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.
I wonder if Russian influence campaigns are trying to smuggle “see, we’re super-tough on immigration also” messaging into liberal campaigns which are opposed to their preferred candidates.
Maybe it sounds like the most crackpot of crackpot theories, but it certainly doesn’t seem like this stuff is popular or effective messaging, and it definitely seems that to some extent they like to promote it anyway. And certainly the Russians have shown quite a bit of skill at co-opting “thought leaders” in other areas of the zeitgeist, and persuading them to emit the requested type of messaging. It would be weird if it hadn’t occurred to them to co-opt any of the mercenary consultants who tend to research and define this type of messaging on behalf of the campaigns.
Not that this is in any way excusing US Democratic / UK Labour’s own inherent dogshit as far as the choice of messaging. I am sure some of it is native-born. It just struck me, in the same way it did the article writer, how similarly it seems like it’s playing out in the UK as in the US, and I wonder if there is a reason for the similarity above and beyond shared foolishness.
There is interference in out democracy from a range of bad faith actors with their own agendas. Russia is definitely meddling, increasingly using AI and recently being shown to have bought off a Reform MEP (although I imagine we don’t know the half of what they got up to with Leave/UKIP/Reform), but we shouldn’t overlook all the dark money being pumped into lobbying groups from the UD, of which Tufton Street is just the most public face. They pretty much drove the Truss government (and the economy off a cliff) but they’ve been influencing politicians and the news for a long time now.