Why so many people are voting Reform

As most of you know already, I have a book coming out in September called “The Rise of Reform: The inside story of Britain’s political disruptors”. It follows a year and a half of me interviewing Reform MPs and donors but also, more interestingly in my opinion, hundreds of Reform activists and candidates across Great Britain. The research at least gave me a good idea of what makes them tick, their strengths and weaknesses on the ground, and why so many people have gravitated towards them since the 2024 general election. Anyhow, you can pre-order the book here.

I thought what might be good is to talk about that latter point, why so many people are joining, standing for, or voting for Reform. I am aiming this at my core audience, most of whom are anti-Reform. I think there is a disconnect within the liberal, pro-European community in Britain on what the appeal of the Reform Party is. They understandably recoil from the whole thing, describing it as racist and/or fascist in nature, with befuddlement as to how anyone could be “taken in by Farage”. I will try and go over the basics of why Reform appeals to so many voters in this article.

For one, you need to take a step back and see how most people in the UK, particularly those who do not pay insane attention to every last occurrence in British politics, see the current political situation. This is particularly true of voters who live outside of London, even more so if they live in a non-affluent part of the country.

They see a decade at least of total and utter failure by the Tories, with Liz Truss and Boris Johnson standing out in particular as terrible, followed by the utter failure of Starmer’s government. Perhaps you quibble with this account, but this is how most British voters see it. So much of Reform’s appeal is “We gave the Tories and Labour a go, they failed miserably, why not give Farage a go?”

So many of you will now say, “But Farage was the guy who sold us Brexit more than anyone else did. Surely if people feel angry at the way things have gone over the last decade, then Farage should get the lion’s share of the blame, right?” That may be the way you see, but that simply isn’t the way most of the country sees it. Very few people are happy with the way Brexit has gone, that is true. But people who feel like we shouldn’t have left the EU mostly don’t vote for Reform and are more angry at the Tories anyhow - they called the referendum and then got us our current shitty deal with the EU, so that is understandable - and so that doesn’t materially hurt Farage. As for people who are disappointed by Brexit but feel that’s because we didn’t get “real Brexit”, or that Brexit was at least done badly, these are Farage’s core people - and there are loads of them across the country. They look at Brexit’s failure and think, “Of course Brexit didn’t work, we had the Tories in charge and they didn’t believe in it. Brexit would work with Nigel in charge.” It’s another take on “Why not give Farage a go?”

Now, as long time readers know, I do not agree with this assessment of our current predicament. I don’t think Brexit was done incorrectly, or that we didn’t get a “real Brexit” - I just think Brexit was a bad idea and was never going to turn out the way its cheerleaders said it would. But I also get why those who think “Brexit would work with Nigel in charge” arrive at that conclusion, even if I don’t agree with it. If you look at the current political situation, across all of the political parties, it is strangely the take that makes the most objective sense, at least if you don’t look any deeper into the issues. That’s because the Labour Party, the Tories, the Lib Dems, the Greens, basically everyone in British politics essentially agrees with the “Brexit would work with Nigel in charge” narrative, at least in practice. They unconsciously support it every single day.

Labour do so by saying that we should never rejoin, not only the EU but the single market or the customs union as well. You cannot say “Brexit is responsible for the mess we are in, but we won’t do anything about that, sorry, we are stuck where we are forever.” It makes you look weak and stupid, which is one of the major reasons why Starmer and his government looks weak and stupid. Labour are propping up the “Farage = Brexit’s salvation” equation, held by so many people in Britain, in exactly this way. After all, if Brexit is irreversible and Labour have no ideas on how to make it work (and in fact say it was a terrible error), then why not give someone who always believed in Brexit a chance to make it work?

The Tories prop up the Farage narrative unconsciously by having a strategy that is essentially “Farage is basically right about everything, you just need us boring people to carry out what he wants to do instead of Farage and his mates”. And this is a very, very, very weak strategy that has not shown any sign of working so far. The Tories in fact gained the few seats they did at the 2026 local elections in England in spite of this strategy.

The Lib Dems support the Farage Brexit narrative by saying that Brexit is irreversible, at least for now, and all we can do is try and minimally restrict the damage that is does by reverting to something every Remainer thought was a terrible, unacceptable compromise back in 2019 (Theresa May’s Brexit). Again, if we have to be outside the EU for some reason, and every single political party in Britain agrees with this idea, then why not have someone take charge of it who really believes in it?

If no political party can make the case for at least rejoining the single market - and no nationwide party is making this case, just to be clear - that means fighting against Farage’s narrative is totally impossible. You cannot say he is not fit to run the country because of some terrible thing that you yourself do not want to change in any material way. That simply makes no sense.

There are many reasons why people are voting Reform, some of them more complicated than others. But the “Farage = Brexit salvation” one I think is core to the whole thing. Again, if you want to read more about this, I go into great detail in the book, which you can pre-order here.