It’s not very often that Nigel Farage is made to look like a cuddly moderate, but there are sinister forces at play in British politics. X CEO Elon Musk has turned himself into a de facto British political pundit, weighing in on the discourse around grooming gangs and calling for far-Right agitator Tommy Robinson to be freed from prison. Even Farage refused to align with Musk on this, saying “Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform”.
Now, manosphere social media personality Andrew Tate has launched a British political party. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was all a big joke: the party is called “BRUV”, which stands for Britain Restoring Underlying Values. Its raison d’être reads like a video game blurb: “This is a war to reclaim Britain. No excuses, no compromises, no second chances. We will defend our borders, crush crime, purge corruption, and restore pride to a nation under siege.”
We will restore the Kingdom. @votebruv pic.twitter.com/3cP6ATF2GZ
— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) January 8, 2025
The party’s “charter” is an amateurish PowerPoint presentation with occasional outbursts in capital letters and liberal use of the Union Jack. The Bruv party’s policies include having Royal Navy warships patrolling the English Channel to deter illegal migrants, “restoring masculinity and strength”, setting up a TV channel called BBC Punishment, “a 24/7 live broadcast of knife crime offenders serving solitary confinement”, and cutting foreign aid to zero.
Not even modern art is safe: Andrew Tate proposes replacing it with “statues and monuments honouring British heroes” to restore pride in our heritage. Perhaps he’ll host a little exhibition of Degenerate Art, too.
This might all be sinister if the charter itself weren’t so risible. Each slide has an AI generated image intended to show the dystopian Britain we currently live in (think grey skies, bombed out streets around Westminster, and Union Jacks in tatters) versus Bruv’s utopian vision for the country (market towns full of soldiers, Union Jacks projected in the sky, classrooms full of white children).
The images are excellent proof of the maxim that AI is only as smart as the human who programmes it. In the accompanying illustration to a slide about “revolutionising education”, a teacher points to a board which says “ENTREPRENULSOIP” in big letters. The Bruv party propose to build a nation of ‘entreprenuls’ through teaching critical thinking and improving literacy. Another slide depicts AI children learning about traditional values like respect and “responsbity”.
“I voted for The Bruv Party at the genny lec” pic.twitter.com/igDDikko9R https://t.co/D24p9AeXv8
— kieran🏴🇧🇪 (@kieran_ashton1) January 6, 2025
The Bruv party’s charter has been met with derision by many on X. Yet its page has also gained over 100,000 followers in three days. Anyone with even the remotest of critical faculties may laugh at an image of Tate photoshopped in front of a Downing Street lectern, bulging out of one of his Topman style blazers, but his followers appear to eat it up.
Journalist Matt Shea, who has made documentaries about Tate for the BBC, reckons there are ulterior motives behind Tate’s Prime Ministerial bid. “He's one of the most successful people at monetizing attention. And increasingly, how you gain attention is by being controversial, because that is what the algorithms prefer,” Shea says. “This is likely a stunt in order to pump the value of one or more crypto products that he holds.”
Tate often endorses crypto meme coins (many of which have crashed) and has launched a number of his own, with names like “Daddy Coin” and “Andrew Tate’s Dog”. The Bruv party proposes having a national Bitcoin reserve and a special tax code for crypto traders.
What’s more insidious is the endorsement Tate has received from Elon Musk. In a video launching his election campaign, Tate describes the current political system in the UK as “corrupt” and says in his distinctive transatlantic Luton twang: “My success, even if I do not become Prime Minister, will force the parties of the UK to address the issues they don't want to address." Musk appeared to agree, replying “He’s not wrong.”
Tate is banned from YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram for violating their hate speech policies. He was banned from Twitter in 2017 for saying that women should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for being raped, but Musk reinstated his account in 2022. The Bruv party’s X account was briefly suspended this week, but again, Musk had it reopened.
“This is the coming together of Big Tech and the Far Right,” says Shea. “The biggest impact, if they get what they want, would be the complete erosion of democratic institutions, the media, truth itself and the inflaming of racial tensions all across the western world”. However, as Shea points out, “the first thing Andrew Tate will do if and when he steps back onto UK soil is stand trial for the sexual aggression charges that the UK police have successfully issued an extradition warrant for”.
Tate and his brother Tristan are currently under house arrest in Romania, pending allegations of rape and human trafficking. The pair say they "unequivocally deny all allegations and decry what they perceive as an exploitative use of the legal system".
Tate is also accused of rape by four women in the UK, yet he has joined people like Musk and Farage in calling for a new national inquiry into the grooming gangs who operated across places like Telford and Rochdale through the 2000s. Some, including a victim of the grooming gangs, have pointed that a man who is accused of rape and grooming himself is not in a position to be so sanctimonious. Tate’s response? “See you in court.”
In the UK’s general election last summer, political parties scrambled to capture the attention of Gen Z. Results were mixed: the Lib Dems’ brat green social media posts claiming it was a “Liberal Democrat Summer” never quite caught on. Reform UK’s TikTok campaign was the most successful: they received the highest engagement and amassed over 330,000 followers on TikTok, compared with Labour’s 230,000 and the Conservatives’ lousy 85,000.
@nigel_farage Always happy to take a selfie! 🤳🏻
♬ Come Inside Of My Heart - IV Of Spades
In the US, pundits have credited Donald Trump’s election victory to his appeal to bro voters. On the advice of his son Barron, Trump appeared on a slew of podcasts loved by young men, speaking with hosts like Theo Von, Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and gained popularity among young male voters.
Earlier in the year there was much talk over whether Reform could capture the “bro vote”. Lots of young male Right-wing content creators sprung up, pledging fealty to Nigel Farage, and a poll from JL Partners in July last year found that Reform UK was as popular with 16 to 17 year olds as Labour.
But while Reform may have had a slick social media operation, it did not translate into votes. A YouGov poll found that of the 18-24 year olds who voted at the general election, only 9% voted Reform – the lowest proportion of any age group.
As Dr Stuart Fox, a Politics lecturer at Exeter University, pointed out to Sky News at the time: “Those young people to whom Reform most appeal – young men from poorer backgrounds – are by far the least likely to vote."
Reform was also deeply unpopular with young female voters. British Election Study data showed that 71% of 18-24 year old women “strongly dislike” Reform, more than any other female age bracket.
Andrew Tate self-identifies as a misogynist. He once said that “virgins are the only acceptable thing to marry” and described women who do not want to have children as “miserable, stupid bitches”. If Reform’s band of middle aged, male MPs were offputting to young women, then the Bruv party leader’s brand of toxic masculinity is totally alienating.
While Tate may have an army of loyal supporters, “bro politics” is necessarily limited by the narrow, often apolitical audience it is aimed at. Boris Johnson used to say he was more likely to be reincarnated as a stuffed olive than become Prime Minister, but Tate is plumping for a new tack. “The chances of me being Prime Minister considering I was the most googled man alive some time before I die is actually very high,” he said this week. Incidentally, the Electoral Commission shows that Bruv has not even registered to be an official political party yet. Tate may want to get that one ticked off the list first.
