With polls showing Reform UK Party Ltd mounting a genuine electoral threat, both Labour and the Conservatives are falling over themselves to counter their offensive. And let’s face it, not much would be more offensive than the sight of Nigel Farage grinning from your TV screen on election night.
But you can’t persuade their potential supporters not to vote for them if you don’t know why they are thinking about it in the first place.
The leadership of both main parties seem to think the only thing Reform supporters get worked up about is immigration. They may be right. But the conclusion that they can only win them over by ‘out Reforming Reform’, is based on some alarmingly naive assumptions about the people they are trying to convert.
Reform supporters’ feelings towards the UK
So, I thought I’d help Starmer and Badenoch out by attempting to discover what the average Reform supporter actually wants.
Despite the Daily Mail and GB News insisting the whole country is desperate to vote for them, I didn’t have a lot of luck canvassing my friends and neighbours. It turned out they would rather be thought of as the kind of “Guardian reading, advacado eating, [sic] Palestinian flag waving, Eddie Izzard supporting vegan” that Reform’s chief-whip has nightmares about.
So, I took to the internet, joining a raft of Reform supporting groups to see what their followers were thinking, it was an interesting task. Scrolling through hundreds of posts filled with so much that was ugly, was like stumbling upon the world’s worst online dating site.
I had expected a lot of straightforward patriotism, but I found that many Reform supporters appear to actively despise their country. Their posts simply listed complaints about the perceived ills of modern Britain and the modern Britons who live here. Whether its Pride flags, Turkish barbers, the National Trust, or electric cars they dislike so much about the world outside their windows, it’s a wonder they ever leave the house.
Finding humour in darkness
There were lighter moments. It would be easy to laugh at some of the contorted logic on display, so I did. My particular favourites were the posts condemning “immigants” [sic] for failing to “intergreat” [sic] or learn proper “Inglish” [not even joking]. Then there were folks so appalled by people travelling to live in a country they weren’t born in that they were planning to up sticks and move to Spain.
Several posters repeated familiar conspiracy theories, always advanced with the conviction of someone who’s watched two YouTube videos about micro-chips in vaccines. So, we learn that the World Economic Forum – assisted by King Charles and George Soros – plans to enslave us all by getting rid of cash-machines. More worrying are references to the Kalergi Plan, a white supremacist delusion that a ruling elite are plotting world domination via forced race-mixing.
Laughable of course until you remember that such ideas fuel the paranoia of damaged souls and end up included in some deranged manifesto discovered on a basement computer after a mass-shooting.
Impotent fury and threats of violence
Along with the childish name-calling aimed at the Marxist, “two-tier Keir Harmer”, there are plenty of darker comments. I read all-too-common suggestions that if the traitorous “Lieber” government (Lie-ber, get it?) doesn’t step down then violence is inevitable. Recently, a contributor posted video of Starmer’s conference speech in 2023 being interrupted by someone showering him with glitter. The comments that followed included several regretting that the protester hadn’t used a gun, knife or acid!
There’s no doubt these people want change. There are constant calls to do something, anything, before it’s too late to save the country. Marches, council tax boycotts, even petitioning the King to dissolve parliament, are proposed but never acted on. There’s little sign that the mass booing of the prime minister on Thursday evenings has taken off yet, but we should all keep our ears open.
Among all this impotent fury there are genuine concerns about the health service, cost of living, crime, housing and all the other things the rest of us worry about. However, these people appear to have fallen for the ancient lie that their problems aren’t caused by the people with the power to change them, but by “the others”. And this is where the slope gets really slippery. Lee Anderson’s sympathy for the thugs involved in the riots over the summer is widely shared, and despite official disapproval from the party’s leadership, the jailed Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) is often lauded as true patriot and political prisoner.
Voting for a dictator
If Robinson is the crack dealer of right-wing politics, then Reform might just be the gateway drug – the first step on a path that begins with flag-waving vitriol online but could end with suspiciously straight-armed salutes on the street.
But would Reform supporters really welcome a British dictatorship?
I added a poll to one of the largest sites – Nigel Farage for prime minister – Britain Needs Reform – which has over 115,000 members. How would they like the country to be governed after the next election? In just six hours I had more than 1,000 answers. Over 80% voted for a leader who could make laws without reference to MPs. That’s a chillingly large majority for abandoning parliamentary democracy.
It should be noted that “Enoch Powell” (someone added his name as an option) received 15% of the vote, meaning the group’s second pick was to be governed by a racist who’s been dead for over a quarter of a century.
Legitimising racism
As opinion polls regularly confirm, the queues at foodbanks and A&E matter more to most voters than the ones at the border. Surely the way to dissuade people from abandoning the British traditions of tolerance and democracy is to deal with real issues rather than pandering to the fairytale that everything would be okay if it wasn’t for “that lot”.
But, with Reform-style ads and videos of poor souls arrested after being forced to work in nail bars, Labour risk legitimising the racism they’re trying to undermine. If you tell Farage’s supporters, “See, you can vote for us after all”, they may just hear, “See, you were right all along”.
As the Democrats found out in November, if you don’t take the chance to improve people’s lives, they might just dump you for the nearest narcistic crackpot and while the Tories’ collapse allowed Reform to creep onto the wings of the political stage, Labour’s failure to address everyday concerns risks thrusting them into the spotlight.
The two most common complaints on the Reform supporters’ websites are that immigrants are bad, and the government doesn’t care about ordinary people. If Labour can’t demonstrate that the latter is as much a lie as the former, we might all get what Reform supporters really want… President Farage.
