News that Reform UK is abandoning promises to renationalise utilities such as water and energy reveals the direction of travel for Britain’s populist Right. After months of watching the slow drip of high-profile Tory defections, along with renewed promises of fiscal prudence over deficit-financed tax cuts, the U-turn on public ownership has cemented the party’s latest pivot. It is now less an insurgent force, and more the new default vehicle for the UK’s mainstream centre-right.

It would always have been awkward to hear Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick arguing convincingly for positions more reminiscent of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour than their own former party. Now all of them will be spared that indignity.

But as a shapeless Reform struggles to find a permanent identity that goes beyond the “Stop the Boats” mantra, Nigel Farage’s party is losing its outsider edge. With figures like Jenrick in senior positions, Reform has moved obligingly back towards the 50-year diagnostic/prescription manual of the British Right: too much state, too much immigration — so less of both, please.

The siren voices that advised the Faragists to accept Tory ship-jumpers with open arms cited the fledgling populists’ lack of governing experience: get some credible, recognised politicians on board, and doubts about your ability to wield power will fade away. Alas, this position always misunderstood Reform’s unique appeal as an anti-political, plague-on-both-your-houses outfit — a means to burn down the whole Westminster machine. Nobody was eyeing an ascendant Farage because he appeared to be operationally competent, or an able administrator for the failing ship of state. With experienced former ministers on board, the momentum behind the party has dissipated rather than built.

It is a perennial mistake of political commentators and activists to ascribe the charge of incoherence to movements whose politics do not fit neatly on the traditional Left-Right continuum. That’s why the Conservative hierarchy resorted to accusations of “socialism” when Reform began to break out of the one-dimensional spectrum with appeals to renationalisation and scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

But for the average “normie”, politics is a much more à la carte experience than it is for the rigid, partisan ideologues, with their set menu of policy opinions. For the non-obsessives, who do not define themselves ideologically but instead through broad affiliation to a diffuse “common sense” view of the world, there’s no reason why someone’s opinion on mass migration should have any bearing on their tolerance for high taxes. Nor should a person’s views on capital punishment be a certain predictor of their views on public ownership of the utilities, or on trade unions.

There were signs, once, that Farage understood this. Reform would break the mould. For the Left, the tragedy of this is that the party’s leadership is composed of libertarian, Austrian School true believers, who nevertheless draw on Boomer nostalgia for a social-democratic, postwar age of industrial statism. The Reform base for Making Britain Great Again harks back longingly to an era of economic security, with a sense of social cohesion and mass common culture that a closed, strictly national, Fordist economy and a top-down state provided.

In promising to nationalise utilities and rebuild lost manufacturing jobs, Reform was edging towards a kind of syncretic, big-tent populism that represented the genuine centre ground of British politics. On the one hand was advocacy for an active state which intervened on behalf of the “man in the street” against rapacious corporations. On the other was the articulation of a robust patriotism, a desire for sustainable levels of migration, and a suspicion of cultural radicalism. It looks now like that project is over. Beneath the mask, the Conservative Party 2.0 has revealed itself.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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