The Second English Revolution

The surge of the populist right in England’s local elections is a sucker punch to the sneering cultural elites

A version of this article was first published in The European Conservative

You can pick your favourite cliché from those the chattering classes deployed to try and wave away the results of the recent English council elections. ‘A bloody nose’, a shout from those ‘left behind’, a short-lived rebellion that will ‘ebb as tempers cool.’ The easiest mistake in explaining the rise of the populist right is to wave it away as mere protest. That reading no longer fits the facts.

Across England, this looks less like a fleeting tantrum and more like the start of a political realignment. The populist right is not just collecting discontent; it is taking in voters who once underpinned the two-party system itself. Once taken-for-granted Labour strongholds have gone forever. Conservative heartlands have ruptured. Long-standing loyalties are loosening in real time.

The local election shock matters not only for the totals, but for their source. These are places that stuck with Labour through British industrial decline, foreign-policy disasters and years of drift. These are voters who put up with managerial politics because they saw no alternative. Now they do.

Westminster and the media establishment still prefers to frame this as a plea for attention, not a serious political judgement. They are desperately trying to reassure themselves, and they are completely wrong. Many voters are not simply asking to ‘be heard’. They see themselves as having been failed by a system which is distant, technocratic and culturally out of step with their lives.

That is why the link to Brexit matters. The instincts behind the Leave vote are resurfacing; that democratic sovereignty counts, borders count, national identity counts. And that ordinary citizens should not be treated as obstacles to so-called ‘enlightened’ rule by experts and institutions who, make no mistake, despise them.

For years, much of the governing class assumed these impulses would fade. They have not. They have congealed. The surge of the populist right suggests millions still feel politically homeless in a system split between cautious managerialism on one side and cultural radicalism on the other.

That estrangement has been building for years. On the country’s biggest questions: immigration, cohesion, security, crime, energy policy and the authority of democratic institutions, many voters see little or no serious debate. Elections only swap out people; they do not bring about any change in political direction. Governments change but core, progressive assumptions do not. Britain grows more centralised, more bureaucratic and more culturally fractured, while voters are told (often threatened) that these trends are inevitable, or morally required.

The result is a growing sense that mainstream politics is no longer a vehicle for democratic choice, but a managerial system that polices the boundaries of acceptable opinion. People might occasionally grumble but they dare not truly dissent. Worry about migration and you are branded intolerant. Push back against hard-edged identity politics and you are dismissed as reactionary. Question remote technocratic rule and you are treated as a doltish, provincial barrier to progress. In time, people stop looking for validation from a cohort which holds them in contempt.

That is one reason that Reform’s rise feels bigger than the usual mid-term punishment of governing parties. This is not just anti-incumbent anger. It is a backlash against a political culture many voters see as arrogant, insulated and utterly incapable of correcting itself.

Crucially, it is not being driven mainly by fashionable activist networks or university campuses. It is coming from ordinary towns, suburbs and working communities whose worries are often treated as morally suspect by Britain’s cultural elites. The people behind this shift are not traditional revolutionaries. Most are moderate in what they ask for: secure borders, reliable public services, safe streets, affordable living and a sense that their country still belongs to them culturally as well as legally. Yet in some quarters, these basic demands are now treated as radical.

Here the Establishment has completely misjudged the mood. For years, commentators argued that Brexit support would mellow once its consequences were felt. Instead, many Leave voting areas have grown yet more distrustful. Not because they regret leaving the European Union, as many bad faith actors would have us believe, but because they think the system tried to dilute, block or morally discredit the decision they made. And they wouldn’t be wrong.

Reform’s rise draws on that resentment. It reflects a belief that the old parties either cannot or will not deliver the genuine national renewal that voters want. The Labour Party is increasingly caught between metropolitan progressivism and the socially conservative instincts of its traditional working-class base, and it has chosen the former. The Conservatives spent years promising border control, lower migration and institutional reform, then left office with trust eviscerated and many supporters disillusioned. Reform UK has stepped into the vacuum left behind.

And it is not just about Reform UK. Restore Britain, the party established and led by the MP for Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe, also performed well. The party won all ten seats in Great Yarmouth in the Norfolk County Council elections. As opposed to other parties, they ran a decidedly local campaign, promising to put Great Yarmouth first at every opportunity (it will be noted that leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, stated explicitly that despite these being local elections, Palestine was one of the ‘elements on the ballot’).

Insurgent parties often benefit from the clarity of opposition. After all, diagnosing decline is easier than reversing it. Reform in particular will face the same scrutiny, compromises and internal strains that confront any movement with governing ambitions. Britain’s electoral system also punishes challengers. Winning votes is one thing; turning them into Westminster power is another. Also, let’s not forget that an entire class of supposedly neutral civil servants will be actively working against any Reform government, such is their ideological groupthink.

Still, it would be a mistake to underestimate the shift under way. The old assumption was that voters cared above all about economic competence, while questions of nationhood, culture and sovereignty sat at the margins. That no longer holds. Many voters now see economics and culture as intertwined. They think that uncontrolled migration deepens insecurity, that social trust depends on cohesion and that democratic legitimacy rests on a real sense of national solidarity. These claims are now at the heart of political debate.

Much of the Establishment response has been, yet again, contemptuous dismissal. Voters for populist parties are cast as gullible, enraged or backward, supposedly led by demagogues into voting against themselves. But that story exposes the deeper problem – far too many influential figures in politics, media and academia cannot accept that millions of voters have reached their views rationally and independently.

One defining feature of modern British politics is the widening cultural gap between governing institutions and the people they claim to represent. Many voters feel the language, values and assumptions of elite Britain bear little resemblance to everyday life. They see a political class more at ease with the jargon of international conferences than with the anxieties of its own citizens.

The central divide in Britain is no longer simply Left versus Right. It is between those who see the nation state as a real democratic community worth defending, and those who treat national identity as outdated, embarrassing or secondary to global managerial ideals - ‘Somewheres’ versus ‘Anywheres’, indeed.

That clash is no longer confined to the margins; it has moved into the mainstream. Whatever the next general election brings, one trend is increasingly hard to ignore: the political settlement that shaped Britain for decades is unravelling. Voters who once felt ignored or derided are no longer satisfied with holding their noses and ticking the least worst option. They have realised the power they have in their hands, and they mean to use it.

In that, they have echoed another English revolutionary, Oliver Cromwell, when he addressed the Rump Parliament in 1653: “You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”