When Margaret Thatcher announced her resignation as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK) in November of 1990, the free-market capitalism that she advocated during her eleven-year tenure in office came to an end. It would take another 25 years for a similar brand of conservatism promoted by Thatcher’s ideological soulmate across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan, to experience the same fate.
Beginning with Thatcher’s immediate successor, John Major, to today’s Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, conservatism in the UK incrementally transitioned from advocating a free-market policy orthodoxy that emphasised privatisation, deregulation, smaller government, and an aversion to close economic and security integration with Europe, to a non-ideological status quo movement that stood for nothing.
Instead of working to reduce the size and regulatory power of government like PM Thatcher did during her tenure in office, the Conservative Party decided to adopt “centrist” positions which sought to manage a generational social welfare State that devalues work, encourages illegal immigration, and stifles entrepreneurial innovation. They also refused to address contentious social issues like trans rights and the growth of Islam in the UK, even embracing leftwing positions on climate change and immigration reform while in power. Conservatives decided to play it safe as a status quo party, out of ideas long before they were out of power.
The inability of today’s Conservative Party to recognise the missteps of the past and reimagine itself as a populist party committed to ending open immigration, government “hate speech” laws, and institutional “wokism,” while promoting a low tax and less regulatory economy that focuses on the needs and interests of the working class, resulted in a collapse of the Tories in the last election. Unfortunately for them, their failure to rebrand the party and conservatism in the UK has fuelled the emergence of a viable alternative on the populist right.
Nigel Farage and the Reform Party have a real opportunity to replace or absorb the Tories into the Reform movement, and become the dominant working-class party in the UK. Recent polls suggest that they have achieved this level of popularity by ditching small government “austerity” conservatism, and embracing British First populism. The template for the Reform movement to redefine conservatism and win elections can be found across the Atlantic in the United States.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was the culmination of a two-decade struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Heading into the Presidential election of 1964, the GOP was led by the progressive Republican Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, who represented the old money interests of the East. The emerging conservative opposition was led by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a small government libertarian firebrand who represented the free-market values of the fiercely individualistic American West.
To the surprise of many it was the conservative Goldwater who won the Republican nomination for President in 1964, but he was easily defeated by Democrat Lyndon Johnson. An uneasy Republican Party truce followed, when Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968. Nixon was able to hold the two factions of the Republican Party together, until he was forced to resign in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal. After the defeat of President Gerald Ford by Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, the opportunity for conservatives to nominate an electable GOP candidate finally arrived in 1980.
Conservatives within the Republican Party turned to Ronald Reagan, the former Governor of California. Reagan’s election in 1980 began a 35-year reign of small government conservative rule within the Republican Party. This was one year after Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of the UK, forming a transatlantic partnership that defined conservatism in both nations for decades.
President Reagan’s brand of small government entrepreneurial conservatism began with the passing of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts, officially known as the Economic Recovery Tax Act, in 1981. His foreign policy goals were funded by large increases in defence spending throughout the early 1980’s. It was designed to contain Soviet expansionism during the cold war, especially into Central America.
In November of 1986, President Reagan took on the issue of immigration, by signing the largest amnesty bill for illegal immigrants in U.S. history. The Immigration Reform and Control Act passed with the full support of the Republican Party and the business community.
Then, before leaving office, Reagan signed the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 1988. FTA led directly to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, an agreement signed by Mexico, Canada, and the United States — creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America.
The growing working-class faction within Reagan’s governing coalition began to question the GOP’s free trade, open immigration, and interventionist foreign policy in the post-Reagan era. This once cordial debate became more contentious when George W. Bush decided to go to war and occupy Iraq beginning in March of 2003. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a pivotal event that fuelled the political ascendency of candidate Donald Trump a decade ago.
Trump’s now seminal speech after slowly descending from his golden escalator in New York City on June 16, 2015, changed American politics forever. Although the speech is primarily remembered for Trump’s remarks about illegal Mexican immigration, he also condemned free trade for hollowing out America’s manufacturing base, and he directly challenged the hawkish foreign policy orthodoxy of the Reagan / Bush Republican Party.
Trump’s America First MAGA movement was born. Trump used the entire 2016 GOP Presidential campaign to hammer anyone with the surname Bush, Senator John McCain, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Party’s political, economic, and national security establishment. He stayed away from personally attacking former President Reagan, but he was not reluctant to go after any other Republican who supported NAFTA and “free trade,” open border immigration, and endless foreign wars.
Trump’s criticism of John McCain, George W. Bush, and Reagan’s international trade and foreign policy positions was initially seen as political suicide by the GOP establishment in late 2015. They viewed Trump as a heretical anti-free market advocate who would never be embraced by Reagan’s Republican Party. The GOP establishment didn’t realise that Trump was not looking to inherit the Party of Reagan. He was determined to rebrand the GOP as the Party of Trump. He intuitively understood that the growing working-class base of the Republican Party was turning against the pro-immigration free-market conservatism, and foreign policy interventionism, of the Reagan era. This is something that the post-Thatcher Conservative Party in the UK failed to recognise in their own country.
Trump knew exactly what his voters wanted him to do in 2016. They wanted an immediate end to open border immigration, which they believe resulted in higher crime, cultural friction, and increased competition for American jobs. They wanted an end to NAFTA and other trade deals which the GOP establishment branded as free trade, but many working-class Americans saw as a sell-out to large global companies – which profited from exporting jobs and reducing the wages and labour rights of U.S. workers. Finally, they wanted U.S. allies to pay more for their own national defence and demanded an end to expensive and never-ending foreign conflicts. In short, they wanted their government to prioritise the domestic needs and interests of working-class Americans.
In 2024, the re-election of President Trump put the final nail in the coffin of Reagan’s small government, free market, pro-immigration, and internationalist brand of conservatism. The passing of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” with the full support of the Republican Congress, will add about 2.5 trillion to the U.S. deficit over a decade. The response of former Reagan era GOP deficit hawks on Capitol Hill? Silence, knowing that the Party of Reagan was now the Party of Trump.
Trump’s support for NATO, U.S. European allies, and Ukraine moves from hostile to tepid, but never fully supportive. His disruptive trade and tariff wars highlight Trump’s life-long mistrust of free trade and free markets, and his crackdown and deportation of illegal immigrants is accelerating in his second term, to the delight of his multi-ethnic working-class base. This 2024 populist policy agenda, which began to take shape almost a decade ago, confirms the obvious: the Republican Party’s transition from Reagan’s small government conservatism to Trump’s America First populism is now complete.
Will Nigel Farage and the Reform Party movement in the UK result in the same fate for the Tories? Both Reform and the MAGA movement in the United States share similar cultural and economic talking points. Both are committed to ending open immigration and cultural “wokism,” while promoting economic policies that focus on the needs and interests of the working class.
The one remaining question is whether Farage has the requisite political skills and personality to transform and redefine conservatism into British First populism? With the unpopularity of both the current Labour government led by Keir Starmer, and the UK Conservative Party headed by Kemi Badenoch, Farage and the Reform Party will get their opportunity in the next election. The path to sustained relevance and electoral success has already been mapped out for Farage and Reform by both candidate and President Donald Trump over the previous decade. It’s now up to Farage to make it happen.
Frank DiFulvio is an independent journalist and professional writer. He lives and works in Rome, Italy and Northern Virginia, in the United States. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Italy.
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(Photograph: Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Farage is not the man people imagine him to be.
Totally agree, another small c Conservative, shunned (and still sulking) as a potential future party leader due to wrong think on the Maastrict Treaty and the EEC’s slide into EU statehood. Expect disappointment plus the bubble has already started to deflate, with the disaffected unintelligent having a punt on the Greens instead (even John Prescott’s son is now a Green candidate with his abandonment of Labour similar to NF’s of the Conservatives).