Nationalism, Populism, and COVID-19 in the United Kingdom

Claire Fredriksson

How has nationalist populism affected the covid pandemic response in ONE of the following countries (Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Hungary, USA, UK)? [underlining my own choice]

In December 2019, two seemingly unrelated events with far-reaching consequences for the United Kingdom happened in close succession. First and most obviously, the general election was a landslide success for the Conservative Party and its Prime Minister, Boris Johnson; the party gained 48 seats to increase its significant majority and won its highest share of votes since 1979.^[1] After the celebratory period was over, and the new year of 2020 had begun, Johnson tweeted “[t]his is going to be a fantastic year for Britain” with an accompanying photo of himself giving two thumbs up.^[2]

On the other side of the world, in the Chinese city of Wuhan, a Welsh student named Connor Reed had become the first Briton to catch COVID-19.^[3] The illness was first publicly declared on December 31st, 2019, and quickly spread throughout the world, first being confirmed in the UK on January 31st, 2020.^[4] Almost three years later, the UK has had over 23 million positive cases, and at the worst stages of the pandemic (in April 2020 and January/February 2021) was having over a thousand deaths per day.^[5]

While some sources, including a paper published in The Lancet in March 2022, have suggested that the UK’s response was not as poor as it could have been and was occasionally suggested to be,^[6] few would doubt that the impact of COVID-19 on the UK was made worse than it was thanks to failings of the government. The movement of Eurosceptic, nationalist populism that had resulted in the 2016 Brexit vote, delivered the Conservatives to power, and enhanced the political profile of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party was able to shift seamlessly into racist and inadequate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, blaming much of the pandemic on Chinese and Muslim communities within Britain. There are many angles to analyse this issue from, but perhaps the most narratively compelling way to read the project is in relation to the career of Farage.

Born in 1964 to a stockbroker father, Farage was identifiable as both a conservative and a provocateur within his teens, having joined the Conservative Party at age fourteen^[7] and made political statements so inflammatory that a high school teacher described him as “a fascist”.^[8]  The consistently Eurosceptic Farage left the Conservatives in 1992 after John Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, shifting his allegiance to the newly formed UK Independence Party.

Founded in 1993 by historian Alen Sked, UKIP were initially a single-issue minor party entirely based around leaving the European Union. The choice of “independence” in the name was a very strong and deliberate populist choice, preying on the fear held by many that the EU was seeking to overrule and erase British national sovereignty, absorbing the UK into a different nation. Farage was a highly influential figure within the UKIP for decades, pushing Sked to resign in 1997 after an influx of voters from the better-funded Referendum Party backed him more,^[9]  and eventually being elected party leader himself in 2006.

Seeing an opportunity to contrast against new Conservative leader David Cameron and his more socially liberal politics, Farage sought to increase the party’s public profile through populist politics. He expanded the UKIP’s policies to include denial of climate change, support of tax cuts, and more explicit bans on migration; this came as he attempted to change his public image to show himself as a “middle-class boy from Kent”,^[10] attempting to use more common language and regularly conducting interviews and photoshoots in pubs.^[11] BBC writer Mark D’Arcy would comment, ahead of the 2019 election, that Farage’s “language, style and character were shaped to appeal to working-class blokes and middle-class Eurosceptics”,^[12] and that tactic worked, as the UKIP won a stunning thirteen seats at the 2009 European election – leaving them with more representation than Labour.^[13]

Though Farage resigned as leader shortly after that election, he would later return just a year later, and the UKIP’s political stock continued to rise. Excellent results in the 2014 European election meant that it was the first time in a century that a party other than the Conservatives or Labour had received the most votes in a national poll,^[14] and the party would gain two members in the House of Commons thanks to defectors from the Conservatives. Perhaps seeking to quell the outflow, Cameron drew up a deal with Farage that resulted in the UKIP’s biggest coup yet – the government promised a referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU,^[15] which took place in June 2016 and resulted in a 52% majority for the Leave vote.

Having achieved the first step of their goal, the UKIP immediately started declining. Farage resigned as leader a second time, and 2017 saw the party fail to defend a single seat in local elections and receive less than 2% of the vote in the general one. An ideological split developed, with new leader Gerard Batten moving explicitly towards the far-right – hiring open white nationalist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (commonly known as Tommy Robinson, partially to hide his criminal activity and partially for a more populist, ‘down-to-earth’ appeal) as an adviser, and proposing Muslim-only prisons in the party manifesto. Farage resigned as a member, arguing that Batten’s actions were “damaging the Brexit cause”,^[16] and bought several members across to his newly formed Brexit Party.

Once Brexit was officially finalised in January 2021, Farage renamed his party to Reform UK and immediately pivoted into a new form of politics - anti-lockdown campaigning, something which had replaced COVID-19 as the populist hobby horse de rigueur. The change had been signposted in November 2020, with Farage and his successor as leader Richard Tice announcing their plan to “learn to live with [COVID-19], not hide in fear”^[17] and their support of the near-universally-dismissed^[18] Great Barrington Declaration that proposed an end to all future lockdowns. While it remains to be seen if Farage’s shift to anti-lockdown sentiment can keep him as a prominent and powerful politician, the seamless transition he and his party made from one political view to the other suggests that the populist beliefs stoked by the Conservative government have led to a sense of disillusionment with (and fighting against) any restrictions.

Of course, the anti-international politics that Farage was best known for had didn’t go away, and he used the COVID-19 pandemic as inspiration to move on to his next target – China. Varying tweets in winter 2020/21, one blaming them for the “cancellation of Christmas” experienced under lockdown restrictions^[19] and another describing China as “the next big battle to fight”,^[20] reflect a worldview that the pandemic is uniquely China’s responsibility and is another motivation to fight against them politically. The attitude of the Conservative Party is more multifaceted - Johnson declared himself a “fervent Sinophile” in 2021, but he was often criticised for trying to balance between having strong economic partnerships with China and standing against human rights abuses in the country, in particular the Xinjiang region and the dealings with Uyghur Muslims. The two leading candidates to succeed Johnson as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, both sought to prove themselves as being tougher on China than Johnson and each other.^[21]

While the poor treatment of the Uyghurs is targeted and authoritarian, it’s perhaps hypocritical for the United Kingdom to not note the near-instantaneous and targeted increase in anti-Asian racism in the early months of 2020. The Guardian reported on several incidents as early as February 9th,^[22] and Sky News reported that the rate of hate crimes against Chinese British people was almost triple that of the comparable period in previous years.^[23] While to some extent a fear of association with illness is justifiable, there was a nasty racist streak to much of the media coverage of COVID-19, playing on pre-existing and politically motivated anti-Chinese sentiment. US president Donald Trump – himself ideologically close to Johnson and Farage – repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus”,^[24] encouraging a strong connection with the origins of the virus despite WHO advice against it; while scientifically questionable research^[25] alleging the virus was man-made quickly spread throughout right-wing, anti-China circles thanks to funding from Trump strategist Steve Bannon and billionaire Guo Wengui.^[26]

The Chinese diaspora wasn’t the only minority group to receive racism during the pandemic in the UK, with Birmingham City University criminologist Imran Awan writing in April 2020 about a rise in Islamophobia.^[27] A variety of misleading videos, spreading through Twitter and Telegram (the latter in the ‘news’ channel of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson), falsely claimed that Muslim communities were breaking lockdown restrictions to attend mosques and inadvertently spread the coronavirus, undermining stay-at-home orders. It can be argued that the Chinese population within Britain is generally accepted as contributing and ‘belonging’ to the community, but such sentiment is nowhere near as strong with regards to British Muslims, and indeed the frequent attacks on them have been a major result of the rise of populism in the UK.

Much of the Islamophobia stems from misplaced fear of the European Union, with unfounded claims that it’s responsible for an influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa arriving in Europe, and later Britain. The 2015 migrant crisis, where wars in the Middle East caused an unprecedented level of asylum seekers to travel towards Europe, was responsible for an upswell of anti-migrant thought, in particular an increase in support for the white nationalist Great Replacement theory.^[28] The discredited concept, published in the early 2010s by French author Renaud Camus but building upon works from as early as the 19th century, argues that ‘elites’^[29] are seeking to replace the white population of France (and more generally Europe) with non-whites, primarily Muslims. While Camus’ theory is completely false,^[30] there is a significant portion of the UK population that has some belief in it, with a Cambridge University study finding that 31% of those who voted to leave the EU believed in the theory.^[31] Even without willing to go all the way into racist conspiracy, the migrant crisis prompted a significant national populist push in the UK; anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate found over twenty groups that were aiming for a “cultural civil war”,^[32] and an election day poll found that one-third of Leave voters had expressly cited immigration concerns as a reason for their vote.^[33] The UKIP, for its part, had actively stoked these fires, receiving criticism during the Brexit campaign for using images of migrants in Leave.EU advertisements.^[34]

While migration had little to do with the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, the nationalist fear of ‘others’ that was pushed by populist parties had a variety of impacts – many believed that implementing hard border controls would have been enough to stop the spread, and then either demonised non-white communities through racist slander or accused them of working against lockdown measures. The reality is that COVID deserved a unified and quick response, and the unwillingness of populist leaders to use the measures of ‘the elite’ to control the spread meant that the responses were doomed to inadequacy. Hopefully, when another global pandemic spreads at some point in the next few decades, the lessons learned through the failures and racism of populist governments can contribute to a more successful recovery.