Reform UK must reject racism as it pursues Donald Trump's playbook
If Nigel Farage’s Reform party comes to power, they will usher in Trump-like attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion policies designed to combat racism
Not counting the four million who perished on the journey, race-based slavery saw nearly 12 million people forcibly taken to the Americas from Africa over the centuries.
While the UK was not a slave-owning country, it excelled at slave trading, with our financial, maritime and trading expertise – in cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Bristol – being key to a massive trafficking operation that generated wealth on the backs of enslaved people so that Europeans could enjoy sugar, cotton, spices and tobacco.
It was a partnership of inhumanity on a global scale which probably gave birth to the idea of “whiteness”, which remains key to any assessment of racism in both the UK and US to this day. It is certainly never far from debates about immigration.
American history and the direction in which Donald Trump is leading the country provide clues about where the UK could be heading under the Reform UK party. Its leader, Nigel Farage, mimics Trump’s opposition to anti-discrimination policies, his rants about migrants and his embrace of ethnic nationalism.
Ethnic ‘purity’
Racism has long divided and devalued America. From the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620, there has always been a sense of exceptionalism shaping its history and politics, and it has often been accompanied by a pervading sense of whiteness, ethnic ‘purity’ and only a grudging acceptance of difference.
Many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners, with African Americans, Native Americans and women excluded from the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln may have issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to free slaves in Confederate States, but the subsequent Jim Crow era in the South saw a protracted period of lynchings, brutality and hate-filled assaults on African Americans.
There were many attempts during the 1960s and 1970s to finally address the widespread discrimination that remained after slavery. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson’s famous “I have a dream” and “I am somebody” speeches were battle cries against the inhumanity of racism. President Lyndon B Johnson, at great political cost, passed ground-breaking legislation on human and civil rights.
But racism is once again raising its head, underpinning Trump’s mass deportation of immigrants. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from another revolutionary country, France, became a hugely symbolic beacon of welcome. Today, she must be covering her eyes in embarrassment.
Sinister attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion
Despite heroic attempts over the centuries to remove or weaken the grip of racism in America, Trump seems determined to continue his campaign of mass deportation, while doubling down on the curtailment of political and civil rights, and intensifying voter suppression.
There is a particularly sinister programme now at work, with the removal of policies designed to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI, and the withdrawal of federal funds from some initiatives. Attempts have even been made to rewrite history by removing references to “how bad slavery was” in museums, including the great Smithsonian Institution, libraries and schools.
In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote that “the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history” and that “power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing”.
It seems that Trump hopes to convince ‘white America’ that they must be protected against population trends which suggest they will be a minority by 2045.
‘The most racist thing’
Unacceptable thoughts are never far from the President’s mind. A recent post on his Truth Social account showed Barack and Michelle Obama portrayed as apes. It was off-the-Richter-scale racial abuse with Republican Senator Tim Scott saying: “This is the most racist thing I’ve ever seen out of this White House.”
Trump, who refused to apologise, claimed the post had been made by a member of staff and that he had only seen the start of the video before the depiction of the Obamas appeared. However, it was an incident that evoked memories of Trump’s promotion of the ‘Birther’ conspiracy theory about Barack Obama.
Racism targets people because of their skin colour, ethnicity or nationality, leading to marginalisation, bullying or worse and mainly affecting those of Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds – all based on the mistaken belief that one’s own race is somehow superior.
Immigration debate in UK
The UK is no stranger to such ideas, sometimes subtle but increasingly out in the open as immigration takes centre stage and one party in particular seeks to make political capital out of the issue.
Reform UK, like the Ukip and Brexit parties before it, is using immigration, race and minorities to stoke fear. As with Trump, Farage is committed to dismantling equality measures, telling the BBC: “If you are a DEI officer, I suggest you look for another job.” He has also struggled to explain away allegations of racist behaviour when he was a pupil at Dulwich College.
After Sarah Pochin, the Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby, said “it drives me mad seeing adverts full of black and Asian people”, she apologised but only “for any offence caused” and stood by her claim that the advertising agency world had “gone DEI mad”.
In a campaign video about school children in Glasgow, Farage complained about pupils speaking “English as a second language” and claimed this represented the “cultural smashing of Glasgow”. John Swinney said the remark showed Farage was “a purveyor of racist views" while Keir Starmer said the Reform leader was a "toxic, divisive disgrace”. Reform also now talk about restoring “Britain’s Christian heritage”.
The reshaping of Britain in the image of Trump’s America is Reform’s main strategy. We only have to look at the USA’s long, tragic history of racism and racial strife and what is happening there today to realise what a disaster that would be.
Henry McLeish is a former First Minister of Scotland and a visiting professor at the University of South Florida
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