Reform UK gets touchy when called “far-Right”. Two years ago, the BBC apologised for doing so after the party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, complained about the term being used to describe Reform in an article on the corporation’s website.
The measure of Tice’s judgement where political terminology is concerned can be gleaned from his characterisation of Sir Keir Starmer’s hugely important recent visit to China as “kowtowing to his Commie friends in Beijing”. It is hard to imagine a more juvenile remark from a man with aspirations to high office.
There is, though some ongoing confusion and debate about whether or not “far-Right” is the most apt or useful label to stick on Nigel Farage’s mouthy nationalists.
A considered argument is made that although Reform fits the “far-Right” mould in lots of ways – for example, Farage’s flag-waving xenophobia, contempt for norms of liberal democracy and chumming up with foreign politicians the BBC is prepared to call “far-Right” – it is more accurate to call it “populist Right” (or “populist radical Right”) in order to distinguish it from neo-Nazi and overtly racist organisations also placed under the far-Right umbrella.
But putting all that aside, how do Reform policies compare with those adopted down the years by other British political parties to which the term “far-Right” unquestionably applies?
Housing provides a useful test – one that might also be applied to the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch, who some argue now often occupy part of the far-Right spectrum too.
In a recent email to supporters seeking candidates for the upcoming borough elections, Reform’s London chief Laila Cunningham raised the matter of social housing allocation – how councils in London decide which households seeking such homes get them, and which have to keep on waiting.
In this policy area, she claimed, “priorities have gone badly wrong”. She continued: “Too many London councils have chosen to prioritise new arrivals over British families and veterans who’ve contributed to this country all their lives.”
The claim is pretty vague. How is Cunningham defining “new arrivals” and “British families”? How often does the prioritisation she alleges take place? What does “contributed to this country” mean? Has a British-born Londoner aged 18 “contributed to this country” more or less than a 50-year old British citizen who was a “new arrival” 40 years ago and runs a business or is employed in one of the city’s public services?
The emotive gist of Cunningham’s assertion, though, is clear: it is that while “Brits” in London languish on social housing waiting lists, immigrants are being allowed to jump the queue. Reform has since said it “could” impose a local residency requirement of “up to” ten years in any London borough it wins control of in May, with Cunningham asserting that “Brits have been pushed to the back of the housing queue in their own country”.
In fact, Tory-run Hillingdon has long required anyone applying to even join its social housing waiting list, let alone be allocated a home, to have lived in the borough for an unbroken ten years. Top Reform London target Bexley, also Tory-run, has a five-year requirement. Many other boroughs have similar rules, with Labour Camden, for example, saying you have to have lived in that borough for five of the past seven years to be eligible for joining the council’s social housing register.
Length of residency in a borough is one of various criteria boroughs use for allocating housing when it becomes vacant, including assessments of applicants’ individual circumstances and needs. But it’s the “queue-jumping” claim Reform wants voters to concentrate on. It is deliberately emotive, designed to stoke-up and profit from resentment of immigrants.
Let’s place Reform’s stance in historical context. For half century and more, the nationalist far-Right in Britain has sought to woo unhappy voters with claims that immigrants are to blame for housing shortages and more: that they are occupying homes that would otherwise go to “Brits”; that they jump social housing queues and, while they’re at it, ruin “traditional’ neighbourhoods with their filthy foreign habits.
London has been no exception. Far from it. In the 1970s, with the country’s economy in a hole, the far-Right National Front exploited such sentiments to become a significant electoral force in much of the capital, as well as a violent racist street movement.
In the 1977 Greater London Council elections, the party won 5.3 per cent of the popular vote, the fourth largest and not far behind the Liberals (who got 7.8 per cent). An NF splinter group, the National Party, got another 0.4 per cent. In some GLC constituencies, including Edmonton, Greenwich, Hackney North & Stoke Newington, Islington Central, Bermondsey and Brent East, they finished third.
Later, new far-Right parties emerged, again attracting quite small but significant amounts of support in London, and prospering in specific parts of it. In 1993, the British National Party won its first election anywhere in the country, taking a seat on Tower Hamlets Council after claiming that local Bangladeshi Londoners were being given favoured access to social housing and by running a “rights for whites” campaign. In fact, under a rogue Liberal Democrat administration, the truth was the exact opposite. But the BNP candidate snook home, beating his Labour rival by seven votes.
Early in the current century, the BNP made strides further east, in Barking & Dagenham. Again, housing was central to its wider allegation that immigrants were being put ahead of “our people”. The party spread the total falsehood that the Labour Party was giving Africans £50,000 to buy houses in the borough. In 2006, it won 12 seats on the council and formed the official opposition to Labour. It won 17.2 pr cent of the popular vote. UKIP, on 13.2 per cent, wasn’t far behind.
Two years after that, the BNP had enough support across the city for one of its Barking & Dagenham councillors to win a London Assembly seat through the Londonwide proportional representation route, with a 5.3 per cent vote share. And in 2010, a year when a general election and full borough elections were held on the same day, BNP leader Nick Griffin contested the Barking parliamentary seat.
He made alleged “unfairness” in social housing allocations a key part of his campaign. A news report from the time shows (from 36 seconds), him claiming that “people from all over the world are coming in here, haven’t paid a penny [and] get pushed to the front of the queue”.
That sounds rather similar to what Reform’s Laila Cunningham claimed in her email. Where there is a difference is Griffin’s emphasising in the 2010 TV report (below) that alleged housing discrimination in favour of “people from all over the world” is unfair not only on what he calls “the indigenous Brits” but also “on settled ethnic minorities who’ve come here, been here for years, helped build the society [and] paid their taxes”.
This was unconvincing from the leader of a party that wanted immigrants and non-white British citizens to leave the country – a chunk of the population that would have included Laila Cunningham. Even so, it was a caveat Cunningham does not include in her email.
Perhaps we should reserve judgement on Reform’s social housing eligibility test until it becomes something more substantial than a Daily Express story lacking key details. But on the strength of what it has – and hasn’t – said about the matter so far, the party of Farage and Cunningham is hardly less “far-Right” than that of Griffin in 2010.
As On London reported last year, Reform has not been averse to making wildly inaccurate claims about social housing allocations in London. Its policy chief Zia Yusuf, no less, said on Newsnight that “the majority of social housing in London goes to foreign nationals”. In fact, about 17 per cent does.
Before that, Chris Philp, a London Conservative MP and shadow home secretary, took the astonishing step of highlighting on X/Twitter a map made by a prominent ethno-nationalist social media propagandist to claim that “48 per cent of London’s social housing is occupied by people who are foreign”. That isn’t true either. The reality is more like 15 per cent.
However, today’s Tory leadership and Reform UK alike have detected, like the BNP and the NF before them, that there are votes to be had in London – mostly from low-income white Londoners – from loudly proclaiming that foreigners, immigrants, asylum-seekers and anyone they chose to characterise as not a “Brit” – are frequently and routinely being given social housing they shouldn’t be entitled to. Reform are at it elsewhere, too: their candidate in the Gorton & Denton parliamentary by-election has been spreading exactly the same sorts of malicious rumours.
There is a legitimate debate to be had about social housing allocations in a time of scarcity in London, just as there is about whether calling Reform far-Right helps or hinders understanding or defeating them. What is clear, though, is that when it comes to social housing in London – and elsewhere – Nigel Farage’s party is stirring the same old pot of falsehoods, hatreds and exaggerations that the BNP and the NF stirred in the past.
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