--- title: The British Right is Fracturing description: "Fronts video analysis of The British Right is Fracturing, with context on conflict, defense, and security." url: https://fronts.co/videos/the-british-right-is-fracturing.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/the-british-right-is-fracturing/ datePublished: 2026-08-21T19:40:09.000Z dateModified: 2026-08-21T19:40:09.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/the-british-right-is-fracturing-15f4b922.png" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4699 --- Prime Minister Nigel Farage. That got your attention, didn't it? Especially if you're British. For a sure while, it even looked like that might be going to happen. Through 2025 and early into 2026, Farage and his Reform UK party seemed on course for number 10. But over the last few months, that has started to change, hasn't it? Part of it does indeed come down to Farage having just spent all summer campaigning against a man with a bin on his head. But even with Count Binface now vanquished, at least until next election, it's become increasingly clear that Reform's troubles are indeed mounting, not least because its right-wing rivals are doing better than predicted. To Farage's right, Restore Britain, which seems as though he'd become something of an actual party, is eating into Reform's potential vote share. And to his centre, he has to contend with a Conservative party which, despite having appeared to be as dead as a Norwegian parrot, seems now in the process of rising up from its parrot-y grave. And while the British left is also engaged in a mini-civil war, the problem is more acute on the right. Unless the UK's right-wing voters can unite around a single party soon, the current fractures may soon doom them all. on the Right Now, for the better part of the last two years, Nigel Farage's Reform UK has been the most popular right-wing party in Britain, and for much of 2026, the most popular party in the country, period. None of that, though, is exactly breaking news. What is news is that those days might have come to an end. Labour briefly overtook them in the polls, and the two are now sitting roughly neck and neck with Andy Burnham's arrival as new Prime Minister and Labour leader, giving his party at least a temporary boost. Burnham's arrival only accounts for so much, though. Reform was, after all, polling as high as 31% back in January, and given their current standing of around 24%, something has clearly shifted, and we're willing to bet those reform defectors haven't all been won over by Burnham's love of pies and pints. Most of it has instead been the result of a small breakaway party called Restore Britain that positions itself to the right of reform. And can we all just take a moment here to appreciate the irony of the perennial right-wing outsider now having to defend against his own challenge from the right? The man responsible for all of that is Rupert Lowe, who actually entered Parliament as one of the Reform's MPs back in the 2024 general election. That didn't last very long, though. As is often the case with Farage and strong personalities, the two a massive falling out. Coming on top of Lowe's separate feud with Zia Youssef, who serves as Reform UK's spokesman for Home Affairs and briefly quit the party himself, it soon became clear that the relationship was unsalvageable. Farage ultimately suspended Lowe last summer, who then broke off to form Restore. But while Restore is registered as a regular party, figuring how popular it actually is has been rather difficult because it's overwhelmingly an online phenomenon. Lowe only registered it with the Electoral Commission this past March, and some 21 councillors who were members have joined by defect. from other parties, not by actual elections. also far more popular in America than it appears to be in Britain. While Lowe has been embraced by Elon Musk and has appeared on Rogan, there's no similar groundswell among the British right-wing elite. that might be because Restore's positions are, from a British perspective, f***ing nuts. general rule, take whatever Reform UK's positions are on any given matter, double down on them, and then double down again, and then throw a jaw-dropping comment about the king not being white British, and you've probably arrived at Restore. instance, where Reform promises to stop the small boat situation, Restore promises to suspend the asylum system entirely, scrap indefinite leave to remain, and deport millions of people currently living in Britain. bit, we're not talking about deporting illegal migrants either. He's talking about deporting people who are in the country legally, and who he just wishes were not. The problem for Farage is that he's spent much of 2025 doing what Le Pen has done over in France, moving reform closer to the mainstream to win over wavering center-right voters. say what you like about Farage, but the man has always held firm against allowing people like far-right agitator Tommy Robinson into any of his parties. But Le Pen has undertaken her campaign, at a moment when the French center-right is weak, and there's no serious challenger to the far-right to chomp into her vote share. Farage, though, is now facing a double nightmare. is appealing to parts of his base, forcing Reform to lurch right to stop them jumping ship. But at the same time, the British center-right is rising from the grave to keep him from dragging the new, reform-curious mainstream voters along with him. right, it's time to talk about the party everyone thought was dead and buried, party that may now be proving, once again, the truism about it being one of the most successful political parties in history. We're talking, of course, about the Conservatives. the Dead Back in late June, there were several by-elections across the UK, including in Makerfield, which is where Andy Burnham swept to victory with a double-digit lead over his opponents to both the right and the left. that it wasn't really a secret that he was running on the hopes of taking Keir Starmer's job, this was the by-election that dominated headlines, and deservedly so. But when you dug deeper into the results that night, there was another story that barely got covered, and a really curious one of that. In the Scottish seat of Aberdeen South, an old face came out ahead, the Tories. party ultimately clinched 49.5% of the vote, nearly double their 2024 showing of 24.4%. This was the first Conservative gain from a seat held by the Scottish National Party in a by-election since 1967. lot of the race dealt with issues that naturally played to the Tories. city of Scotland's largest concentration of energy sector employment, and the SNP's former power-sharing deal with the Greens in the Scottish Parliament went over about as well in Aberdeen as Jill Stein. in Texas. So this additional blue seat in the Commons is not necessarily representative of some Tory resurgence across the wider United Kingdom. But it has arrived after their leader, Kemi Badenoch, has been climbing slowly but surely. When she first took over as Conservative leader after the disastrous 2024 general election, she had somewhere around a 12% favorability rating. And even by modern British standards, where unpopularity is almost a requirement for politicians across the spectrum, that was spectacularly poor. For context, just before resigning, Keir Starmer was at least treading water in the low 20s. Badenoch began to climb, albeit at an absolutely glacial pace, this time last year. She had surged into the 20s. But that trend has kept up and accelerated at least a little bit. of this year, she had broken into the 30s, which actually made her the most popular party leader in the UK at the time. Andy Burnham, since taking over as Labour Party leader and then Prime Minister has taken that spot. But Badenoch's surge, combined with the strong showing in Scotland, has resurrected a question that has been sidelined for the last few years. Could the Tories actually make a comeback? Now, to be clear, the party is still historically unpopular, polling in the low 20s. But remember, the UK electoral system is really weird. Each of the 650 seats is contested separately, and in each one, the winner is whoever gets the most votes. That holds even if five parties contest the seat and all get 20%, but just one happens to get 20% plus one extra vote. So if you have two right-wing parties polling close to one another, as the Tories and Reform do, then it only takes the smallest shift in voter behavior to turn a Reform majority into either a hung parliament or even a gigantic Labour majority. One that's created by the right-wing vote splitting so badly that Labour can romp home through the middle. Of course, Kemi Badenoch's plan isn't to deny Reform a victory, it's to secure one for the Tories. And in this regard, she has a long road ahead of her. Farage might have made a fool of himself campaigning against Count Binface, but he did ultimately win the by-election, and he remains leader of the party tied for first place in the polls. For Badenoch, this is particularly dangerous, given that this isn't just some random other party. Reform UK was essentially launched originally under the banner of the Brexit party as the anti-Tory group the right. The idea that Farage has been championing in for two decades is that the Tories are about as trustworthy as a shady used car salesman. They say all the right things when they need you, and then they betray you in office. For example, they might champion a hard Brexit to cut down on EU migration to Britain, only to allow in a million non-European immigrants the moment Brexit has taken effect. The idea of the Tories going soft in office always played well with the right in person, but never caught on in big enough numbers to matter come election time. Farage's first party, the UK Independence Party, was only ever able to win two constituencies. Its influence came more as a threat to the Conservatives and ultimately played a role in David Cameron's decision to hold the very well-planned and extremely well-thought-out 2016 Brexit referendum. Farage's successor parties had slightly better showings, they did so usually as a protest vote. the 2019 European elections, which are never taken as seriously as general elections, and especially so that time around as the UK wouldn't be in the EU much longer, Farage's Brexit party placed first, with the Conservatives coming in a disastrous fifth. the December general election that year, under the new leadership of Boris Johnson running on an explicit mantra to finally get Brexit done, Farage's party failed to win even a single constituency. Johnson managed that in no small part by appealing to disaffected Labour voters, along with rallying a more socially conservative Tory base, largely on the grounds of migration, basically betting it would more than offset whatever centrist voters he'd lose to the Lib Dems. it paid off in droves. He took a huge majority in the 2019 race, handing Labour the worst showing in decades, while slapping Farage's party down. What followed, though, was a circus that pissed off the entire political spectrum. Boris did indeed end free movement from the EU, but simultaneously opened the door to non-EU migration on a scale that nobody had voted for. Rishi Sunak took that approach and hit the pedal to the metal. Net migration ultimately soared to 944,000 in the year ending March 2023, the million immigrants we mentioned a moment ago. Just for some comparison, that number was a mere 226,000, the year Johnson rode his party to victory. And at the time, 226,000 was controversially high. Not only was it migration where the Tories went beyond merely s***ing the pooch but knocked it up, ran away with its younger sister, and then resolutely refused to pay child support. 28 saw the government impose strict lockdown laws on the population while conservative staffers got drunk and partied together in number 10, and the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss both blew up the bond market and answered the longstanding question of whether anyone would ever beat George Canning's 1827 record of Britain's shortest-serving PM. By the time Sunak had led his party into battle in 2024, the game was up. Far too many on the right simply had no faith that the Tories could deliver on reducing migration, no longer trusted them on the economy, and were willing to defect in a general election. That is the deep pit that the Tories' new leader has been climbing out of ever since. Whether or not Kemi will be able to pull it off remains an open question, but she's not the only one dealing with a messy fracturing of Britain's new multi-party system. Even though Labour have fallen head over heels for their new prime minister, there's still threats to them from their left as well. The Honeymoon For more than a year now, conversations about parties splintering apart have focused heavily on the Labour Party, which has increasingly been under pressure from the Greens across the UK, along with various regional parties like the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales. And pressure is honestly putting it mildly. Analysis from Paul Whiteley back in June found that only 60% of the people who voted Labour in 2024, were still with the party which is made even worse when you remember that their enormous parliamentary majority was largely because of the right splitting their own vote, not any swing overall towards Labour. forget, Starmer won a landslide with fewer votes than Labour netted under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. All of that played a role in the defenestration of Starmer last month, and the question ever since has been whether his successor will actually be able to smooth over the issues on the left, or if the problems run deeper than just the man leading the party. While we don't want to get too far ahead of our skis, given that Burnham has so far been in office for barely over half a Liz truss, has been long enough to see that he's had a substantially different approach to the issues facing the UK. Front and centre to that is the affordability crisis that's toppled incumbents across the world, with Britain being no exception. Here, Burnham has hit the ground running. On his second day in Downing Street, he announced that the 5% VAT on electricity would be scrapped on October 1st. The cost of that is now set to be funded by ending the digital ID scheme that his predecessor spent a year building, which proved to be enormously unpopular. And having come from Greater Manchester, where he capped bus fares at £2, or not very much money in dollars, he's now rolled that out to the entirety of England, well, outside of London anyway. Sorry, London. Those are solid starters to signal that there's a new man in charge, and likely part of the reason his approval rating hasn't begun to crater like Starmer's had by this time in his premiership. But realistically, he's going to have to do a lot more than just capped bus fares if he wants to avoid the same fate as Sir Keir, and that's where reality does start to come crashing back down. Right now, has and costs across England are at crisis levels. The ONS points out that the median home in England is at somewhere around £300,000, or 7.6 times what the median full-time worker earns in year, with London sitting at 10.6 times. Part of that has been an issue with simply not building enough of the things. The country has been running a deficit on construction for decades at this point. Burnham has committed to the largest council house-building program since the Second World War, which is a slightly modified version of a program that came out under his predecessor, but ultimately didn't get off the ground. Burnham has certainly been more active in discussing it, which counts for something in the court of public opinion, but the situation is pretty bleak. The Center for Policy Studies crunched the numbers back in July and found that spending the proposed £3.9 billion a year and assuming the land they're building on will be free, you're looking at 15,000 homes annually. It's not nothing, and it is admittedly more than the one affordable house that Count Binface was promising, but it's also not exactly going to turn the tide among young and not-so-young voters who were wondering if they'll ever be able to buy their own home. And that's where things begin to look a bit dicey for Burnham. The green surge under Starmer was made up almost entirely of Labour members who had basically decided that the government wasn't governing like Labour should at all. Ironically, Starmer and Sunak seemed to have orchestrated the same sort of approach, where they give speeches talking to traditional basis of support, but ultimately governed as if auditioning for a role on the opposite party's front bench. was, by any measure, the most restrictionist Labour leader on immigration in modern times. time he resigned, he had net migration figures lower than either Johnson or Sunak could have ever dreamed of. him nothing on the right, of course, and actually cost him support on the left, which increasingly felt that they voted Labour and got a Tory. So when the Greens were actually polling ahead of Labour this year, some were wondering whether the Greens were about to do to Labour what reform had done to the Tories. far, at least, Burnham appears to have recovered those losses, as many of the defections from his party appear to be more out of frustration rather than a deep sense of betrayal. Greens have already fallen from their height of 18% in the polls earlier this year down to 12%, indicating that left-wing Brits are nowhere near as done with their flagship party as the right is But the fact that the Greens, the guys who long held a single parliamentary seat purely on the basis of Caroline Lucas' personal charisma, wherever polling near Labour, is just about the biggest warning sign that you can imagine. is in the honeymoon period right now. when the realities of Britain's creaking finances force him to make some hard decisions, sure that those pissed-off Labour voters might not abandon ship all over again? Realistically, nobody can actually predict where all of this is going to go from here. Britain is now effectively a multi-party system, consisting of five separate parties polling in the double digits nationally, plus regional parties that are capable of dominating locally in Wales and Scotland. country with an electoral system designed for two parties, that could throw up all sorts of insanity, such as a party winning a parliamentary landslide on less than 30% of the vote. even Count Binface got over a quarter of the vote in Clacton. And while we wouldn't be so bold as to predict a Binface premiership after the next election, satirical candidacy clearly touched a nerve in an era when British politics feels absurd. only thing for sure at this point is that the next general election seems unlikely to be won by whoever is the most popular, and instead by the faction, left or right, that has the least fractured coalition. Whether that will be the British right or the British left, that's something we'll all just have to wait for the future to find out.