How the UK Establishment Normalised Reform

Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts ---|--- Is Reform fascist, far-right or merely right wing? And do we really need to get into this? Our guest on this episode, thinks we should: Daniel Trilling is a journalist, a long-time openDemocracy contributor, and the author of a new Book: If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. Daniel has spent decades covering the wild west of right-wing politics in England— from the fascists to the conservatives. And his point, which we dig into over the length of this episode, is we need to correctly diagnose what Reform is, and what they are tapping into, before we decide what to do about it. I found this conversation particularly thought provoking for two reasons: Whenever we cover Reform on openDemocracy (and we go at them very hard), we often get readers writing in saying, “I support Reform but I’m not racist”; On the other hand, I worry — to borrow from the title of Daniel’s book, if we are making a dangerous group respectable. So yes, we need to get into it, and Daniel is just the person to do this with. 00:00 Introduction 01:05 The Collapse of the UK's Two-Party System 02:18 The First-Past-The-Post Lottery 03:07 What is the "British Establishment"? 04:19 The Media Elite & Private School Pipelines 05:32 The "Punitive State": Working Class vs. The State 07:37 The Nigel Farage Playbook 10:48 The False Promise of "Fixing the Country" 13:30 "Anti-Nationals" & The Right-Wing Identity Crisis 16:32 Scottish Nationalism vs. Englishness 18:23 The Identity Void of Post-Empire Britain 21:40 How to Actually Defeat Reform UK & The Far-Right