Owen Jones says Farage is on course for a clear win in Clacton as Reform rhetoric hardens
Says Nigel Farage is heading for a decisive win in Clacton, and he is warning that the politics around Reform UK is getting. Owen Jones — full details here.
Owen Jones says Nigel Farage is heading for a decisive win in Clacton, and he is warning that the politics around Reform UK is getting darker. In a recent Guardian column, the commentator linked that rise to a broader shift on Britain’s right, where hardline language is no longer treated as a fringe warning sign.
Jones pointed to comments from Zia Yusuf, one of Reform UK’s leading figures, who wrote on social media that Tory and Labour politicians had created “the burning injustice of modern Britain” and called them “traitors to their country”. Yusuf added: “A reckoning is coming.” Jones argued those words cannot be brushed off as theatre.
A warning about Britain’s political climate
The column framed the remarks as part of a bigger concern: whether Britain’s centralised state leaves too much power in too few hands. Jones said the country is closer to tyranny than many people think, and urged readers not to fall back on British exceptionalism, the idea that authoritarian politics cannot take hold here.
He pointed to the United States as a cautionary example. American exceptionalism, he wrote, did not stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency or from moving quickly to concentrate power, weaken the media, attack voting rights, politicise the federal bureaucracy, weaponise the justice system against opponents and send the National Guard into Democratic cities.
Pressure on Labour, and on the wider right
Jones has also argued that Britain’s political choices are narrowing fast. In March, he said Britons do not want Trump’s war fixation and accused leading figures on the right of pressing Labour to mirror Washington’s foreign policy line, including on Iran. He grouped Tony Blair, Farage, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and the right-wing press among those demanding closer alignment with Trump.
In another piece in May, Jones said Labour’s failures had made a right-wing authoritarian government a plausible next chapter. He described Labour’s loss of support to the Greens and Reform, while noting that Andy Burnham had emerged as Labour’s most popular politician and the party’s best hope of clawing back voters. Even so, Jones said Burnham would have to earn support from the left if he wanted it.
The political backdrop is already volatile. France24 reported in May that Labour MPs were openly questioning whether the party would survive as a political force, while a separate report from June said there are no guardrails now on the right of UK politics and that where Restore Britain goes, others will follow.
Jones’s central warning remains stark. Reform’s language is hardening, the main parties are under strain, and in his view the country should not assume it is immune from an authoritarian turn. The question is no longer abstract. It is heading for Clacton.
