What sweet in goat mouth… Reform is a creation of Britain’s systemic culture of racism

Less than 24 hours after polling closed in the recent council and devolved government elections in England, Wales and Scotland, the Labour Party and the political class in Westminster, were having a nervous breakdown about the election results. 

Uppermost in their concerns was the performance of the Reform Party across the three nations and particularly the gains they made in traditional Labour areas. With 5,000 seats up for grabs across 156 councils, including the 32 London boroughs, Labour lost 1,229 seats, retaining 1,068; Conservatives lost 433 seats and won 801; the Green Party gained 393 seats, bringing their overall total to 587; the Liberal Democrats won 142 seats, making their total 844 and Reform gained 1,372 seats, bringing their total to 1,454. Labour lost control of 37 councils and the Conservatives eight. The Liberal Democrats gained overall control of three councils, the Greens, five and Reform, 14.

This came less than three months after Labour suffered a shocking defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election on February 26 when it lost for the first time since 1931.  The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer won the seat with 14,980 votes, with Reform’s Matt Goodwin, coming second with 10,578 votes, pushing Labour into third place with 9,364 votes.

Labour’s national executive committee had blocked Andy Burnham, mayor of greater Manchester, from contesting the seat.  It was widely expected that Burnham would win the seat, which would have enabled him to launch a bid for the Labour leadership and displace Keir Starmer as prime minister.  As it was, the Greens clocked up a 27-per-cent swing from Labour and Reform, 14.6 per cent.

That result and the May 7 election results were more than a wake-up call for Labour.  They signalled to the entire country the extent to which Reform, a right-wing party that was considered fringe and anything, but mainstream, had been adopted by the electorate as a possible contender for the leadership of the country.

Needless to say, Nigel Farage MP, Reform’s leader, was preening himself for having delivered a second knockout punch in British electoral politics in 10 years, the first being Britain’s vote in the Brexit referendum in 2016 to leave the European Union, which Farage, as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), had manoeuvred David Cameron, then Conservative prime minister, into calling. 

After May 7, Farage presented himself to the country as knocking on the door of 10 Downing Street and as capable of walking into the prime minister’s office at the next general election.

So, how did we get here? 

One of the favourite sayings of the old folks back home is:  “What sweet in goat mouth does sour in ‘e bam-bam”.

That is a colloquialism for: What you put in at one end, however delectable, could sting you in your rear end.

Reform did not just appear from nowhere.  Nigel Farage is not a Houdini, whatever claim he may have to omnipotence.  Reform is a creation of Britain’s systemic culture of racism and xenophobia. It has served the interests of this postcolonial, post-imperial nation state to have white Britain define itself on the basis of the racial classification it developed to justify its domination, subjugation and dehumanisation of peoples across the globe.  

It was a process that required a belief in notions of white supremacy and of whiteness as naturally superior to blackness.  And since that was Britain’s starting point, beliefs that defined the culture into which white folk were socialised from birth, it was not considered necessary to encourage white Britons to deconstruct whiteness, or to understand the process of racialisation, let alone the relationship between whiteness and eugenics.

Such is the nature of colonialism and of white supremacy that Britain never thought it had any need to teach its white population about those across the world with whom they shared a common citizenship by virtue of colonisation and on whom their daily material existence depended.

Meanwhile, Britain continued to be the most stratified nation in Europe on the axis of class, while still encouraging even the most destitute of whites to see themselves as superior to black folk, irrespective of our level of education, our inventions, our artistic creativity, or anything else.

Since then, race and antiblackness have remained etched into the DNA of this nation, as it had been since colonialism, enslavement and indentureship. Racism became systemic, cultural and institutional as manifested in immigration and border control, citizenship, schooling and education, in policing and criminal justice, in housing, employment, health and in pretty much all aspects of our engagement in the society.

Since then, every time the nation suffered a migraine, it was the fault of the immigrants and that gave rise to fresh demands for immigration control and the containment of immigrants and their demands for equal rights and justice, especially by the police and the criminal justice system. And while we expected the trade union movement and indeed the Labour Party to be our natural allies, they proved to be as racist as the rest of the nation and therefore as inevitable sites of struggle for us as black workers and members.

National leaders’ eagerness to exploit that situation and to exclude black folk, whether or not born in Britain or settled here since the end of the first World War, as well as and their refusal to actively confront the legacy of empire, is what fertilised that culture of antiblackness and the demonisation of immigrants and asylum-seekers.  

What is not stressed enough in all this is that the legacy of empire is not only the racism that runs through the DNA of this nation, but what Britain continues to do and to fail to do in the countries that it once colonised.  I suspect that most of those whom Farage and Reform aided and abetted by Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood, want to keep out, would willingly stay in their own countries if Britain and Europe stopped sucking the lifeblood out of them, or/and putting and keeping in power those whom they could depend upon to let them continue sucking their nations dry.

The policies pursued by successive governments in that Labour/Conservative duality which might as well merge into a single party state, for all the differentiation one could detect between them, make a Reform government a logical development.  Maybe change will come about, finally, when Reform tries to reclaim Britain from all those immigrants, born here or not and decides to deport all of that growing section of the population who are the offspring of African/White and Black and Global Majority/White parentage.  That would be a reckoning to behold.

Reform has its antecedents. In the 1964 general election, in Smethwick in the West Midlands, the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths won his seat, displacing the Labour incumbent, Patrick Gordon Walker with a 7.5-per-cent wing from Labour, even though Labour won that election. Griffiths campaigned with the slogan:  If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.

That did not prevent Griffiths from taking up his seat in the Westminster parliament, although as their MP, he was expected to serve all those ‘niggers’ whom he and his constituents did not want as neighbours.  The people of Smethwick had spoken and had chosen him, in the same way that the people of Britain spoke in 2016 and said, “We want our country back, get Britain out of Europe.” 

The British people appear to be saying:  we want Nigel Farage and Reform, get Starmer out of Downing Street, and let’s get those ‘niggers’ outa here.  It was delectable for the two major parties to exploit the endemic racism within the British electorate for the past 80 years, at least.  Now that the nation has digested and sated itself, it should not complain that its ‘sour in e bam-bam’.

• Professor Augustine John is a human mights campaigner and Honorary Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.