Azmin Azran
Following UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to call for a snap election in early July, polls have been predicting an end to the Conservative Party’s 14-year hold of the government.
The Labour Party is slated to win by a landslide, with a YouGov projection giving them 425 seats in the 650-member House of Commons. But if polls remain accurate, these figures will end up being less about Labour’s popularity in the UK, and more about shifting trends in right-wing politics in the country and elsewhere.
Because of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system – where a candidate with the highest number of votes gets elected, no matter how low the percentage – Labour is projected to take these seats with only around 37 percent of the vote share.
But while the Conservatives’ vote share is going to slump down to around 19 percent, this is likely not going to be as big a defeat for right-wing politics as it may seem, as a substantial portion of the current ruling party’s vote share is being gobbled up by the right-wing populist party Reform UK.
Greater space for Reform UK in the politics of the sixth largest economy in the world could be distinctly unpleasant.
Having entered UK politics in the last election under the banner of Brexit Party, Reform UK is the latest political venture of Nigel Farage, a controversial right-wing politician in the UK who had served as a member of the European parliament for over 20 years despite being a vocal opponent of the UK’s membership of the European Union.
But Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has shown up as a prominent player in this year’s general election. BBC’s poll tracker gives Reform UK 18 percent of the vote share in the latest update. This puts them within one percentage point of the Conservatives. What’s important here is that because of the first-past-the-post system, Reform UK candidates are likely to eat into the Conservative candidates’ vote shares across many constituencies, precipitating an election loss that has been called an “extinction-level event” for the Tories in the UK media. In the chaos, Reform UK is set to come away with around five parliamentary seats.
Although that may not seem significant in terms of presence in parliament, if the projection of their vote share turns out to be accurate, it may be a sign of things to come. On top of that, political parties in the UK who can send between one and five members to the parliament gain access to between 118,000 to 354,000 pounds of public funding. If they gain more seats, however, the party will get even more public money based on their vote share (42 pounds for every 200 votes), and that could lead to them becoming a major player in future elections.
The UK media, however, has uncovered over the last few weeks a series of unsavoury details about Reform UK candidates. Party leader Nigel Farage has made headlines over the years for racist comments, including saying that hearing foreign languages on the London underground railway made him uncomfortable and defending the use of the word “ch***y” to describe people of Chinese descent. The candidates his party has nominated don’t fall far behind in creating controversies either.
The Daily Mail reported that Edward Oakenfull, the candidate in the Derbyshire Dales constituency, once posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “importing loads of sub-Saharan Africans plus Muslims that inter-breed” had created a “gene pool decline”. The same report by The Daily Mail revealed that Amelia Randall, who is up for election in the constituency of Herne Bay and Sandwich, is a self-proclaimed psychic fortune teller.
In fact, she sold tarot card readings and “magic spells” for up to 200 pounds on the website OnlyFans. Garry Sutherland, the party’s candidate in Exmouth and Exeter East, was found guilty last year of kicking a dog and causing it unnecessary suffering.
Reform UK has alleged that the private firm they hired to vet their candidates did not do their job properly, and has said it will sue them for their shortcomings. But beyond the “eccentricities” of the candidates in the UK election, the potential rise of the hitherto fringe right-wing populist politics in the UK is consistent with the signs that similar powers are coming to the fore across the West.
The possible reelection of Donald Trump in November, a victory for far-right Geert Wilders in the Netherlands late last year, the government of Giorgia Miloni — leader of yet another right-wing populist party — in Italy, Marine Le Pen’s successive silver medals in the French presidential elections, Poland’s government under right-wing populist party Law and Justice, the ultraconservative Argentine president Javier Milei, and even the win for “Yes” in the Brexit referendum — these can all be pegged as part of an emerging trend of politics making a rightward swing in Western democracies.
Of course, countries like Brazil have been able to reject the populist leader Jair Bolsonaro, and Germany has been able to hold off right-wing powers like Alternative for Germany for now. But which way the pendulum swings going forward, remains to be seen.
While the UK election will probably see the downfall of the Conservative party, it will not be as much of a blow for right wing politics as it will be for centre-right politics. Moving forward, whether or not the UK joins the rest of Europe and much of the Americas in this right-wing populist movement, is going to be up to its citizens and the power of their vote.
