15 March 2024

What is Reform UK?

The right-wing populist party has secured its first MP, with the former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson defecting to Reform on Monday. It’s now averaging more than 10% in the polls.

Where does it come from?
Reform was originally called the Brexit Party, founded in 2018 by financier and hotelier Catherine Blaiklock with support from Mr Brexit himself, Nigel Farage. When Blaiklock got embroiled in an Islamophobia scandal the following year, Farage took control, exploiting Tory dithering over Brexit to win more seats than any other UK party at the 2019 European elections. But with Boris Johnson promising to “Get Brexit Done” in the general election that followed, Farage won just 2% of the vote. In 2021, the party switched to opposing lockdowns and rebranded as Reform UK. Perma-tanned businessman Richard Tice became leader, with Farage named “honorary president”.

What are its policies? 
A heady mix of social conservatism and libertarianism. Reform’s online manifesto – apparently a “working draft” – proposes banning critical race theory and “transgender ideology” in schools; slashing immigration; leaving the European Convention on Human Rights; cutting all government spending by 5%; and abolishing income tax for those earning less than £20,000 a year. At the kookier end of the spectrum, it also wants Britain to leave the World Health Organisation and “reject the influence of the World Economic Forum”. In a section on scrapping Net Zero, Reform urges us to see the bright side of global warming: “In Roman Britain some 2,000 years ago, it was two degrees warmer than now. Grapes for wine were grown in Yorkshire.”

How popular is it?
After polling in single figures for months, support for Reform has recently ticked upwards. Results in recent by-elections have been between 6.3% (Rochdale) and 13% (Wellingborough). The party is pitching itself at the pro-Brexit Red Wall voters who backed Boris Johnson in 2019, and winning former miner Lee Anderson to the cause seems to be a vindication of this strategy. Tice has hinted at “conversations going on” with other Tory MPs who might follow Anderson’s lead.

Does this spell trouble for the Conservatives?
Absolutely. Reform is poaching 20% of the Tories’ 2019 voters but just 2% of Labour’s. Analysis last year by the think tank More in Common found that Reform was on track to deny the Tories 35 constituencies – mainly due to Red Wall voters who are furious with the government for its failure to tackle immigration. And if Farage returns as leader says Scarlett Maguire, a director at pollster JL Partners, “then all bets are off”.

Does Reform have a weakness?
The party’s economic Thatcherism is “largely at odds with the voters it is trying to chase,” says John Oxley in UnHerd. Red Wall voters are “often dependent on state services” and tend to support big spending; Johnson won them over in 2019 in part by promising to splash the cash. Tice’s vision, by contrast, is “libertarian on everything but immigration”. This free-market philosophy is not shared by European populist parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the far-right Alternative for Germany, which tend to be more interventionist – and more successful.

How would reform do in a general election?
Badly. Our first-past-the-post voting system means it is very unlikely to win even a single seat in parliament. Small parties also tend to suffer from a lack of high-quality candidates and financial muscle – it’s expensive to contest 650 seats at once. And before he defected, Anderson called Tice a “pound-shop Farage”, which doesn’t bode well for morale. Farage’s old party, UKIP, used to do far better in by-elections than Reform is doing now, and it only ever ended up with one seat: Clacton.

Will Reform shift the Tory party politically?
Yes, says Stephen Bush in the FT, but not in the way you might think. Although no MPs have followed Anderson yet, many local Tory activists have. Ironically, this “reduces rather than increases” the power of the Conservative right – if the headbangers leave, the party membership becomes, on average, more moderate. Currently, “essentially everyone” in Westminster thinks that Rishi Sunak will be replaced as Tory leader by a more hard-line figure. But a more moderate party membership, who get to vote on the final two leadership candidates, might just confound those expectations.