I was working in Leeds when I first started seeing adverts for WKD. Billboards, TV spots—loud, garish, and oddly confrontational. They didn’t look like advertising as we understood it.
Traditionally, advertising sold aspiration. Buy this and you’ll be better, cooler, more successful—more attractive, even. WKD did the opposite.
Its campaign—“Have you got a WKD side?”—didn’t invite you to improve yourself. It invited you to lean into your worst instincts. The joke was the point. This wasn’t about becoming someone better. It was about being a bit of an idiot, and enjoying it.
At the time it felt strange. Slightly crass. But it worked.
WKD had identified a group that most brands ignored or patronised. People who weren’t interested in aspiration, or at least didn’t see themselves reflected in it. Instead of trying to elevate them, WKD validated them. It told them they were fine as they were—and that their behaviour, however laddish or antisocial, was part of the appeal.
And WKD did very well.
Launched in 1996, it rode the rise of the alcopop market to become the UK’s leading RTD by 2006, as the category peaked at around £1bn. When the market collapsed under regulatory pressure and changing tastes, most competitors disappeared. WKD didn’t. It adapted, held its position, and remains a dominant—if unfashionable—brand, sustained by recognition, price, and a lingering cultural footprint.
Something similar is happening in politics.
Where politics once rewarded restraint—particularly on the conservative side—it now increasingly rewards performance. Loudness, insult, and provocation have become assets rather than liabilities.
This is often described as “vice signalling”: the deliberate performance of behaviour that violates social norms in order to signal allegiance to a particular group. Where virtue signalling says “look how good I am”, vice signalling says “look how much I don’t care what you think”.
It’s effective for the same reason WKD’s advertising was effective.
Figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are not simply being crude by accident. They are speaking to a segment of the electorate that feels ignored, patronised, or actively criticised by mainstream politics. Older voters, less engaged historically, and often alienated by rapid cultural change.
For years, those voters were told—sometimes correctly—that their views on race, gender, and sexuality were outdated or unacceptable. The response from parts of the right has not been to moderate those views, but to reframe them. What was once embarrassing is now presented as rebellious. What was once marginal is now marketed as authenticity.
In that sense, Trump and Farage are doing what WKD did: identifying an under-served audience and validating it.
But there are limits to the analogy.
This is not a growth market. Demographically and culturally, the underlying attitudes are in decline. Each generation starts from a different baseline, and the direction of travel is clear. What sustains this politics is not just culture, but economics.
Older voters accumulated assets—particularly property—that aligned their interests with a form of politics that protects wealth and resists redistribution. Younger voters, locked out of those gains, are less likely to share those priorities.
That creates a tension. A political movement built on a shrinking base can still be loud, influential, and disruptive—but it is structurally fragile.
Which may explain why parts of the modern right are becoming less interested in democratic norms. If your constituency is not growing, the incentives shift. Winning arguments matters less than holding ground.
WKD survived by becoming a fixture of a declining category. The question for politics is whether the same strategy can work indefinitely.
At the recent by-election Reform under performed. It should have been a free hit against the Government but they fell well short. Partly this was organisational – a poor candidate, a campaign manager suspended for racism, and a party leader who vanished to the other side of the world the week of the vote.
But Reform’s problems don’t end there. They have a highly motivated on-line community who offer loyal and noisy support for the party. Most of the parties campaigning is on-line, and this community is crucial to the rapid rise of Reform. These supporters don’t just amplify Farage’s message, they go further. While Reform’s leadership try to stop short of out right racism or xenophobia their on-line supporters go much further. Taking their lead from Farage and Tice they are rude, angry, offensive, racist and bigoted.
This isn’t the first time a political movement has had this problem. Corbyn had a highly engaged on-line community, some of whom could be rude, snobbish and patronising, and at times, sadly, antisemitic. Reform are an awful lot worse.
In an on-line world the only interactions people have with party members are via social media this becomes a huge problem. Angry, rude, aggressive and racist aren’t good adverts for any party. Unless Reform can fix this problem they will struggle to translate poll leadings into seats.
Few people make reference to John Ruskin these days, he has fallen out of fashion. To paraphrase Ruskin aesthetics is a choice, just like moral and political choices. Choosing to be crass ignorant and rude indicates a more profound moral failure. To chose crass over informed, ignorant over articulate, rude over polite indicates someone who would chose bad over good, lies over truth.
Their partisan supporters may not care about truth and lies, good or bad. But the wider group of voters do.