Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian.
This is no single bloc marching under one ideology, or even a mass of ‘red-wall’ voters. What unites them is a desire for something different.
Who are Nigel Farage’s army, the voters who want him as our next prime minister? Few questions are as important in British politics. Were an election called tomorrow, the favourite for No 10 would be Farage, whose immigration policies are in some ways more extreme than those of the BNP were. His party’s role model for government would be Donald Trump’s US: Elon Musk-style cuts to our public services and masked agents snatching families off the streets.
A few months ago, many in Westminster and across the country would have considered this a cautionary nightmare, a catastrophe that would unfold if Keir Starmer failed. But in the week of another red-on-red assault and after 150 opinion polls in a row topped by Farage’s Reform UK, it’s no longer a scare story. It’s the most likely prospect.
And still the question of who actually supports Farage meets cliches and bluster. He is “a tribune of working-class rage against the elites”, claims Downing Street adviser Maurice Glasman, while the BBC’s Chris Mason catches an “insurgency vibe”. An ex-City trader turned Brussels politico is now Merrie Englande incarnate, the teller of inconvenient truths from our bombed-out post-industrial heartlands. See our Nigel go hard-hatted into a steelworks! Watch him sink pints with ex-miners, or gambol along an Essex pier!
That’s the sales pitch; the actual customers are vastly different. I can exclusively reveal here the results of the largest-ever survey of Reform voters: more than 11,000 people who would vote for Farage tomorrow, were the polling booths open. Yet far from a single bloc marching under one ideology, they form a large, diverse and fragile coalition.
They stretch from Surrey to Sunderland, from affluent homes with mortgages long paid off to the hard-up. They disagree with each other and with Reform leaders. The results should be studied by anyone in politics, the unions and beyond wondering how to win back Reform voters and stop Farage from running Britain. A spoiler for those in Downing Street: waving flags won’t cut it.
The analysis comes from Hope Not Hate, the respected anti-racist organisation, based on extensive recent polling by Focaldata as well as focus groups. The summary report is available now, and the Guardian analysis is based on extensive access to the background data and focus group responses. What did they find? Well for one, the “red wall” voters usually vox-popped by TV crews as the Farage faithful now make up a distinct minority of his supporters: only one in four of the Reform base. This is who analysts mean when they talk about Reform voters who go left on economics but right on social issues. They’re from towns, not cities, from the north and east of England, and very worried about getting poorer.
Contrast them with another lot dubbed by Hope Not Hate “hardline Conservatives”. They’re about one in five of all Reform voters, often southern and well-to-do, and children of Thatcher. They clash with the first group on workers’ rights and wages and the NHS – and the tensions are growing.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/datawrapper/embed/5FXYV/2/?dark=false
Farageism is a curious dish of microwaved Thatcherism, seasoned with a big dash of old Labour. He’s about slashing taxes and partially re-nationalising water, more manufacturing as well as plans to “bring crypto in from the cold”. It’s a mush of right and left economics, trying to glue together his disparate base. When he boasted last week about forming the “most pro-business, pro-entrepreneurship government this country has seen”, he was speaking to his hardline Conservative voters. But as an election looms, and he has to cobble together an actual platform, he’ll have to pick a side.
But what’s most striking is that most of the Farage vote – much more than half – is not nearly as ideological. Starmer, Boris Johnson and David Cameron have all let them down so badly that they’ve drifted into Reform’s arms.
“The NHS waiting list is still awful … housing crisis not getting any better,” one focus group member says. “I just feel the country was in jeopardy … and Labour hasn’t done anything to get us back on our feet.”
All party leaders are “a load of rubbish”, another focus group member says. “They just spout whatever to get in.”
This is why Farage poses as the anti-politician – even though he’s spent 20 years as a professional politician in Brussels and Westminster, more than double than Starmer’s time.
Yet even among his own voters, Farage is no saviour: he’s a last roll of the dice. Their very lukewarm support is suggested by the terms Hope Not Hate use for the other groups of Reform voters they identified: “reluctant reformers”, “squeezed stewards” and “contrarian youth”. Each is motivated by a distrust of mainstream politics, but otherwise have little in common. To top the ballots they need to get into power; the turquoise brigade can no longer be a single-issue party, blaming “darkies” for all that ails the UK. Reform voters are easily the most hostile to migrants and yet there are significant chunks for whom immigration isn’t the number one issue. What is? Well, there’s a reason why Reform’s campaign leaflets say cost of living is the party’s number one priority.
Similarly, while turquoise rosette-wearers claim climate breakdown is a lie, more than half their voters agree “climate change is caused by human activities”. The single biggest group of Reform voters, “squeezed stewards”, are middle-income (though anxious about the cost of living) and really care about the environment, even if for them it means getting poo out of rivers rather than following the latest Cop summit.
What this analysis of Reform voters shows you is not Farage’s strength, but the political mainstream’s weakness – in two areas above all. First, the majority of Reform’s base are people who have been failed by Thatcherism, even while backing a party leader who is a true believer in the Iron Lady.
Even so, Reform voters’ hopes for fulfilled lives – owning their homes, not worrying about food and energy bills, retiring at a decent age while still healthy to enjoy it – have run aground on the UK’s economic model. Yet the government that promised “change’ has delivered no such thing. Starmer and Reeves now give as their main reason for keeping their jobs the stability of financial markets. What’s their offer? Vote Starmer for PM; get bond traders for your government. Britain deserves far better.
Knowing he has to fend off Farage, Starmer has chosen to festoon himself with flags and to spout poisonous rubbish about an “island of strangers” and a “one-nation experiment in open borders”. He has not opposed racist politics; he has normalised it. And the preachers of racist politics are getting more strident and more influential. Last year, Farage opposed mass deportations. Twelve months of Tommy Robinson calling for it on the hard-right social media channel renamed X and Farage has adopted the policy against people who have already got all the proper paperwork to stay – while Starmer has promised his own crackdown on people applying to remain here. From the extremists’ lips to the voters’ ears within a year.
Yet what’s the message of this vast, detailed study? So many Reform voters want an alternative; they stay with Farage because the other parties only offer more of the same.
