How Nigel Farage’s biopolitics captured Westminster

In modern Britain, biopolitical techniques circulate not only through the formal machinery of the state but across media ecosystems, party war rooms, banks, and cultural institutions. Farage and his allies are riding that network to yank the Overton window ever further to the right. To do so, they're aided by other political parties, which play along, laundering the language until punishment sounds like policy.

The Labour government, for example, has met Farage's claims with triangulation; adopting, bleaching and redeploying key themes. From Keir Starmer's Powell-echoing 'island of strangers' speech to the bigotry of his party's arguments over what is a woman, sideshows have become centre stage.

At the same time, Labour ministers have overseen the hardening of protest policing, with counter-terrorism powers around pro-Palestine marches stretching the law and freezing dissent. That's the machinery in motion: manage the population, marginalise the unwanted, then badge it as moderation.

None of this would have succeeded without the Conservatives' simultaneous repositioning under Kemi Badenoch's leadership. Over the past year, Badenoch has lurched from gaffe to gaffe as she strains to outflank Farage on the right, even distancing herself from aspects of her own Nigerian heritage in efforts to do so. The party is not a coherent alternative to Reform, but its shadow.

In place of a governing prospectus, Badenoch's party has fallen back on culture war polarities paired with promises to scrap equality laws. One could even argue that the Conservatives' latest trial balloon – a plan to build camps to detain migrants – primed, if not inspired, Reform's migration plans.

Mainstream pivots hand Farage a perfect foil: his programme reads as the original, everyone else as knockoffs. And that matters. Far-right projects are cumulative and path-dependent – built through organisation, repetition, drilled populist lines, and, above all, a durable anti-establishment pose, even when the cheques come from billionaires.

Voters drawn to this politics pick the architect over the imitator. Farage has hammered these positions for years, and copycats rarely manage to dethrone a brand that's been so carefully engineered.

In this environment, the media aren't bystanders; they're accelerants. On Monday, as Farage unveiled his plans, the BBC's rolling 24-hour news channel handed him 58 minutes of oxygen. Talking points were platformed with scant contextual challenge, helping drive dehumanisation and normalise the most extremist rhetoric. Live, no interruptions – and we all know how that ends.

Reform has four MPs in Parliament. Where is the similar BBC coverage for the Liberal Democrats, who have 72? The Greens, who also have four? Will the BBC give the launch of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana's new party comparable airtime?

Reform has mastered the spectacle: choreographed media moments that smother alternative accounts. And when broadcasters reach for euphemism or hedge about where Reform sits on the spectrum, they leave the classification contest deliberately blurry – exactly the ambiguity Farage wants.

That blur is the point, and the springboard. Reform's talent is turning local arguments into national theatre.

And this is only the beginning. In Durham, one of 10 councils that Reform controls following the May 2025 local elections, the party's gains were packaged as a vindication of a broader programme, then used to justify rolling back diversity, equality and inclusion and net-zero pledges, under the guise of 'saving taxpayers' money'. Platform an entity that spreads hate, and you legitimise it.

Farage is a PM-in-waiting, and everyone can see it. The damage before the next election is already real, and no one looks ready to stop it; the government is busy trying to out-Farage him. Policy now trails his agenda.

As Aurelien Mondon, professor of politics at the University of Bath, has argued, issues such as migration are manufactured from the top down; the harder the system pushes them, the more they dominate.

That's biopolitics – mainstreamed and weaponised to police which bodies count. Today it's 'irregular' migrants, trans people, and women's bodily autonomy; tomorrow the list expands. The project is exclusion: erase those deemed outside the nation's body.

Chasing Reform down its own corridor makes every rival look smaller and less believable than the original. For the Tories, Badenoch's journey ends in absorption: a Reform-lite shell that satisfies no one for long. For Labour, the risk is existential: triangulation blunts a few attack lines while severing the party from the left currents sparked under Corbyn and largely extinguished by Starmer's right-wing purge. Keep feeding this machine and Britain gets a Farage premiership; starve it of consent and there's still a chance to break the spell.

Dr Georgios Samaras is assistant professor in public policy at King's College London's School for Government, where his research centres on unconstitutional politics in the era of democratic fragmentation.