In 1979, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote with reference to Britain’s impending shift to the Right that political restructuring doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Rather, he argued, ‘[I]t works on the ground of already constituted social practices and lived ideologies … it wins space by constantly drawing on these elements which have secured over time a traditional resonance, and left their traces in popular inventories.’ The political force that most speaks to Hall’s comments in 2025 would appear to be Reform UK.

A notable example is the launch of the garishly bright-blue ‘Reform FC’ football shirt emblazoned with the party logo on the front (and ‘Farage’ on the back), which has been roundly mocked by the party’s political opponents. The Union Jack is reportedly upside down on the shirt, and there are (unsubstantiated) rumours that it isn’t even manufactured in Britain (so much for political nationalism). Farage himself said in 2021 that we should ‘keep politics out of football’. A gq headline referred to the shirts as ‘sad’. But unfashionable aesthetics and internal contradictions aside, Reform UK’s attempt to capture cultural ground is a serious business. Reform is attempting to infuse its politics into people’s everyday identities, through pubs, football, and clothing. It is a challenge the Left should take seriously.

It is true, of course, that there are historical precedents when it comes to the Left drawing on popular culture generally, and football especially. Fashion historian Joanna Turney writes in her book Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance that in football,

[O]ne can see the fusion of sport, class, regionality, and power, in the establishment of civic pride. This implies that on the pitch dominance is translated, to a certain extent, to civic and social dominance, which in turn exerts a sense of collective and group belonging.

Turney argues that much of footballing culture has historically been

… a vehicle for overturning the status quo . . . the acquisition of dominance for those who ordinarily have none, whilst simultaneously reinforcing it, once the full-time whistle has been blown. This is the carnivalesque manifest; the world is turned upside-down only for its later reinstatement.

In contrast, the Right has not always regarded football as a useful cultural tool. In the 1980s, some conservatives tried to neutralise the cultural power of football. Margaret Thatcher treated football fans as a ‘problem population’ — an extension, perhaps, of ‘the enemy within’ classification she applied to trade unionists. In 1988, after a series of state panics relating to football hooliganism, the government threatened to introduce compulsory ID cards for fans and deployed heavy policing around matches. The Hillsborough tragedy in 1989, and the state’s subsequent negligence and cover-up, highlighted that football supporters were not only viewed by the political establishment as problematic and not to be trusted, they were also seen as highly expendable. Football was further stigmatised in these years as a working-class pastime associated with disorder — the solidarity and defiance of fan culture in hardened form, racked against the state. The terraces were viewed as unruly, emotional, and resistant to authority, precisely the qualities that made them a cultural space ripe for political contention. Now, this very historical placing of football as anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment makes it a rich cultural ground for the likes of Farage — a demagogue who frequently inserts himself into politics as a countercultural force, a man of the people voicing sensible but often ignored opinions on their behalf.

Underclass and Underdogs

Countless British football teams (Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, and West Ham included) were originally born out of workplace settings: unions, railway companies, miners’ groups, and factory teams. Historically, wearing your team’s colours was often inseparable from wider notions of working-class marginalisation and resistance. Indeed, Turney argues that ‘the most successful football clubs emerged from the most deprived regions’. In 1898, a group of football players announced the formation of the Association Footballers’ Union (AFU) to fight for better wages and working conditions for players. Today some of that legacy lives on. This year, for example, Clapton CFC (a fan-owned football club) has released a line of pro-trans and anti-racist merchandise.

But over the last few decades football has often been travestied by the cultural mainstream and divested of its radical potential. In the 2000s, football shirts (and sportswear more broadly) were tied to the emergence of the ‘chav’ stereotype and its demonisation of the working class. An aggressive media and political establishment viewed working- class dress codes as a sign of degeneracy and a threat to civilised middle-class values. Football shirts, emblems of community and belonging, were doubled down on as symbols of fecklessness, marking out who was a threat to Tony Blair’s vision of a modernised, respectable bourgeois Britain. The football shirt attracted the ire of the hostile class politics of New Labour.

By 2025 the narrative has subtly shifted. The past decade has seen a reconstitution of the working class so that it is no longer seen as a feckless underclass but rather the ‘white working class’ — its members having acquired the status of underdogs in a modern world that has left them behind. In the past, the cultural terrain of this demographic — football, pubs, and union spaces — was a useful entry point into the Left for those not naturally attracted to party politics. But now Reform is dominating this ground, exploiting people’s genuine desire to be part of something meaningful, and positing an accessible, simplified zero-sum game of us and them, winners and losers. Across the globe, we can already see glimpses of how influential this cultural strategy is becoming. In 2018, the right-wing Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro refashioned the ‘canarinho’ (little canary) national football shirt into a powerful symbol of reactionary nationalism (a more explicit sporting analogue to Trump’s MAGA baseball cap in the USA, now one of the most indelible images of our political era).

Identity is becoming a tricky ground for the Left to navigate. The obvious flaws of liberal identity politics — hyper individualism, representation over substance, a rejection of building shared interests, a lack of class analysis — have created hesitancy when it comes to discussing and understanding identity in a more general sense. In (rightly) rejecting liberal identity politics, we can risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater and eschewing identity altogether. Farage and Reform understand that many voters are not guided by cold policy offerings, but rather by questions of who they are, who they belong with, and who they stand against. What is at stake for many people when voting is the possibility of acquiring a sense of collective, cultural self-worth in a world that feels as though it is locked in decline.

Efforts at a party-political level to integrate politics into people’s lived identities have been thin on the ground recently, leaving the cultural playing pitch open to the Right. But cultural identity itself remains a crucial terrain on which to build an enduring politics. People want to know who they belong to, who will stand with them, and what symbols might affirm that belonging. Elements of the Right have grasped this, offering a simple, exclusionary form of identity built on scapegoating as a means of empowering the broader body politic. The Left’s task is not to shun identity altogether but to build broader and more generous forms of it, rooted in solidarity, not fear. Popular culture remains a vital way to do this.

It is important to point out that there are some campaign groups and organisers already doing the good work of enmeshing their politics in cultural spaces and creating those spaces organically from the ground up. But those on the left with hard political power should also seek to hook their political values into culture as a means of gaining ground in electoral politics. The current hierarchy of the Labour Party has shown little initiative in this area, venturing into cultural spaces rarely. Keir Starmer’s soundbites calling for a ‘patriotic renewal’ feel cold and meaningless, with no concrete sense of identity enveloped within them. Despite introducing the Hillsborough Law, when it comes to football, Starmer is probably better known for accepting thousands of pounds worth of free match tickets from party donors.

On the more authentic left there are sparks of possibility, but they are small. As yet, no one of any stature is offering the kind of sophisticated cultural strategy Reform is tentatively building. At the party-political level there is a vacuum, one that the Right is moving quickly to fill. As well as putting forward an economic narrative, the Left urgently needs to speak to a deeper sense of collective selfhood. It needs to reintegrate into the cultural spaces it once regarded as its natural habitat, bringing with it a politics of hope and unity, and developing those cultural spaces from within. We need an electoral strategy that prioritises a politics that is lived joyfully, not merely one that is well argued in the abstract in academic papers or in the halls of Westminster. Reform understands that culture is central to political life: we need the Left to do the same.