The Reformer - Newspaper of Reform UK
Issue 001 (Autumn 2026)
I.
Saying something is broken means it is damaged, or no longer functioning properly.
And many things can be broken: bones, bottles, hearts, promises, laws, etc.
Even silence.
II.
But if you're Nigel Farage, then the word broken is a potent political metaphor designed to induce public anxiety, assign blame to opponents, and justify urgent policy intervention and radical structural change.
When Reform UK declare that Britain is broken they are, therefore, following a tried and tested populist script that serves several strategic functions.
III.
Obviously, I'm not the first to notice the irony of this: that in order to successfully sell a message of national renewal, they must first wage a campaign of national demoralisation.
I believe this is known as patriotic pessimism - love your country, but acknowledge it's gone to the dogs: crumbling public services, rising crime, spiralling prices, and - of course - record levels of illegal immigration.
By highlighting these (and other) issues, the Reform rhetoric seeks to create a sense of crisis. Britain is broken - but it was broken not by the hardworking people of Britain who pay their taxes and watch GB News, but by the political elite and their friends in the mainstream media.
I know all this because I have just had Issue 001 of The Reformer (Autumn 2026) pushed through my letterbox (not at my request I hasten to add) and the phrase Broken Britain appears repeatedly throughout - as well as in big bold letters on the front page, so readers cannot possibly miss it.
IV.
Obviously, it's not a message that appeals to someone like me - someone, that is, born of a critical and artistic tradition where the idea of brokenness enjoys a highly privileged and positive status.
I regard the ideal of Wholeness as a dangerous and totalising fantasy - particularly when invoked in a political context to enforce conformity. For me, freedom and beauty reside (if anywhere) in the crack, the fissure, and the fragment: I still believe in the ruins and I still regard the break not as a sign of failure, but an opportunity and an opening through which new forces can emerge.
Farage and his Reformers don't seem to appreciate that the history of a people or nation is never complete or settled and never follows a smooth, continuous line of progress.
As Benjamin said, it's not our grand monuments and great institutions that speak of who we are - our true character is only revealed when these structures fall into ruin and our task is no longer to fix that which is broken, but to build up new little habitats and find new little hopes as we move among the ruins.
Or, if we do repair that which is broken, let us do so with gold, so that the break is not disguised or mourned, but celebrated (the Japanese call this the art of kintsugi (金継ぎ).
V.
It's not my job to tell anyone how to vote.
But I would be wary of any political party that bangs on about a broken nation and exploits the nostalgic longing for a mythic, unbroken past where everything worked perfectly and everyone was united.
Das Ganze ist das Unwahre, as Adorno once put it [1].
And a world without cracks leaves no room for failure, difference, or becoming.
Notes
[1] This famous line by Adorno - in which he inverts Hegel - reads in English: 'The Whole is the false.' It can be found in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N Jephcott (Verso, 2005), see Pt. 1, § 29. The original German text was published in 1951.
