The Grammar of Race: British Fascism, Racial Nationalism and the Rise of Reform UK

This article brings histories of British fascism and the Black Radical Tradition into conversation with the study of contemporary British politics to offer a race‐critical analysis of Reform UK's rise. Drawing on race‐critical scholarship and Black Radical analyses of fascism, it argues that Reform UK is the latest formation of a distinctively British racial nationalism, one that has moved across parties, leaders and conjunctures while drawing on an identifiable repertoire of demographic threat, white victimhood, anti‐cosmopolitan populism and the restoration of sovereignty. Understanding race as a structural social relation rather than an ideological feature makes this continuity visible in ways that dominant frameworks have not. This article contributes a race‐critical framework for analysing movements that operate through racial grammar while carefully omitting specific ‘biological’ racialism from their official vocabulary.