Closing the gate

In the landscape of contemporary political analysis, a dangerous blind spot has emerged. Commentators, from the broadsheets and the BBC to popular political podcasts, frequently treat the rise of national-populist movements as a series of disconnected electoral phenomena – a response to migration here, an outcry against deindustrialisation there. By focusing almost exclusively on how these parties win over ordinary voters, we are missing the far more significant danger: what they do once the winning is done. The true threat of the modern populist movement is not found in its manifesto promises, but in its adherence to the “one-way gate” principle. This is the unstated but foundational belief that a movement only needs to win a single election to ensure it never has to face a fair one again.

To be clear, pointing this out is not a substitute for a primary electoral strategy. The only way to decisively defeat populism at the ballot box is to address the genuine, material grievances that fuel it. A government that fails to deliver on economic security, housing, and public services creates the very soil in which the populist seed germinates. The primary task of any progressive movement must be a programme of national renewal that offers tangible improvements to the lives of the many. However, alongside this primary mission of delivery, there exists a secondary, vital institutional necessity: we must de-normalise those who seek to use the democratic process to destroy democracy from within.

It is strange that the British political class remains so reluctant to name this threat. We treat Reform UK as a “party of protest”, a group of disgruntled outsiders shouting at the gates. We must stop doing this. De-normalising them is not about smearing their voters or dismissing their concerns as “illegitimate”. In fact, to do so only plays into their hands, allowing them to cast themselves as the brave champions of “the people” against a “failed establishment”. Instead, de-normalisation is an act of institutional self-defence. It is about recognising that Reform UK is the local franchise of a specific, global family of political actors who do not merely wish to change the direction of the country, but to change the mechanics of the state to ensure their own permanence.

The pioneers of this soft autocracy, most notably Viktor Orban in Hungary, have demonstrated that you do not need a traditional coup to end a democracy. You simply need a majority and a willingness to rewrite the rules of the game. In Hungary, the Fidesz party used its 2010 victory to immediately alter the electoral reality. They abolished the two-round runoff system, which had previously allowed opposition parties to unite behind a single challenger. By switching to a single round, they ensured that a fractured opposition could never unseat them. In 2014, this allowed Orban to capture eighty-five per cent of Budapest’s constituency seats despite winning a minority of the total votes in many districts. This is the “one-way gate” in action. Once the gate is passed, the exit is barred.

This strategy relies on the capture of the judiciary, the neutralisation of the media, and the purge of the civil service. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has provided the template for judicial capture. By utilising political crises to replace independent jurists with partisan loyalists, he has turned the law into a weapon. This allows for the “legal” persecution of rivals, such as the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who was effectively barred from the presidency through a politically motivated conviction for “insulting public officials”. When the courts become an extension of the leader’s will, the voters’ ability to change their minds at the next election becomes meaningless.

The reason we must de-normalise these movements is that their strategy depends on being seen as “just another party”. If their proposals to alter the judiciary or defund national broadcasters are treated as run-of-the-mill policy debates, the public loses its ability to see the trap until it has already sprung. Normalisation provides the camouflage under which the “one-way gate” is constructed. Because Reform UK has not yet held power, we cannot point to a history of government action, but the indicators of their intent are hiding in plain sight.

Nigel Farage’s recurring threats against the BBC and ITV are a classic example of the populist media strategy. These are not mere complaints about bias; they are attempts to delegitimise and financially hollow out the only institutions capable of holding a populist leader to account on a national scale. By framing the BBC as a “rigged” actor and calling for the abolition of the licence fee, Farage is following the Orbanist playbook of dismantling public service broadcasting to make way for a more compliant, partisan media landscape.

Similarly, the recent recruitment of Robert Jenrick into the Reform-adjacent ecosystem provides a chilling indicator of how these ideas are infiltrating the wider right. During his time in the Conservative party, Jenrick began advocating for the abolition of the Judicial Appointments Commission, suggesting instead that the power to appoint judges should return directly to the lord chancellor – a political appointee. This is a move toward the politicisation of the judiciary that would be instantly recognisable to any observer of the democratic backsliding in Poland or India. When political leaders start choosing who dons the wig based on their perceived ideological reliability, the final guardrail of the constitution is extinguished.

We must also recognise the populist war on ‘the Blob’ or the ‘deep state’ for what it is. The goal is to reclassify neutral, expert civil service positions as political appointments such that, in time, the machinery of the state can be hollowed out and flooded with loyalists who serve the party rather than the public. When Reform UK leaders speak of “cleaning out” Whitehall, they are not talking about efficiency; they are talking about a purge designed to remove anyone who might say “no” to an unconstitutional act.

The task for liberal-democratic forces is to defend the system itself, even as we argue over the policies within it. We must move the debate away from the populist’s preferred terrain – where they cast themselves as the only ones listening to the people – and onto the terrain of the “one-way gate”. We must ask: if this party wins, will the people still have the power to remove them in five years?

If we continue to treat Reform as a normal party with a quirky manifesto, we are complicit in the erosion of our own democratic safeguards. It belongs to a family of parties that regard the democratic process as a nuisance to be tolerated only until it can be subverted. We must look at Hungary, Turkey, and India not as remote, alien cultures, but as the mirror of what happens when the “one-way gate” is left unguarded. And this is exactly what is happening in Trump’s America right now. Delivering a better future for the mass of voters remains the most urgent priority, but the secondary, essential guardrail is the de-normalisation of those who seek to lay the groundwork for a one-party state. Once the gate has slammed shut, the grievances of the people will no longer matter – because they will have lost the only tool they had to demand better.

Image credit: J.M Executive Via Flickr