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Around a year ago, I had recently relocated back to the UK from the United States and was experiencing the almost widespread envious looks of American friends. While they were looking down the barrel of a another Trump presidency with its guarantee of chaos and division, we had elected Keir Starmer by a huge majority and were feeling pretty content with ourselves. I remember people praising me on the wisdom of my move, which I absolutely took even though politics had not been part of my reasoning.

Emergence of Reform UK

Perhaps the answer to that is Nigel Farage and his movement, which has in some way managed to harness the resentment, disappointment and regret felt by many of people who supported and were then disappointed by Brexit, and are now in pursuit of another fire to light. To this degree, the foundations of the nationalist rally last weekend and the growth of Reform overall appear broadly of a similar nature with their US antecedents.

It is a case, at least in part, of people reaching at whatever that vows to overthrow a establishment that has repeatedly failed to serve them.

What has felt surprising to many of us this year, though, is how rapidly the scene seems to have changed in this nation, and how a leader as frivolous as Farage could get anyone to back him at all, let alone in the direction of No 10.

Frivolous Figureheads and Public Ridicule

And by frivolous, I do not mean in the populist demagogue style. You can despise those men while acknowledging their talent as mass communicators. Farage, by comparison, is a jackass, a smirking fool openly mocked to his face by opposition members in Congress earlier this month when he arrived, at the invitation of Republicans, to give testimony before a House judiciary committee on freedom of expression.

Farage didn’t organise the ‘unite the kingdom’ rally on Saturday, of course; that was Tommy Robinson, the former BNP member with convictions for violence, substance offenses and fraud – facts that, British broadcasters were at great effort to point out on Monday morning, should not tar all those who participated at his march with the same reputation.

Parallels and Differences with the American Right-Wing Landscape

US observers will see this as a critical moment: a similar moment to that phase of Trump’s rise in support during which his supporters were given countless favorable portrayals in the US national press, and invited to explain why following a man who said outrageous things did not make them in the slightest bit self-serving or awful.

At the same time, the breakneck speed of Reform and Robinson’s rise means that the nation Trump is touring this week is apparently very changed to the one he engaged with in January. There may be a moment when the US president stops to admire his own work, and he will certainly be satisfied to see British far-right activists making progress.

But he is also a man who abhors and is eager to distance himself from “losers” – a group into which, perhaps, his ally the prime minister currently falls, and who we can presume he will drop as rapidly as he embraced him.

Looking Ahead: Traction and Societal Divergences

For the rest of us, it is a question of waiting to see how much support our own version of the Maga movement will have. There are key differences between the two countries that leave some large constituencies who came out in the US for Trump without exact British counterparts.

• British far-right ideology references to the Christian church as an influence, but evangelical Christianity has no traction in a nation where, historically, foxhunting is a bigger wedge issue than reproductive rights.
• I can’t see JD Vance’s pro-birth views, based in his fervent Catholicism, being much of a viable option here, either.

In fact – and this may be pure jingoism on my part – Vance strikes me as the type of American who even Britons on the extreme right might regard instinctively as a unsettling little piece. On the other hand, if sufficient people are willing to pledge allegiance to a thug or an ambitious pub bore, these are distinctions that may hardly matter.