FORUM Blog March Rage for order

Posted on 24/03/2026

With Reform UK polling strongly, Patrick Yarker commends the spring number of FORUM, whose lead article examines the malign phenomenon of contemporary right-wing populism.

Charlotte Haines Lyon explores the new populism’s stance towards education in the opening article of FORUM’s spring 2026 number. Populism in our day thrives by encouraging cultural grievance and the spread of conspiratorial thinking. It offers simplistic instant remedies for entrenched social inequality and economic insecurity. In particular, today’s right-wing populists corrode trust in the public institutions on which almost everyone relies and within which many people work. New populism’s particular approach is not simply to point to institutional failures which policies of underfunding, outsourcing and privatisation have generated, but to frame the institution as intrinsically untrustworthy and in some way hostile to those who use it or rely on it.

State education is not excepted. In a speech last October to students at a private college in the US, Nigel Farage reportedly ‘pushed the narrative that the educational elite are “are poisoning our kids. They are telling them to be ashamed of their country”’.  Suella Braverman repeated this when she became Reform’s education spokesman (as she styled herself) in February. Teachers were teaching children to be ashamed of Great Britain, she said. Hence the need for ‘a patriotic balanced curriculum’ which would foster ‘love of our great country’.

The idea originally appeared on page 11 of the Manifesto on which Reform UK fought and lost the 2024 General Election. It proposed:

A Patriotic Curriculum in Primary and Secondary Schools. Any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance. History and social science curriculum to be reviewed and audited regularly to ensure balance.

Reform’s entire education policy in that losing Manifesto amounted to a single page of catchpenny nostrums and unsubstantiated claims. For example, that giving the wealthy 20 per cent tax relief on private school fees will improve education for everyone. The party’s education spokesperson may change, but the policies, such as they are, do not.

Braverman lamented the erosion of teacherly authority by ‘violence and disorder’. In her view, ‘Discipline, once the backbone of education has been weakened in the name of progressive ideology’, a hard-Right shibboleth dating back to the 1960s. To restore order to disorderly schools, Reform’s 2024 Manifesto demanded permanent exclusion for violent and disruptive students, as if unaware that this sanction has long been available.

Reform UK promises to scrap the Equality Act on the day it comes to power. A central pillar of the order Braverman would ‘restore’ is the gender binary, so as spokesman she is adamant there can be no questioning of it. The Manifesto put it this way:

Ban Transgender Ideology in Primary and Secondary Schools. No gender questioning, social transitioning or pronoun swapping. Inform parents of under 16s about their children’s life decisions. Schools must have single sex facilities.

Ban questions, say Reform, and social transitioning; but not selective education. Farage has hinted that as prime minister he might lift the ban Tony Blair imposed on the creation of new grammar schools. Braverman is on record as supporting segregated education. A one-time chair of governors of Michaela Community School, she has promised that Reform would expand the free schools programme. Might this be the mechanism by which a Reform government could more thoroughly reorder the English state system on the basis of so-called ‘ability’, shunting those deemed ‘less able’ on to vocational tracks at 11 or 14? As Comprehensive Future has noted, Reform’s (admittedly threadbare) school policies point towards an educational order of increased stratification and segregation.

Braverman’s rage for order rages first against the existing order. Like Farage, she pretends that order amounts only to disorder. That establishment is chaos and anarchy – and yet somehow able to act with conscious and concerted malevolence against ‘the people’. The same notion is dear to the heart of other fascist-adjacent right wingers and their parties. Marine Le Pen desires to restore some natural (even cosmic) order to France, previously established but now lost or dissolved through the work of ‘outsiders’. Right-populism aims to overthrow the prevailing ‘liberal’ order but not to unsettle – far less transcend – the capitalist one. Right-populists would strengthen aspects of that most-established of orders by removing workers’ rights and weakening organised labour. Those who donate large sums to parties such as Reform expect no less.

In the late 1970s the poet Derek Mahon wrote from Belfast:

Somewhere beyond the scorched gable end and the burnt-out buses
there is a poet indulging
his wretched rage for order –
or not as the case may be for his
is a dying art,
an eddy of semantic scruples
in an unstructurable sea.

With his phrase about a poet’s ‘wretched rage for order’, as with the poem as a whole, Mahon offers a riposte, laden with ironies, to lines written by the American poet Wallace Stevens forty years earlier. In that earlier poem, cryptic and sonorous, Stevens writes of a woman singing by the sea. Hearing her song, the poet is moved to celebrate that ‘rage for order’ which propels the making of a poem, and of any artistic endeavour, and which has also to do with the way each of us tries to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. The way we reconstruct our experience, which is education’s terrain.

The ‘order’ Stevens addresses, and which his poem exemplifies, is far removed from any political order Reform would impose. Counter to the proper work of education, Reform’s order would curtail the opportunity for many to be, in the poet’s words, the maker of the song they sang. The consequence of Reform’s new order won’t be to bring us closer to ourselves or our origins. It won’t address the questions that matter. A right-populist order cannot abide what teachers responsibly try to value in those they teach: curiosity, difference, the sudden fruitful stepping out of line, the ‘look!’ or ‘listen!’ of imagination’s emancipatory thrust; the ‘more than that’ which once stopped Stevens in his tracks and, with his companion, made him wonder:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.