Less Middle England at prayer, more Middle England at war. Reform UK’s annual party conference, held during the first week of September under the sprawling steel canopy of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre (NEC), was a battle cry for British nationalism. Over two long days, the party worked through its central ideological obsessions: the left-liberal plot to destroy democracy; the spectre of Western civilisational decline; above all, immigration as an existential threat to the British way of life.

The conservative historian David Starkey claimed that the UK was in a ‘sub-revolutionary situation’. Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesman, promised to ‘repel the invasion’ of small boats off England’s southern coast. Rassemblement National president Jordan Bardella, flown in from Paris, urged attendees, of whom there were several thousand, to ‘never apologise for being a patriot’. At the centre of proceedings stood Reform party leader Nigel Farage. His image – grinning, in a brilliant aqua blue suit and Union Jack socks – beamed out from the posters, TV screens and stalls that lined the conference hall walls.

The months leading up to the conference had not been easy for Reform. The party’s popularity, which reached record highs following a strong set of local election results in May, had slumped as a series of financial scandals chipped away at its support: Farage and his colleagues have been accused of receiving potentially illegal donations from foreign donors and are now under police investigation.

Andy Burnham’s arrival on the national scene complicated matters further. When the former Labour mayor of Greater Manchester replaced Keir Starmer in Downing Street on 20 July, he pledged to end Britain’s ‘40-year experiment’ with neoliberalism. He would do this, he said, by decentralising constitutional power, bringing key utilities back under public control and ‘spreading growth into every postcode’.

Burnham’s soft-left pitch, (…)

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