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Makerfield and the Politics of Pressure

The coming by-election at Makerfield has provoked a familiar argument on the patriotic right. On one side are those who denounce the intervention of Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain movement. Labour is vulnerable. Reform has a realistic chance of victory. Any division of the anti-Labour vote therefore appears self-indulgent and destructive. Rupert Lowe, they say, may have legitimate grievances against Nigel Farage. He was certainly treated badly by Reform UK. But personal grievances ought to be put aside when the national interest is at stake. If Labour can be defeated, then Labour should be defeated.

On the other side are those who see Nigel Farage as the problem rather than the solution. They argue that Reform UK is little more than a vehicle for containing public anger. Every time popular discontent threatens to escape the boundaries of acceptable politics, Farage appears, gathers up the protest vote, makes a series of compromises, and then leaves the underlying structure untouched. In this view, Rupert Lowe is valuable because he threatens Farage’s position. The sooner Farage is challenged and replaced by a man of greater integrity, the better for the country.

Both positions have a certain logic. Both also rest on assumptions that do not survive contact with political reality.

The first assumption is that Britain stands on the verge of some great political rupture. If only the correct party can gather enough votes, or if only the correct leader can emerge, the existing order will be swept away and replaced with something fundamentally different. Of course, there are examples of such transformations. Russia in 1917 saw the destruction of one ruling class and its replacement by another. Iran in 1979 witnessed the collapse of a monarchy and the rise of a revolutionary theocracy. Similar examples can be found elsewhere. Yet these events were exceptional. They occurred when the existing state apparatus had ceased to function effectively. The old order was no longer capable of commanding obedience. Administrative structures had broken down. The loyalty of key institutions could no longer be relied upon. Under those conditions, revolution became possible.

Britain is not presently in that condition. The country may be badly governed. Its political class may be incompetent. Its institutions may be corrupt and increasingly detached from the interests of the population. None of this amounts to state collapse. Modern Britain remains one of the most centralised and administratively sophisticated states in the world. It possesses powers of surveillance, regulation and information management that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. The police state is often clumsy. It is frequently absurd. It is not, however, weak.

This matters because fantasies of imminent revolution are often based on a misunderstanding of where Britain actually stands. People look at social decay, demographic change, collapsing public services, and widespread public dissatisfaction, and assume that these conditions must shortly produce some decisive confrontation. They forget that highly organised states can survive astonishing levels of dysfunction. The late Soviet Union endured decades of stagnation. The Ottoman Empire acquired the nickname “the sick man of Europe” long before it finally disappeared, and that needed the Great War. It was the same with the Hapsburg Empire. Decay and collapse are not the same thing.

If revolution is improbable, perhaps the answer lies in electoral victory. This is the second assumption behind much of the argument over Makerfield. Perhaps Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe will eventually enter government through the ballot box. Once there, they will make the necessary reforms. Immigration will be reversed. The bureaucracies will be cut back. The censorship apparatus will be dismantled. Industry will be restored. The country will begin moving in a healthier direction. This belief is less implausible than dreams of barricades and insurrection. But less implausible is not the same as plausible.

The great theorists of elite rule explained the truth of democracy more than a century ago. Gaetano Mosca observed that every society is governed by an organised minority. Vilfredo Pareto described the circulation of elites, whereby personnel change while underlying structures remain. Robert Michels formulated his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which every large organisation develops a permanent leadership class that becomes increasingly independent of its nominal supporters. These men disagreed about many things. On one point they were united. Democracy changes faces more readily than it changes systems.

The reason is obvious enough. Every viable state possesses a permanent administrative core. Civil servants, judges, regulators, military officers, police officials, academics, media managers and corporate functionaries form an interconnected network of expertise and influence. Governments come and go. This network remains. It possesses continuity, institutional memory, technical knowledge and the immense advantage of permanence. The elected politician arrives promising radical change. The permanent apparatus replies with delay, obstruction, reinterpretation, consultation, procedural complexity, judicial review, regulatory resistance and media hostility. The shock is absorbed. The energy dissipates. The machine grinds on.

This does not mean elections are meaningless. It means they rarely achieve what their most enthusiastic supporters expect. There is no obvious electoral path to national restoration. Neither Nigel Farage nor Rupert Lowe is likely to become the British equivalent of Lenin entering Petrograd or Khomeini returning to Tehran. Even if one of them entered Downing Street, the existing administrative state would still be there the following morning.

A more realistic strategy begins by accepting this unpleasant reality. The objective should not be immediate conquest of the state. It should be steady and persistent pressure on the state. Power rarely surrenders everything at once. More often, it yields incrementally when resistance becomes too expensive. The ruling class must be presented with a choice. It can offer concessions and compromises, or it can attempt suppression. Suppression carries costs of its own. Excessive censorship creates martyrs. Heavy-handed policing generates publicity. Obvious abuses of power undermine legitimacy. Every ruling class prefers compromise when compromise is available.

This is where Reform UK becomes important. Its value does not lie primarily in the prospect of forming a government. It lies in its ability to gather and focus a vast accumulation of public dissatisfaction. Millions of people who feel betrayed require some vehicle through which their frustrations can be expressed. Reform performs that function. The established parties cannot entirely ignore this pressure. They can mock it. They can denounce it. They can attempt to contain it. But they cannot pretend it does not exist. Eventually, pressure produces adaptation.

Indeed, there are already signs that parts of the ruling class have begun reassessing some of the assumptions that dominated British policy after 1979. Deindustrialisation has not made the financial oligarchy more secure. Unlimited immigration has not produced the permanently atomised society its advocates expected. Instead, it is producing competing tribal loyalties that may prove less manageable than the nationalism diversity was supposed to dissolve. These are tensions that cannot be dismissed indefinitely as imaginary. Cultural leftism has become so extreme that even some of its former supporters are beginning to retreat. The process is slow. It is often dishonest. It remains real.

Restore Britain plays an equally valuable role. Its significance lies less in the policies it advocates than in the pressure it places on Reform UK. Nigel Farage has always possessed a strong instinct for compromise. This is not necessarily a moral failing. Successful politicians generally require such instincts. The danger is that compromise becomes accommodation, and accommodation becomes surrender. The existence of Rupert Lowe creates a permanent incentive for Farage to resist this tendency. Every concession he makes to the establishment risks losing support to his right. Every retreat invites criticism. Every attempt at moderation is scrutinised by a rival movement waiting to exploit disappointment. In this sense, Reform and Restore perform complementary rather than contradictory functions. Reform applies pressure to the governing class. Restore applies pressure to Reform. The result is a chain of pressure extending upwards through the political system. Viewed in this light, the Makerfield result becomes less important than many people suppose.

Of course it would be pleasant if Labour were defeated. It would be pleasant if either Reform or Restore secured victory. Yet these outcomes are not the only measure of success. Suppose Reform and Restore together secure more than half the vote, while Labour keeps the seat because the opposition vote is divided. Many observers would call this a disaster. They would be wrong. The purpose of political pressure is not necessarily to win every battle. It is to alter calculations within the ruling class. A result demonstrating overwhelming hostility to the existing order achieves that purpose. Whether the anti-Labour vote is concentrated in one party or distributed between two matters less than the overall message. The message would be unmistakable. Large numbers of voters are no longer willing to support the established consensus. Their anger continues to grow. Their demands can no longer be ignored. That message is what matters.

Politics is rarely the art of immediate victory. More often it is the art of creating circumstances in which concessions become unavoidable. Those looking at Makerfield as a straightforward contest between Farage and Lowe may therefore be misunderstanding the significance of the event. The real audience is not the voters of Makerfield. It is the ruling class itself.

And what matters is not who wins the seat, but whether the people who govern Britain emerge from the result more frightened than they were before.

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