Reform, Bangor University and the populist politics of performance

Neil Schofield-Hughes

What was the strange affair of the Reform request for a platform at Bangor University’s Debating and Political Society – and the fall-out from that society’s refusal to provide one – all about?

In an age of populist politics, things are rarely as they seem from a recital of the bare facts. There is always a context and almost always an agenda.

So it’s worth standing back for a moment to ask what actually happened.

Reform UK appear to have asked the University Society whether they would host a visit from a Reform MP and a Q and A session.

The Society said no, arguing that such an event would be contrary to their ethos.  #

In other words, Reform invited themselves to a meeting and threw a hissy fit when they didn’t get in. It’s the kind of entitlement that can’t cope with being told “no”.  And it has nothing whatsoever to do with free speech – there are plenty of other places where Reform, a political party rarely absent from our news channels, could set out their stall, metaphorically and literally.

And then the reaction – the threat of collective punishment, aimed at the University itself and its students, most of whom have absolutely nothing to do with the decision.

Not that Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, has any power to defund or withhold student loans, and the subsequent disagreements with his own party members in Cymru suggests a certain confusion over how devolution works.

We end up with a general proposal to “legislate for free speech” with no concrete proposals; a slogan, a talking-point, and no more.

But that’s not the point. What matters is the way the story is presented to illustrate a wider political narrative.

Performative

In other words, it’s performative. The story, however little relation it bears to what actually happened, is out there. It creates the reality. And the rest of us, in the world of fact and accuracy, are left playing catch-up.

Fortunately there are plenty of guides to provide the programme notes to populist performance – including the Austrian-American academic Ruth Wodak, who has written extensively on the language and iconography of right-wing populism, and whose book The Politics of Fear  is a detailed examination of its methodology, drawing extensively on examples from first-term Trump and Orban.

Crucially, Wodak asks us to interpret the performance, not in terms of the rights or wrongs of the issue, but about how populists use language to construe victimhood, legitimacy and popular will.

Facts matter far less than the narrative performance – it’s all about getting control of the story.

And that is exactly what Reform has done here.

Because, as we have seen, this was never an issue of “free speech” at all. Free speech on campus is, of course, central to those who want to promote culture wars.

They thrive on binaries: the people versus gatekeeping liberal elites, the idea that Universities are the home of privileged oppressors who seek to police and ban honest speech in the name of “woke”.  There is no room for nuance in the politics of provocation and manufactured outrage.

Victimhood

And then there is victimhood. Playing the victim while simultaneously issuing threats is a classic tactic on the populist Right.

Umberto Eco, in his essay Ur-Fascism, argues that the authoritarian seeks to portray his opponent as both weak and strong – strong enough to be a threat, weak enough to be defeated if the people place their faith in the strong leader.

Reconciling the two allows conspiracy theories and narratives of betrayal to flourish; again, a classic from the populist Right playbook.

As we get closer to the Senedd elections, and indeed the General Election across the UK, we can expect plenty more of this.

Propaganda

Like all propaganda, it aims to unite the party faithful while sowing doubts among neutrals and opponents. Its dishonesty is strategic and purposive.

In a world of falling living standards, collapsing public services and increasing social discontent it offers simple solutions to complex problems, seeking to create scapegoats and accusing those who seek honesty and nuance as self-seeking elitists.

The affair of Reform and the Bangor University students is a reminder that, in an age of populism, normal democratic political practice no longer applies.

Countering it means understanding how political discourse has changed, and developing strategies to resist the performance of the populist Right.