Brexit Party populism has deep roots in English radical politics

Last year, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change released a report entitled “European Populism: Trends, and Future Prospects”. Populism, it concluded, is “not a deep ideology but rather a logic of political organisation” which presents itself as “the true will of a unified people against domestic elites, foreign migrants, or ethnic, religious or sexual minorities”.

Two things strike me about that sentiment.

First, that it’s far too broad to work as an adequate definition: the invocation of a popular will, however defined, is a common feature of Western politics – take De Gaulle’s frank idealism for “a certain idea of France”, Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” (a neat fudge of “we, the people…”) or Tony Blair’s tribute to Diana as “the people’s Princess”.

Second, the early success of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party shows that it simply isn’t true that populists lack “a deep ideology”. Of course, the Brexit Party has all the accoutrements of a postmodern populist outfit – an ‘Us vs the Elite’ grievance story married to savvy use of social media, well-organised mass rallies, and remarkable message discipline from its lead figures: its ex-business tycoon chairman Richard Tice, Farage himself, and now Ann Widdecombe.

So much for the Party’s “logic of political organisation”. But there is a “deep ideology” there too – nothing less than an authentic articulation of an ancient spirit of revolt, an elemental yearning for a wild, untethered liberty that flares up time and time again in English politics.

Conservatives will sometimes tell you that the English are instinctively anti-revolutionary. It’s a nice notion, informed by the experience of the age of European revolutions in the 19^th century, with its landmark dates 1789 and 1848, that frame a period in which popular frustrations in England seemed to be broadly accommodated through the existing political system, which adjusted to demands for greater representation through progressive extensions of the franchise.

It’s true that we haven’t experienced that kind of mass upheaval – but English political history is littered with individuals and movements that advocated unrestrained revolt at any cost.

During Wat Tyler’s Peasants Revolt of 1381 against new taxes, one the rebellion’s leading figures, the priest John Ball, gave this sermon on Blackheath:

“When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.”

The spirit of liberty – Edenic, untrammelled and free – appears again and again throughout modern political history, with the Levellers of the Civil War in the 17^th century, the English Dissenters of the 18^th century, radical politician and satirist turned outlaw John Wilkes, the Chartists of the 19^th century and, in the 20^th century, in Tony Benn’s visions of popular democracy, informed by the Benn family’s long history of religious Nonconformism.

With its “Let’s go WTO” wholesale rejection of the status quo, Nigel Farage’s new outfit speaks to that radical strain of the English temperament. So while I can see why it might be comforting for centrists to think of populism as a weak phenomenon, with  no properly worked-out set of ideas beyond bigotry and anti-elitist rhetoric, it is an assessment that fails to reflect adequately the complex and volatile inner life of English populist movements.

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