Nigel Farage’s identity crisis

ESPAÑOL

PORTUGUÊS

ITALIANO

November 8, 2025

The old ideologies won’t work

Ин Jonny BALL

Join us on Telegram , Twitter, and VK .

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

From the confines of a fascist prison cell, the Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, made his judgement on the political and economic cataclysms of the Thirties. “The crisis,” he wrote, “consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying — and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Over the past 15 years, Gramsci’s so-called “interregnum” passage has been quoted and repeated ad infinitum. This is because it speaks so appositely to our current condition: an era of economic stagnation, collapse in liberal norms, and destruction of old party loyalties. There’s a sense of permanent flux, of implosion. We are in a void between the old regime of globalised economic and social liberalism, which began crashing down in 2008, and whatever system eventually emerges to take its place.

But for now, nobody is in control. Growth remains elusive to Western governments of all political stripes. State capacity is shot, which means that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver on projects or promises. As a result, economic stagnation has been corrosive to the authority of both the Tories and Labour.

And so Nigel Farage has the opportunity to end the interregnum by leading a new type of government in 2029. For now, he sits at the head of a top-down, personalised party. If Reform wins, it would be the first government in over a century not headed by a Labour or Tory politician, and it would enter office on the basis that it would reconstitute the British state: rewired for harsher, harder times. Liberal Britain, watching Farage’s ascent in horror, has not yet processed the full implications of a Reform government. The commentators read the polls, and know the numbers, but on some level still think of a Farage majority as an outlandish nightmare scenario. Yet it is a Farage majority that is the likely outcome of the next general election, even though the contours of Farageism are still being formed. We still do not know whether the British New Right would govern in the vein of a Giorgia Meloni or a Victor Orbán.

These two respective leaders of Italy and Hungary represent two poles of possibility for Reform. Orbán’s self-described “illiberal democracy” in Budapest has combined big-state interventionism, and pro-natalist, pro-welfare policies, with economic nationalism and authoritarian creep. Meloni, meanwhile, has eschewed her roots on the fringes as part of Italy’s neo-fascist movement, and has instead governed as a traditional centre-right politician — reserving additional rhetorical venom for migration and the culture wars. Farage has praised both leaders at different moments: Orbán, he once said, is “the future of Europe”, while he has also praised Meloni’s uncompromising stance on migration. His policy prescriptions veer unpredictably between Meloni’s relative moderation and Orban’s more robust, statist, abrasive populism.

“The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible ‘adults in the room’, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.”

But Farage, like the best continental populists, has managed to successfully crystallise into a single issue all the fears, anxieties, and collective fantasies of a desperate public. Crime, dilapidated high streets, shoddy public services, falling real incomes, ballooning state spending — all have been distilled into the symbolic subject of the Migrant. Progressives still object, but within every creation myth is a kernel of rationality. In recent years, inward migration has hit an unprecedented scale. The electorate has made repeated injunctions to keep migration within sustainable limits, but the Left-liberal cultural and political establishment has refused to listen. The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible “adults in the room”, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.

Reform’s task, therefore, has been to articulate a broad message that explains the country’s malaise. The party’s offering — big tent, low-migration patriotism — is enough for them to pose as a “none-of-the-above” option for the growing proportion of the electorate that is now prepared to reject technocracy. But beyond Farage’s intuitive communicative flair, and his instinctive penchant for projecting good-humoured but no-nonsense defiance towards Labour and the Conservatives, Reform still does not quite know what the party is for. This week, the party attempted to add a veneer of economic credibility to its fiscal plans, abandoning the last manifesto’s promise to replay Trussomomics with a splurge of deficit-financed tax cuts. Instead, Reform promises that spending reductions will now precede any changes to the tax code. Deregulation will summon the animal spirits of British entrepreneurialism, Reform claims, and the state’s ever-expanding welfare commitments will be scaled back. This is a strategy of Meloni-ism writ large.

And yet it is a model of political economy that is wildly unsuited to our age of chaos. New political forms are emerging from the interregnum. For decades, Chinese state planners have been administering breakneck growth and dirigiste development via industrial subsidy, currency and capital controls, state-owned enterprises and hard protectionism. In the US, Donald Trump has upended 50 years of globalisation and open markets, embracing a dog-eat-dog American nationalism that brings the age of liberalised trade and economic integration to a close. On the continent, the formerly austerity-happy EU and Germany have belatedly adopted public investment in strategic industries. In a geopolitically febrile climate, they are “derisking” and “reshoring” domestic production of critical commodities.

Set against this global context, a dogmatic return to free-market fetishism appears inadequate. The Austrian School, and the disciples of Hayek and Friedman, no longer have the answers. Farage, a consummately protean politician, appears to have understood this. In his more Orbánite moments, he has parked his tanks on the fallow lawns of the Left. The steel sector could be nationalised, he has mused, along with water and utilities. Domestic industry would be supported by public procurement, and an industrial strategy would aim to boost manufacturing. The two-child benefit cap would be lifted for working British couples: a policy reportedly adopted after Reform’s meetings with Orbán officials. And, perhaps most radically, the Bank of England would be subject to political interference not seen since high Blairism’s granting of its independence in 1997. (The Old Lady would be instructed to end the loss-making rounds of quantitative tightening, and cancel the high interest rates paid to commercial banks.)

Earlier this year, Farage even saw fit to talk approvingly of a fellow rebel from the other side of the political divide, Arthur Scargill. There’s a case to be made that during the miners’ strike it was, in fact, the “dry” cabinet monetarists who were the iconoclasts and radicals. In this view, it was the miners’ leader, fighting to protect provincial Britain’s traditional communities, families, and dignity of labour, who was the unlikely “small-C” conservative. And yet all this tentative Left-coded positioning, as well as the reheated Thatcherism, is belied by this week’s more anodyne, conventional pronouncements. In a speech on Monday, Farage tried to calm the nerves of onlooking deficit-hawk think-tanks and quangos. With Reform consistently ahead in the polls, the party is trying to demonstrate its commitment to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy, lest the markets begin their dangerous jitters.

As the Farageists attempt to build their own grand coalition from the army of the dissatisfied, glaring questions are coming to the fore. How will commitments to a small state and lower tax be reconciled with improved public services? How will a commitment to lower the welfare bill go down in Reform’s own constituencies, in which an increased share of the populist vote correlates strongly with the share of adults who are dependent on benefits? How will the angling towards free-markets and low-regulation sit with public ownership, or robust industrial policy? And who will win in the inevitable clash between Reform’s pro-development, anti-planning law Yimby free marketeers, and the homeowning voters and local councillors in peri-urban England who oppose new building at every turn?

If Michael Gove’s favourite Marxist, Gramsci, were alive today, in analysing the chaos of our interregnum he may have identified Nigel Farage as an embodiment of “Caesarism” — a “great ‘heroic’ personality” that appears, in either a reactionary or progressive form, to either break an impasse or resolve a “historico-political situation characterised by an equilibrium of forces, heading towards catastrophe”. Our interregnum may be reaching such a Caesarist conclusion, or else reaching catastrophe. There is a space for a hard-edged, syncretic brand of politics that combines elements of an unleashed free-market with a statist reflation of national production, critical industries and infrastructure: just imagine a mixture of Chinese, Singaporean and East Asian developmentalism. But this is yet to be articulated; Reform is still without a governing ideology. And if the party absorbs all the trappings of respectability that launched us into the age of perma-crisis in the first place, they will merely be placeholders, the next in the queue to manage decline. And in that case, our long interregnum will stretch out further.

Original article: unherd.com

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Tags:

Print this article

Nigel Farage’s identity crisis

The old ideologies won’t work

Ин Jonny BALL

Join us on Telegram , Twitter, and VK .

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

From the confines of a fascist prison cell, the Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, made his judgement on the political and economic cataclysms of the Thirties. “The crisis,” he wrote, “consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying — and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Over the past 15 years, Gramsci’s so-called “interregnum” passage has been quoted and repeated ad infinitum. This is because it speaks so appositely to our current condition: an era of economic stagnation, collapse in liberal norms, and destruction of old party loyalties. There’s a sense of permanent flux, of implosion. We are in a void between the old regime of globalised economic and social liberalism, which began crashing down in 2008, and whatever system eventually emerges to take its place.

But for now, nobody is in control. Growth remains elusive to Western governments of all political stripes. State capacity is shot, which means that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver on projects or promises. As a result, economic stagnation has been corrosive to the authority of both the Tories and Labour.

And so Nigel Farage has the opportunity to end the interregnum by leading a new type of government in 2029. For now, he sits at the head of a top-down, personalised party. If Reform wins, it would be the first government in over a century not headed by a Labour or Tory politician, and it would enter office on the basis that it would reconstitute the British state: rewired for harsher, harder times. Liberal Britain, watching Farage’s ascent in horror, has not yet processed the full implications of a Reform government. The commentators read the polls, and know the numbers, but on some level still think of a Farage majority as an outlandish nightmare scenario. Yet it is a Farage majority that is the likely outcome of the next general election, even though the contours of Farageism are still being formed. We still do not know whether the British New Right would govern in the vein of a Giorgia Meloni or a Victor Orbán.

These two respective leaders of Italy and Hungary represent two poles of possibility for Reform. Orbán’s self-described “illiberal democracy” in Budapest has combined big-state interventionism, and pro-natalist, pro-welfare policies, with economic nationalism and authoritarian creep. Meloni, meanwhile, has eschewed her roots on the fringes as part of Italy’s neo-fascist movement, and has instead governed as a traditional centre-right politician — reserving additional rhetorical venom for migration and the culture wars. Farage has praised both leaders at different moments: Orbán, he once said, is “the future of Europe”, while he has also praised Meloni’s uncompromising stance on migration. His policy prescriptions veer unpredictably between Meloni’s relative moderation and Orban’s more robust, statist, abrasive populism.

“The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible ‘adults in the room’, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.”

But Farage, like the best continental populists, has managed to successfully crystallise into a single issue all the fears, anxieties, and collective fantasies of a desperate public. Crime, dilapidated high streets, shoddy public services, falling real incomes, ballooning state spending — all have been distilled into the symbolic subject of the Migrant. Progressives still object, but within every creation myth is a kernel of rationality. In recent years, inward migration has hit an unprecedented scale. The electorate has made repeated injunctions to keep migration within sustainable limits, but the Left-liberal cultural and political establishment has refused to listen. The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible “adults in the room”, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.

Reform’s task, therefore, has been to articulate a broad message that explains the country’s malaise. The party’s offering — big tent, low-migration patriotism — is enough for them to pose as a “none-of-the-above” option for the growing proportion of the electorate that is now prepared to reject technocracy. But beyond Farage’s intuitive communicative flair, and his instinctive penchant for projecting good-humoured but no-nonsense defiance towards Labour and the Conservatives, Reform still does not quite know what the party is for. This week, the party attempted to add a veneer of economic credibility to its fiscal plans, abandoning the last manifesto’s promise to replay Trussomomics with a splurge of deficit-financed tax cuts. Instead, Reform promises that spending reductions will now precede any changes to the tax code. Deregulation will summon the animal spirits of British entrepreneurialism, Reform claims, and the state’s ever-expanding welfare commitments will be scaled back. This is a strategy of Meloni-ism writ large.

And yet it is a model of political economy that is wildly unsuited to our age of chaos. New political forms are emerging from the interregnum. For decades, Chinese state planners have been administering breakneck growth and dirigiste development via industrial subsidy, currency and capital controls, state-owned enterprises and hard protectionism. In the US, Donald Trump has upended 50 years of globalisation and open markets, embracing a dog-eat-dog American nationalism that brings the age of liberalised trade and economic integration to a close. On the continent, the formerly austerity-happy EU and Germany have belatedly adopted public investment in strategic industries. In a geopolitically febrile climate, they are “derisking” and “reshoring” domestic production of critical commodities.

Set against this global context, a dogmatic return to free-market fetishism appears inadequate. The Austrian School, and the disciples of Hayek and Friedman, no longer have the answers. Farage, a consummately protean politician, appears to have understood this. In his more Orbánite moments, he has parked his tanks on the fallow lawns of the Left. The steel sector could be nationalised, he has mused, along with water and utilities. Domestic industry would be supported by public procurement, and an industrial strategy would aim to boost manufacturing. The two-child benefit cap would be lifted for working British couples: a policy reportedly adopted after Reform’s meetings with Orbán officials. And, perhaps most radically, the Bank of England would be subject to political interference not seen since high Blairism’s granting of its independence in 1997. (The Old Lady would be instructed to end the loss-making rounds of quantitative tightening, and cancel the high interest rates paid to commercial banks.)

Earlier this year, Farage even saw fit to talk approvingly of a fellow rebel from the other side of the political divide, Arthur Scargill. There’s a case to be made that during the miners’ strike it was, in fact, the “dry” cabinet monetarists who were the iconoclasts and radicals. In this view, it was the miners’ leader, fighting to protect provincial Britain’s traditional communities, families, and dignity of labour, who was the unlikely “small-C” conservative. And yet all this tentative Left-coded positioning, as well as the reheated Thatcherism, is belied by this week’s more anodyne, conventional pronouncements. In a speech on Monday, Farage tried to calm the nerves of onlooking deficit-hawk think-tanks and quangos. With Reform consistently ahead in the polls, the party is trying to demonstrate its commitment to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy, lest the markets begin their dangerous jitters.

As the Farageists attempt to build their own grand coalition from the army of the dissatisfied, glaring questions are coming to the fore. How will commitments to a small state and lower tax be reconciled with improved public services? How will a commitment to lower the welfare bill go down in Reform’s own constituencies, in which an increased share of the populist vote correlates strongly with the share of adults who are dependent on benefits? How will the angling towards free-markets and low-regulation sit with public ownership, or robust industrial policy? And who will win in the inevitable clash between Reform’s pro-development, anti-planning law Yimby free marketeers, and the homeowning voters and local councillors in peri-urban England who oppose new building at every turn?

If Michael Gove’s favourite Marxist, Gramsci, were alive today, in analysing the chaos of our interregnum he may have identified Nigel Farage as an embodiment of “Caesarism” — a “great ‘heroic’ personality” that appears, in either a reactionary or progressive form, to either break an impasse or resolve a “historico-political situation characterised by an equilibrium of forces, heading towards catastrophe”. Our interregnum may be reaching such a Caesarist conclusion, or else reaching catastrophe. There is a space for a hard-edged, syncretic brand of politics that combines elements of an unleashed free-market with a statist reflation of national production, critical industries and infrastructure: just imagine a mixture of Chinese, Singaporean and East Asian developmentalism. But this is yet to be articulated; Reform is still without a governing ideology. And if the party absorbs all the trappings of respectability that launched us into the age of perma-crisis in the first place, they will merely be placeholders, the next in the queue to manage decline. And in that case, our long interregnum will stretch out further.

Original article: unherd.com