UK Politics

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.

So, I thought I’d help Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch out by attempting to discover what your average Reform supporter actually wants.

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So, I took to the internet and joined a raft of Reform-supporting groups to see what their followers were thinking. I have to say, this was not a pleasant task. Scrolling through hundreds of posts filled with ugly sentiments was like stumbling upon the world’s worst online dating site.

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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 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 Southport riots is widely shared and despite official disapproval from the party’s leadership the jailed Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) is often lauded as true patriot and political prisoner.

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As opinion polls regularly confirm, the queues at food banks 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 fairy tale 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 narcissistic crackpot and while the Conservative‘s 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.