At the recent Reform Party conference, Nigel Farage stated, amid the fireworks and trumpets, that his mission was to ‘Make Britain Great Again’, a direct copy of Donald Trump’s mission to ‘Make America Great Again’.
The phrase is meaningless until it is unpacked. What does the word ‘Great’ mean, and how will it be achieved?
We now know what it means in America because we have observed it all happening over the last nine months.
The Federal government of the USA, with the full collusion of the Republican party, media allies, and many industry, tech and media owners and executives, has been turned over by President Trump, from one where the government mostly worked for and with the people, as it is elected to do, into one where it works for the benefit of the president himself and his family, and those people and institutions supporting him either through their loyalty, vocal praise, votes or donations.
The ‘MAGA’ experience
Trump’s ‘American Greatness’ is being achieved by:
- breaking the rule of law, avoiding or ignoring inconvenient legal judgments, and by disparaging and threatening judges and court officials;
- ignoring the US Constitution, and Separation of Powers between the executive, judiciary and Congress;
- declaring non-existent emergencies to (falsely) justify the use of extraordinary, unconstitutional presidential powers;
- ignoring, overruling, distorting or threatening Congress, and undermining its authority;
- ordering the Justice Department to follow Trump’s direction;
- rendering the Supreme Court compliant to Trump’s demands;
- defunding or otherwise dismantling environmental, health, financial, social, and legal protective institutions and agencies, including restricting abortion access, and the budget for USAID;
- calling the climate emergency a hoax, and halting or dismantling all green energy projects and mandates;
- ramping up fracking and fossil fuel investments and logging opportunities, including in national parks and wilderness areas;
- imposing huge, arbitrary, third-country import tariffs to generate income for the US Treasury, and to bully smaller nations into granting trade, investment and political advantages to the USA;
- withdrawing from, or otherwise disrespecting, international treaties and agreements such as the Paris climate accord;
- threatening Panama, Canada and Greenland with annexation;
- throwing the US commitment to NATO into doubt, ending direct US support for Ukraine, and allowing Putin endless procrastination with meaningless ceasefire negotiations;
- supporting and approving the Israeli military campaign of genocide in Gaza.
- misusing the presidential power of pardon to release convicted criminals who have supported Trump personally;
- rewriting history (historical revisionism) to remove the idea that slavery was bad, and elevating Confederate soldiers to hero status;
- illegally misusing the power of the military to threaten the population, state, and city governments in Democrat-run cities – Los Angeles, Washington DC and Chicago;
- illegally misusing the powers and enormously extending the resources of the Immigration and Customs, Enforcement (ICE) Agency, to threaten, round up, detain and deport, without legal redress, hundreds of thousands of people, including children, off the streets and from their homes for alleged breaches of US entry or residence rules, support for Palestine, or social media comments;
- undermining, distorting and corrupting the election process through gerrymandering and voter suppression;
- Bullying national institutions such as universities, media companies, law firms, courts with threats over funding, closure, lawsuits etc.
- Distorting government funding processes to enable the above programmes to be funded, tax cuts for the wealthy to be extended, and financial support for public health to be withdrawn.
This list of unconstitutional and malevolent activities represents only some of the ethical, financial and social onslaughts causing widespread death, illness, financial hardship and loss of liberty which the Trump administration is inflicting in the name of Making America Great Again.
Project 2025 – the blueprint
This was all driven by Project 2025 and its authors – a political initiative which in 2023 published a 900-page document called ‘Mandate for Leadership’. This was written by 140 staffers from the previous Trump administration, and from the Heritage Foundation, a very wealthy, long-standing, and prominent Christian nationalist think tank. This blueprint for government aimed to reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power at the expense of Congress and the judiciary, all to favour their extreme right-wing policies. All Trump’s Cabinet appointees, and enforcers of the above agenda, are drawn from the ranks of Trump loyalists, including those from Project 2025, Fox News, and lawyers who have worked previously for him.
Ideological foundations
MAGA is driven by strong ideologies around white nationalism, right-wing (so-called) Judeo-Christianity, the sanctity of male-female marriage, opposition to female emancipation, opposition to abortion, opposition to gay rights, support for the rights of the individual over obligations to community or society, and in some cases and to some extent, are avowedly racist, nativist, sexist and Fascistic.
It is the complete opposite of Abraham Lincoln’s ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, and the complete opposite of values of tolerance, liberalism, democracy, and equality of opportunity.
Warning from America
Thom Hartmann puts his outrage at the state of MAGA America very forcefully:
“The GOP is nakedly embracing white supremacy and the Confederate neofascist ethos. … They want to redefine America itself, not as a democracy where all people are ‘created equal’, but as a fortress where some people’s bloodlines, wealth, and religions entitle them to power, while others are cast aside or erased from memory. … The Trump administration has already shown us the template they’re using to deconstruct a democratic America and replace it with a whites-only neofascist ethnostate.
This is a struggle for the soul of America. Our choice is between the pluralistic democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to protect, or an authoritarian nationalism that dehumanises millions and threatens to dismantle our most cherished institutions”.
MAGA is anathema to democracy, to a liberal and democratic society, and to modern ethical values. It has created death, division, cruelty, chaos, hate, mayhem and social breakdown in America and around the world.
That is MAGA’s vision of American Greatness.
But this, it seems, is what Nigel Farage and his Reform Party want to bring to Britain to ‘Make Britain Great Again’.
The Farage vision for Britain
Nigel Farage makes no secret of his admiration for MAGA, for Donald Trump personally as President of the USA, and for many in the cabinet and among his supporters, such as JD Vance and Steve Bannon. He attends and speaks at their Conservative conferences, has campaigned regularly for Trump, and attended his January 2025 inauguration. He has business interests in the USA and visits regularly.
He brings all the MAGA ideals, values and policies over to Britain, including rounding up and deporting asylum seekers and the undocumented, cancelling all efforts to achieve net zero, supporting fracking and North Sea oil and gas drilling, installing DOGE units everywhere to ‘root out waste, inefficiency and fraud’ (a fig leaf for arbitrarily cutting public services), adopting zero tolerance towards LGBTQ people, abolishing all DEI diversity initiatives, massively reducing the size of the state’s activities and the public services including the NHS it provides, and much more. All straight from the MAGA playbook.
Open Britain calls the Reform spectacle farcical:
“Don’t be fooled. Behind the carnival façade is a dangerous movement feeding on fear and division ….. we need to call this circus what it is – a dangerous con, powered by fear and false promises.”
Rachel Reeves referred to the Reform Party National Conference as ‘The Clown Show’:
“The Reform Party (in Government) would lose control of spending and force up inflation and people’s mortgages……
The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said the sums “do not add up” and “would almost certainly require substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services”.
Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, puts his opposition to Farage very strongly, saying it is time for Mr Farage to ‘come clean’ about whose side he is on:
“You’re not representing working people, you’re selling them out. There is a world of difference between what Nigel says and what Nigel does.
“Every single Reform MP, including Mr Farage, voted against a ban on fire and rehire, against banning zero hours contracts and against day one rights for millions of workers.
…..do you believe that Nigel Farage really cares about the people of Clacton, when he is off collecting his speaker fees in the United States?”
Conclusion: the stakes for Britain
Nigel Farage, his Reform Party, and his MBGA mission, want to upend the UK’s democratic tolerant society, with extremist, entirely divisive and impractical policies that would represent a very permanent threat to the Britain we know. The events in the USA, after just eight months of the Trump administration, fuelled as they are by the extremist, anti-democratic instincts and violent divisiveness of the MAGA movement, threaten the lives, health, well-being and security of all Americans.
If Nigel Farage and his Reform Party were to capture the British Government, something very similar to the USA would happen here. This is now a battle for the soul of Britain.
Comments? We want to hear them. Please write to editor@westenglandbylines.co.uk
See also Michelle Cook’s report on Reform antics in Worcestershire.
