When the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, many commentators assumed Nigel Farage’s political story had reached its final chapter. After all, what use is an anti-EU insurgency once the country has actually left the EU? The assumption was simple: Faragism was a single-issue fever, and the fever would break as soon as Brexit was delivered.
It didn’t. Nearly a decade later, Farage’s movement is not merely alive; it is polling ahead of the Conservative Party and reshaping the language of mainstream politics. A new open-access paper I have co-authored with Dr Parveen Akhtar in Sociology Compass, entitled Manufacturing Consent: Faragism and the Hegemonic Struggle for Britain, tries to explain this puzzle. Our central argument is that Faragism should never have been understood as a single-issue protest. It is better seen as a long-term, adaptive “hegemonic project” – a sustained effort to redefine what ordinary people consider common sense. And its survival has depended on a remarkable ability to change its target while keeping its machinery intact.
We trace this evolution through three distinct phases.
Phase one (roughly 1993 to 2016) was the anti-EU “war of position”. Drawing on the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci, we describe this as a slow, cultural battle for hearts and minds. Farage, first through UKIP and later through a wider media presence, positioned himself as the “man in the pub” – coarse, anti-metropolitan, and authentically English. The European Union was the perfect villain: distant, bureaucratic, and symbolically tied to a story of national decline. By 2016, this framing had become so entrenched that the Conservatives felt forced to offer a referendum, and a narrow majority voted to leave. Victory, however, created an existential problem. The enemy had been defeated. The movement needed a new one.
Phase two (2018 to 2023) delivered that new enemy through a pivot to what we call “civilisational politics”. With Brussels off the table, the target shifted from institutional to cultural: immigrants, asylum seekers, and specifically British Muslims. The rhetoric moved from sovereignty to security, from bureaucrats to “small boats”. This was not a break with the past but a strategic substitution. The populist engine – heroic leader, aggrieved people, corrupt elite – remained identical. Only the villain changed. The infamous “Breaking Point” poster, depicting a queue of non-white refugees, marked the transition. It allowed exclusionary politics to be framed as “legitimate concerns”, giving voters and media outlets plausible deniability while keeping the emotional temperature high.
The current phase three (2023 to the present) is the most sophisticated evolution yet, and it is the phase our paper analyses most closely. Under the banner of Reform UK, the movement has visibly diversified its leadership. Zia Yusuf, a millionaire businessman born in Scotland to migrant parents, served as Chairman and Head of Policy. Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi, both from minority backgrounds, have been recruited or defected to the party. The language has shifted again, from crude ethno-nationalism to the ostensibly neutral vocabulary of “civic values”, “integration”, and “British patriotism”.
We term this “diasporic civic nationalism”, and we argue it represents something genuinely new in British right-wing politics. Older formations like the National Front or the BNP could never escape their association with white identity. Reform UK, by contrast, has strategically absorbed postcolonial diasporic identities into its leadership, allowing it to perform diversity while preserving an exclusionary core. This is not tokenism in the old sense; it is a structural feature of the project. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Eviane Leidig, and Akkerman and Rooduijn, we show how minority figures can “civilise” a far-right movement, making it appear respectable and broadening the definition of “us” just enough to sharpen the attack on a new “them” – recent arrivals, unintegrated communities, and progressive multiculturalism itself.
But here is the twist, and the reason we believe this matters for anyone watching British politics. This third phase is simultaneously the movement’s greatest strength and its most significant vulnerability. Hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, is not a fortress that, once captured, stays captured. It is a performance that must be endlessly renewed. And the more Reform UK leans into its civic, inclusionary rebranding, the more exposed it becomes when the mask slips.
The cracks are already showing. In early 2026, former pupils at Dulwich College testified to Farage’s reported private use of racial slurs and admiration for fascist figures. These revelations did not merely cause embarrassment; they exposed the continuity of a racialised worldview beneath the strategic adaptation. Then, in April 2026, Farage staged a press conference on the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, deploying rhetoric about “reversing the invasion” that sounded far closer to Phase 2’s civilisational politics than to Phase 3’s polished civic nationalism. Such moments reveal a strategic incoherence that is not accidental but structural. The grassroots base, and arguably the leader himself, have not undergone the transformation the rebranding implies.
The result is a pincer movement of pressure. On one side, progressives and minority communities see through the performance. On the other, hard-right activists feel betrayed by the civility. When Reform UK suspended the MP Rupert Lowe, he broke away to launch Restore Britain, an openly ethno-nationalist splinter group peeling activists from Reform’s right flank. Polling already hints at fragility: after touching 31 percent in late 2025, Reform’s support had fallen to roughly 25 percent by April 2026, its lowest in nine months. The sophisticated survival strategy has generated the very conditions of its own potential undoing.
What about the opposition? Our paper also examines why counter-hegemonic forces have so far failed to mount a coherent alternative. Anti-racist organisations, faith-based mobilisation, Labour’s grassroots, and environmental campaigns have all produced real contestations, but they remain fragmented across single issues without a unifying narrative. Meanwhile, the Labour Party in government has largely accommodated the new anti-immigrant common sense rather than challenging it, ceding the discursive terrain on which a different vision of Britain could be built. The media landscape, with its algorithmic amplification of outrage and the dominance of right-wing broadcast and print outlets, compounds the difficulty.
For the general reader, the takeaway is this: populism is not a static backlash or a momentary tantrum. It is a dynamic, continually rearticulated project that evolves to survive. But that evolution is never seamless. By draping itself in the language of inclusion while changing almost nothing of its underlying substance, Faragism has built a trap for itself. The gap between what it performs and what it actually is becomes wider and more visible with every revelation, every awkward pivot, and every defection.
British politics is not locked into this trajectory. The paper concludes that the contradictions internal to Phase 3 – between performative diversity and substantive exclusion, between elite strategy and grassroots sentiment – represent genuine openings. Whether they can be exploited depends on whether progressive politics can develop the narrative coherence and institutional capacity it currently lacks. Faragism has shown that political common sense can be remade. The question now is whether it can be remade again – this time, in a different direction.
