The American far-right, or alt-right (coined by famed white nationalist Richard Spencer), has been on the rise since at least 2016, when Donald Trump won his first election. The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville created precedence for right-wing extremist violence, while Trump’s response, and his second presidency, has given legitimacy to a swiftly rising far-right branch of thought and influences that have quickly infiltrated the political stage of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Until this year, the U.K. was under the center-right rule of its Conservative Party (whose members are referred to as “Tories”) for the past 14 years. The American Republican Party is more socially right and populist than the Conservative Party, especially under Trump’s leadership. Correlating with the beginning of Trump’s second term, however, Nigel Farage’s far-right populist party Reform U.K. overtook the Labour party and topped Politico’s Poll of Polls as of April 1, gaining the top spot in national voting intention for the next U.K. general election. As of writing, voting intention sits at 31%, with Labour at 18%, the Conservatives at 14% and the rising Green Party at 12%. By comparison, in January 2021, according to the Legatum Institute, Reform U.K. had only a 3% approval rating, and in February 2025, they had 26% in the Opinium poll for the Observer, only one point behind Labour at the time, as reported by the Guardian.
For my American readers, it is essential to understand that the U.S.’s entire political landscape sits on the right of the global political spectrum. The U.K.’s centre-left Labour party is not an equivalent to the Democrats because Labour is more left leaning. We also do not operate in a two party system: The U.K. parliament is made up of a variety of parties who have to form coalitions if one party does not have the majority of the 650 seats in Parliament, which frequently is the case. On the other hand, 533 of the 535 members of Congress in America are either Democrats or Republicans, meaning third parties are essentially irrelevant.
Both the U.S. and the U.K. are experiencing a rapid rise in far-right sentiment in their legislatures. However, the monumental failings of both the Labour Party and the Tories (the latter of which having lost 251 seats in a 14-year majority in Parliament) have left room for Farage and Reform U.K. to take the spotlight and appeal to a dissatisfied voter base. According to Ipsos, both Labour leader Starmer and Conservative leader Badenoch face over 60% disapproval ratings, compared to Farage’s 53%. The rise in support for Reform is most clearly be seen in disillusioned ex-Tory voters: of Legatum’s 3,400 respondents that would vote Reform U.K. in the 2029 general election, 67% had voted Conservative in the 2019 election and 86% had voted ‘Leave’ in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Reform U.K. made significant ground in local elections, it took control of 10 councils (close in concept to the American definition of county) in the 2025 local elections, while the Conservatives lost 16 in that same election. It won 677 seats, 41% of the 1,637 seats up for grabs, but in 2024 it only won two seats of the 2,636 available in local elections. The jump in right-wing victories has also been reflected in the U.S. In 2010, Democrats held 4,031 state legislative seats across the country, while Republicans had 3,246. These figures seem to have flipped; as of Aug. 29, according to the NCSL, Republicans hold 4,063 out of the 7,386 state legislature positions.
The drastic increase in votes for a relatively young party like Reform U.K. (though it has had many iterations under Farage in the last 20 years) forces us to question how the public can trust a party that lacks any previous example or experience of success in governing a country. Last month, the Reform leader in Kent was found to have sworn at councilors of her own party and told them to “suck it up” if they did not agree with her. According to Robert Ford, a political science professor at Manchester University who spoke to The Guardian, the only organization model that Farage can successfully run is one where he has autocratic control: “The Brexit party and Reform were explicitly set up [so that] if anyone disagrees with Nigel, Nigel wins.” This sounds uncomfortably similar to Donald Trump’s penchant for firing and prosecuting all who disagree with or move against him such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and Eastern District of Virginia Attorney Erik S. Siebert.
In March 2024, then-leader of Reform U.K. Richard Tice called the label of far-right for his party “defamatory and libellous” despite them proposing the toughest policies of all major U.K. parties on immigrants and asylum seekers on top of plans to bar non-British citizens from accessing welfare, going so far as to outline plans for an “immigration tax.” This is unsurprising as immigration is a flash point issue for Reform voters. According to British Future statistics, 27% of the general public had immigration as a top three issue in deciding the 2024 vote, whereas this figure was 72% for reform voters. In a Legatum poll, over 80% agreed with the statement that immigration has made life in Britain worse, and 35% put stopping the boats/illegal immigration as the number one issue that would determine how they would vote in the next general election. This is similar to Trump’s supporters, 82% of whom saw immigration as a “very important” issue in 2024 according to Pew Research Center.
In the U.K., immigrants overwhelmingly live in the capital and the South East, with London being home to one third of the foreign-born population of the country. However, out of 371 U.K. councils, 12 are controlled by Reform U.K. and only one of these is in the South of the country. This indicates that those that vote for Reform are not actually in close proximity to proportionally large numbers of immigrants. This pattern can be seen also in the U.S. Seven of the top 10 states by immigrant population voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. California, a state that has voted blue in every election since 1992, has nearly double the immigrant population of the second most immigrant-populous state, Texas.
In California, immigrants contribute $49.5B dollars to social security, and the undocumented immigrant population contributes $21B dollars in taxes. Blue states, and California in particular, are favored by immigrants likely because of pro-immigrant policies like its 2024 law that made it the first state to offer health insurance to eligible undocumented immigrants. The state also allows for certain undocumented immigrants to get state-based financial aid and institutional scholarships at Californian colleges and universities. While some may argue that this is an unfair usage of state resources, residents of the Golden State still voted against Donald Trump and his deportation policies. Out of the bottom 10 states for immigration population, seven voted for Trump in 2024.
Clearly, the far-right parties in both countries use their populations’ worries about immigration to their advantage and base their messages on a rejection of migration. They have both used the failings of the “left” to entice those that would want to see change in their local areas and they both draw in those with strong, right leaning ideologies. As well as the issues surrounding immigration, both parties and far-right movements converge on other policies such as their attitudes to economics, which I will explore in a future article.
