Can the UK Populists Remain Popular?

The paramount aim of populist nationalist parties like the Rassemblement National (RN) in France, the Scottish National Party (SNP), or Reform UK is to be, well, popular. That may seem a banal observation, but their success depends on appealing to the widest possible range of voters, albeit united by their love of country and opposition to the dilution of national culture by immigration. Coherent policies on economics, tax, and spending come second to la Patria.

Reform has dominated the British opinion polls for most of the last year and could be the next government. Yet, true to form, it offers a ragbag of disparate policies drawn from right and left. 

Reform UK has supported nationalization of water companies, redistributing tax money to lower earners, and increased spending on public services like the NHS, police, and prisons. It even called for a £20 billion raid on commercial bank profits by scrapping Bank of England interest payments on reserves created through Quantitative Easing.

Until this week, Nigel Farage also appeared to support the abolition of Britain’s most controversial welfare policy: the two-child cap on benefits. Paid to those in Universal Credit, this benefit is worth over £3,000 a year per UK child. The cap was introduced by the Conservatives in 2015 on the grounds that it is unfair for people on benefits to afford larger families than working couples not on benefits.

In her recent budget, Labour’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves abolished the two-child cap, claiming that it was a major cause of child poverty. Reform UK agreed with the abolition—until last week, when their new treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, announced that he would restore the cap as part of an assault on Britain’s unaffordable benefits bill.

Jenrick wants to support “alarm-clock workers” and stop them having to fund, through their taxes, an army of working-age benefits claimants which has grown to some 10 million according to the UK government’s figures. Health-related benefits alone are scheduled to rise to nearly £100 billion in the next four years. 

But all this talk of fiscal rectitude and welfare cuts comes at a price. In compassionate Britain, no one talks of benefit “scroungers” any more—at least not in public. The problem with Britain’s social democratic state is that many voters support it. 

A majority wish to see more money for the inefficient National Health Service, which now accounts for nearly half of all day-to-day departmental government spending. There is genuine loathing of utility companies like energy and water, and state ownership is approved by a majority of British voters, as are higher taxes on the wealthy.

It may come as a shock to discover just how socialist the UK has already become. The state now consumes 45 percent of GDP. At 36 percent, the overall tax burden is the highest since the Second World War. The overall benefits bill, including the state pension, is now over £300 billion.  The Labour government abandoned its attempt to curb disability benefits after a backbench rebellion by Labour MPs afraid of blowback from voters who have come to expect these benefits.

But the picture painted by the left-wing Green Party, which is leading the latest opinion poll for today’s Gorton and Denton by-election, is of Britain as a workhouse-stricken Dickensian land dominated by greedy billionaires and fascist right-wingers. Many voters seem to agree with this portrayal. Yet it is almost comically wide of the truth.  

Income inequality, measured on the internationally-recognized Gini coefficient, is lower than during the last Labour government. The national minimum wage, at two-thirds of median earnings, is higher than ever. Diversity mandates apply throughout the public and most of the corporate sector.

Capitalism is seen by many Brits as inherently immoral. Seventy percent of young voters say they want a socialist system. The wealth taxes and rent freezes offered by the charismatic Green leader, Zack Polanski, are absurdly popular, though even Labour-supporting tax experts say they don’t work. 

Winding back these socialist aspirations and abolishing benefit entitlements is going to be an immense task. There is no doubt that things need to change and that Britain can no longer afford its quasi-socialist economy. But people don’t want realism—or at least the UK media doesn’t. There is outrage whenever a government attempts to curb benefit entitlements, like disability benefits, even though there is evidence they are abused.

Voters want more money spent on public services as well as lower taxes. Many seem to believe this can be paid for by taxing the rich, even though the top 1 percent of earners already pay nearly 30 percent of income tax revenues. Indeed, the top 0.1 percent pay more than the bottom 50 percent of UK earners combined.

Attacking the “1 percent” is irrational. The wealthy bring businesses and jobs to Britain and finance the National Health Service. The hated billionaires are leaving Britain and taking their businesses and taxes with them. This is partly because of the threat to their assets posed by confiscatory inheritance taxes introduced by Reeves. Britain arguably needs more wealthy people and more enterprise to promote growth. 

But Jenrick has already had to promise not to cut taxes. Some in Reform sound as if they would  prefer to follow the approach of the most successful national populist party in Europe: the Scottish National Party.

The SNP has increased income taxes in Scotland to an even higher level than the rest of the UK. It is currently spending some 30 percent more on public services than England, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The Scottish government has abolished university tuition fees and introduced a £20-a-week Scottish Child Payment on top of UK child benefits. 

The SNP has nationalized the rail service and introduced a raft of giveaways like free prescriptions, free bus travel for under-22s, and the Baby Box of maternity products that New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently sought to emulate.

And it seems to work. The nationalists have been in government for nearly 20 years, and are on course to win a fifth consecutive term in May.  Of course, Jenrick would say that it is time Scotland learned to live without UK fiscal transfers through the Barnett Formula on public spending. But spending public money is popular.

The RN in France has learned from the SNP and is offering social protectionism as well as economic protectionism. The supposedly “far-right” party, which has been on the cusp of power in recent legislative elections, is promising to reduce the retirement age for French workers, increase workers’ rights, and promote social housing, along with more traditional right-wing policies on immigration and borders.

This is the trouble with populism. It is not really interested in talking truth to the people, to paraphrase the left-wing cliche. Jenrick will face immense pressure to keep Reform policy vague and in line with public prejudices while it concentrates on its core issue of immigration and defending “Christian culture,” as the deputy leader, Zia Yusuf, has described its mission. The problem with that is that the New Testament is generally regarded as the property of the left.

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