ in its name.

Conclusion

This article has resisted the temptation to discuss whether Reform can be considered a fascist party or as forwarding fascist politics. Such exercises tend to miss, as stated at the beginning, the dynamics of racial politics.

Fascism, in the view of Du Bois and the Black Radical frameworks, was a signifier of the West rather than its ‘dark side’. Recent work on the relationship between race, racism and capitalism emphasises the consistent appearance of racialism and authoritarianism in times of decline and crisis. The conjuncture of deindustrialisation, austerity and imperial nostalgia that has shaped British political culture since 2008 has provided grounds productive of racial nationalism.

The frameworks most commonly deployed to analyse it are often inadequate to the structural and historical depth of what they are describing. British racial nationalism did not begin with Reform UK, nor with the BNP, nor with Enoch Powell. It is a constitutive element of the political and imperial history of the British state.

What the Black Radical and race-critical frameworks make visible is that Reform is not a symptom of policy failure nor simply the mainstreaming of British political extremities. It is a symptom of the unresolved contradictions of a racially ordered society confronting its own decline.

The persistent difficulty in naming this is a political and a scholarly problem. Frameworks that ignore race do not simply miss the mark. When analysts conclude that Reform is a legitimate expression of working-class grievance, or a populist challenge to an out-of-touch elite, the issue is not that there are no legitimate grievances of the working classes, nor that elites are in fact ‘in touch’ with those classes. It is the siloing of race and, often, racism to the margins of British society that warrants criticism. The language in which these grievances are presented, and the political ends to which they are directed, are too often racial.