Britain Is Not Theirs Yet: On Farage, Hyperstition, and the Road to DOGE

Farage celebrating Reform UK’s success at the May 2025 local elections.

The Myth-Making Machine: Hyperstition and Reform UK

Reform UK’s recent wins are about more than mere votes. They’re about narrative and myth. They’re about an idea catching fire.

The wannabe government-in-waiting is being driven on by hyperstition - the process by which fiction becomes reality through collective belief. A once fringe concept popularised by accelerationist thinker, Nick Land, hyperstition describes how belief in a political future can bring it into being. It doesn’t matter whether Reform UK can run a council, fix a pothole, or govern responsibly. What matters is that enough people now believe they could, and should, be the future.

That belief spreads. It feeds on despair, disillusionment, and distrust. It needs no evidence, just performance. Reform doesn’t need to be competent; it needs to feel inevitable. This is Trump’s playbook, imported wholesale. The sense that something broken is finally being broken open. That the saboteur is the saviour.

We wrote about this dangerous dynamic in a previous article ‘Part 5: Accelerating Toward Autocracy: Nick Land’s Vision and Its Implementation’ exploring the concept of hyperstition. Farage is now playing from the same script. With every council gained, with every outrageous announcement - like his call for a UK-style DOGE department to “streamline” governance (Coughlan, 2025) - he strengthens the illusion that Reform is not only rising but is unstoppable. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The danger lies not in what they have already done. The danger lies in what people now expect them to do. Hyperstition makes political fantasy contagious. And Reform UK, fuelled by its own fiction, is suddenly in a position to act.

DOGE and the Dismantling of Democracy

Nigel Farage’s latest proposal, a UK version of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE,) is dangerous. It is lifted straight from the Trump-Musk axis of chaos politics, and as we’ve seen in the US, efficiency is a euphemism. It means slash-and-burn. It means deregulate, defund, and dismantle. It means clearing the path for profit, no matter the social cost.

DOGE mark one.

Farage, like Trump, cloaks destruction in the language of revolution. But the revolution he’s selling is one for the already powerful. A DOGE department would be a wrecking ball aimed at the public sector: targeting environmental protections, workers’ rights, diversity commitments, and the basic social safety nets that keep ordinary people afloat.

The logic is familiar: strip away bureaucracy, unleash ‘freedom,’ and let the private sector do the rest. But who benefits when regulations disappear? It’s not the overstretched teacher, the NHS nurse, the pensioner, the renter facing eviction, or the parent navigating SEND services. It’s the landlord, the hedge fund, the offshore investor. The DOGE doctrine is about serving those who already own the game board.

Farage’s shameless importation of this idea reveals his true political inspiration: Trumpism, unfiltered and proud. He’s not trying to ‘fix Britain.’ He’s trying to break it, so that something crueller, leaner, and more profitable can rise from the rubble.

And the scariest part is that it is working. The press treats him like a media sensation, a disruptor; a man with a pint and a soundbite, but his ideas are taking root. They’re entering mainstream discourse not as fringe provocations, but as viable proposals. That is the work of hyperstition. The fiction becomes familiar. The familiar becomes fact. What begins as a stunt becomes strategy.

Reform’s Growing Power Is Not Just a Warning

For years, Reform UK were treated as a protest vote; an outlet for discontent, a ghost haunting the electoral margins. But no more. The ghost has put on boots and taken five councils.

Reform now actually controls some councils. That means they are responsible for real decisions: bin collections, social care, planning, education budgets. This is where ideology meets infrastructure, they will be put to the test and will need to demonstrate that they can run a council successfully. Let us be clear - we fully expect them to fail. Not because we want them to, as real people will get hurt by their callous lack of care. We think they will fail at this because their politics are not built for governance. Their ideology thrives on opposition, not administration.

Running a council is not a culture war. It’s road maintenance, safeguarding, and making sure children with disabilities get to school. It’s not done with slogans, it’s done with spreadsheets, and the moment slogans have to answer to reality, the gap will be laid bare.

There is part of us that welcomes this exposure. Because finally, they have to face the dull, relentless realities that make government work. And there’s no hiding from the fact that potholes and public services are not fixed by fury.

But we must also be honest: failure does not always lead to rejection. Especially not in this political moment. Thanks to the machinery of hyperstition, every misstep can be spun into martyrdom. The councils were ‘rigged.’ The civil servants ‘sabotaged them.’ The budget was ‘already broken.’ And the narrative machine will roll on. This is the Trump effect, again: failure doesn’t discredit you when your appeal is rooted in grievance. In fact, it can amplify you. ‘Look how they’re trying to stop us,’ they’ll say. ‘We must be doing something right.’

That’s why Reform UK’s local power must be treated not as a sideshow, but as a staging ground. This is where the next phase of their narrative will be tested, refined, and fed back into national discourse. It’s how the myth might tighten its grip.

Unions like UNISON are already preparing for the worst (Coughlan, 2025.) Encouraging public sector staff under Reform-controlled councils to unionise is forming the first line of resistance to a politics that sees the public good as expendable. The local now matters more than ever, because this is where the national fight will take shape. If they hollow out council structures and frame the backlash as ‘proof of the establishment’s fear,’ they will keep winning even while failing.

This is the danger of post-truth populism: it doesn’t need results. It just needs noise, enemies, and airtime.

The Risks of Labour Copying Reform UK

After Reform UK’s shock by-election win in Runcorn and Helsby, overturning a Labour majority of 14,000 by just six votes, Keir Starmer’s response wasn’t to dig deep, to reflect, or to speak to the disillusioned millions who voted for hope in 2017 and 2019. Instead, his instinct was to go “further and faster” (Sparrow, 2025.)

Further into what, exactly?

We’ve heard this language before; it isn’t courageous to allow Refom UK to set the agenda for the Labour Party. The moment Labour starts sounding like Reform UK, on immigration, on crime, on welfare, it doesn’t just lose its soul, it loses its viability. It feeds the idea that the right is right on these issues. That the only way to win is to concede the moral terrain entirely and scramble to build a more palatable version of cruelty.

Diane Abbott, long treated as a Cassandra figure in a party obsessed with discipline over vision, put it plainly: Labour is heading in completely the wrong direction (Huskisson, 2025.) When you copy the populists, you don’t convert their voters. You confuse your own. And worse, you legitimise the very narratives that threaten democracy itself. You help harden the idea that immigration is to blame, that wokeness is the problem, that ‘efficiency’ overrides equality.

This is the party that once promised a Green New Deal, the end of food banks, and a reversal of decades of neoliberal rot. But instead of defending those ideals, even in a different form, Labour now seems to believe that what Britain really wants is a watered-down Farageism, minus the pint and the smirk.

It’s a strategic miscalculation of epic proportions.

You don’t beat Reform UK by becoming them. You don’t out-Reform the reformers. You offer a real alternative, rooted in material improvement, in housing, in dignity, in hope. Not vague gestures to ‘working people,’ but actual policies that make their lives better. And if Labour won’t do it, then something else must. Because copying the right only serves to turbocharge its power.

We said in ‘Austerity Everlasting? Labour’s Cowardice Presides Over Britain’s Decay’ that Starmer’s Labour risks becoming an echo, not a resistance. That risk has now solidified. With every dog-whistle migration ad, with every attack on protest rights, with every refusal to articulate a moral vision, Labour helps to normalise what should be unthinkable.

The slide into Trumpism doesn’t begin with a landslide. It begins when parties start mirroring the enemy to hold onto power. We’ve seen how that ends, in America, in Hungary, in Italy. And unless Labour course-corrects, Britain could well follow suit.

The Real Agenda - Who Reform UK Actually Serve

Strip away the fireworks and the fury, the nationalism and the nostalgia, and Reform UK is a party of profiteers. Its agenda is not built to lift up the working class but to consolidate power in the hands of those who already own too much of Britain.

Reform UK’s rhetoric is feral, ferocious, and brilliantly distracting. But it masks a truth that should ring louder than any soundbite: this is not a movement for the dispossessed. It’s a protection racket for the rich.

Farage and his allies talk endlessly about cutting red tape, ‘freeing up business,’ slashing immigration, and protecting ‘British values.’ But when you read between the lines and look beyond the performance, what emerges is a blueprint for the total dismantling of the state and of public life. Environmental protections? What tosh. Equality legislation? Bureaucratic nonsense. Trade unions? A nuisance. Welfare safety nets? Total claptrap.

Reform UK serves those who resent regulation because it slows profit. It serves the slum landlords, the private equity firms, the lobbyists who want Britain run like a business with no HR department. It is a libertarian dream-state, dressed up in Union Jacks and working-man cosplay.

A millionaire cosplaying as an everyman.

And Farage? He doesn’t even pretend anymore. He stands shoulder to shoulder with billionaires, media barons, hedge fund parasites, and American ideologues. His politics is pure projection: cast the elites as the ‘liberal left,’ while he mingles with the real elites at donor dinners and right-wing think tank events.

The people most at risk under a Reform UK future are migrants, renters, public sector workers, disabled people, LGBTQ+ communities, and anyone without financial insulation. These are precisely the ones who are being told to stay silent, to sacrifice, to accept that their rights are less important than Reform’s idea of ‘freedom.’ Just like in the US, working class people are being baited to vote for their own destruction.

This is a class war dressed as a culture war. Unless it is exposed now, loudly and clearly, Reform UK will continue to grow, not because it delivers for people, but because it convinces them that everyone else is to blame.

Conclusion: This Is Not Just a Protest Party Anymore

This is no longer a rehearsal. Reform UK is no longer a warning shot as they are gaining ground. They now shape councils, dominate headlines, and bend the national narrative to their will. They are rewriting the story of Britain before our eyes, and too many are watching like it’s entertainment.

The Trumpification of British politics is here. It’s been rebranded, anglicised, pint-in-hand and tie slightly loosened, but the mechanics are the same: break the system, blame the ‘elites,’ offer the people nothing but scapegoats and soundbites, then call it a revolution.

Labour continues to hedge and triangulate. Instead of challenging the fiction, it flirts with imitation. Instead of standing as a moral counterweight, it spins into abstraction, “further and faster,” but into what, no one exactly knows. But we do know where that vacuum leads: into the arms of those who shout the loudest, not those who lead the wisest.

Reform UK is not a protest party anymore. A soft-edged, right-wing project that will erode democracy and govern not to serve, but to strip. It’s Trumpism without the theatre budget, but with the same endgame: dismantle the state, dismantle truth, and leave nothing but profit and paranoia in its place.

There is still time to stop it, but not if we indulge the idea that they will collapse under the weight of their own incompetence. Authoritarian projects don’t fail because they can’t govern; they succeed because they redefine what governance is.

The story doesn’t have to end the way he wants it to, however. Reform UK thrives on the illusion that there is no alternative, that the centre is dead, the left is weak, and fear is the only currency. But they are building momentum on vapour and spectacle. Vapour can be burned off. Spectacle can be exposed.

Because if we name the fiction, if we refuse the script, if we interrupt the myth mid-sentence, then it can never become truth. The future isn’t written yet. This is still our country to defend.

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References

Coughlan, J. (2025) ‘Unison chief tells staff at Reform-controlled councils to join union.’ The Guardian, 3 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/03/unison-chief-tells-staff-at-reform-controlled-councils-to-sign-up-to-union [Accessed 4 May 2025.]

Huskisson, S. (2025) ‘Diane Abbott slams Labour’s ‘disastrous’ local elections and sends ten-word warning.’ The Mirror, 4 May. Available at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/diane-abbott-slams-labours-disastrous-35167544 [Accessed 4 May 2025.]

Sparrow, A. (2025) ‘Diane Abbott says Starmer wrong to say Labour should respond to defeats with ‘more of the same,’ just ‘further and faster.’ The Guardian, 2 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/may/02/local-elections-polls-labour-tories-reform-council-mayor-uk-politics-live-news?page=with:block-6814ae568f08c2e1abc796eb#block-6814ae568f08c2e1abc796eb [Accessed 3 May 2025.]