The Populist Tightrope

Can Reform expand without alienating its base?

Photo: Marcelo Moreira

A moment stood out for me in the FT's recent coverage of Reform's local election launch. In Farage's big speech, he bemoaned the Labour government's non-dom tax and that it was driving out billionaires like Lakshmi Mittal. It was a rare moment in which Big Nige misjudged his crowd. "Good riddance" came the response, his keenest supporters seemingly happy to boot out the global rich. It points to a growing tension in Reform between a party whose default economic position is Thatcherite and whose base is far from it.

It is part of a broader problem the party has in moving from one of protest to making a serious play for power. To really succeed in the 2029 election, it needs a broader coalition than ever before. It needs to get more votes and get them in more places and among new demographics to turn polling success into seats. The party's economic outlook is going to matter hugely to this, and the tension between the leadership and the voters could be critical to its success. Beyond that, it has to contend with a greater issue: how to court its anti-establishment base while pulling in more moderate voters.

Like many of the European populist parties, Reform is an ideologically contradictory party. Its leadership largely embodies and seeks a different electorate from the one it has. Played well, this can be a strength. It can offer all things to all voters, and indeed, that has been the route to power of similar insurgents like the Five Star Movement. Misjudged, however, and it could lead to Reform getting caught between the desires of the voters it has and the ones it wants. It also provides an angle for both Labour and Conservatives to squeeze the party, as well as throwing up the opportunity for internal schisms of the sort that have plagued Farage's previous projects.

Dress for the voters you have, not the ones you want

Farage's Mittal comments encapsulate the contradiction at the heart of Reform's economic positioning. Its leadership has always been right-wing and broadly Thatcherite. It believes in spending cuts and slashing taxes, most often for the rich. The 2024 manifesto aimed to increase the inheritance tax threshold, cut stamp duty, lift the VAT threshold and slash corporation taxes. Each of these measures would predominantly benefit the better-off and result in less money flowing into public services. The only concrete proposals on spending were about the military, farming and the NHS, which assumes cuts would be significant elsewhere.

This position hardly maps on to the party's voters. Reform's base is demonstrably concentrated among older voters with lower education levels and of lower social grades. These are voters who are disproportionately dependent on government services and will often be net recipients from the state. They don't pay very much tax but rely on the NHS and frequently receive some form of benefit (including pensions). Indeed, when you look at seats that Reform holds or is close to winning next time, many of them have above-average levels of claimant households.

Many of these voters were driven towards Reform by Thatcherism and its aftershocks. Places like Ashfield are ones that are still smart from the decline of big industry, both at an economic and a cultural level. They are also areas which suffered under austerity, with declining public services and knock-on effects for declining towns and villages. Generally, they are the sorts of voters already left cold – or worse – by talk of tax cuts for the rich. What to do about this will be a challenge for Reform.

Reform's last manifesto did flirt with bits of economic populism. The proposal to raise the tax threshold to £20,000 was a big one and one which would have taken many of their voters out of direct taxes altogether. The party has also called for the nationalisation of Thames Water. Yet none of this amounts to a comprehensive programme to engage with the needs of Reform's base. This is a "low tax, small state" party preaching to voters who need and want state intervention more than they care about tax cuts for the rich. As the outfit becomes more serious about policy-making, as it is apparently set to do with a new think tank, it is going to have to choose more explicitly whether to chase the voters it has or the ones it wants.

Beyond the fringe

This sort of confusion is not just an economic matter for Reform. The same dilemma also applies to its whole appearance. So far, it has enthused a disengaged, anti-establishment base through its broader positions. It has been the most pro-Trump of the Westminster parties. It was also the most explicitly critical of lockdown and has flirted with vaccine scepticism. Farage has embraced anti-globalist tropes and, of course, spoken of his admiration of Putin. Reports have also suggested he is cosying up to US anti-abortion activists with a push to bring pro-life campaigns here.

Each of these is a niche position within UK politics. Taking over these niches has helped Reform gain its current momentum. These positions appeal to people who are both highly animated about politics but disillusioned with its mainstream. It's not that everyone who supports Reform is a crank, but that Reform has made it easy for those who are cranks to get on board. Other despatches from the local election launch attest to this. This bloc could be a valuable accelerant for the outfit – but it could also be a millstone around it.

Most of these positions are not big enough to be successful "wedge" issues. Instead, they make you look a bit odd in the eyes of the median voter. Go on about them too much, and you risk alienating yourself from people's concerns. Abandon them, however, and your cranky base starts to dissipate. You can already see this if you poke around on Twitter for some of the right-wing anti-Farage sentiment, particularly that which has bled towards Reclaim and emerging far-right parties.

We see Reform's attempts to manage this in Farage's oblique conspiracism. As Politico recently discussed, the leader has adopted a "just asking questions" approach towards these things. It is a clever tactic that encourages the people who believe that stuff while passing by those who don't. The question is how long Reform's nudge-nudge embrace of conspiracism can keep both sides happy. It is a deft line to walk – too much embrace of odd issues, and you push yourself away from the voters you need to make it to major numbers. Fail to deliver to the base enough, however, and they might desert you.

Less obviously, Reform's contradictions also apply to its main uniting issue. Much of the progress the party has made so far has been off the back of its anti-immigration position. The recent row with Rupert Lowe, however, has exposed some of the tensions in that too. Everyone knows that Reform is an anti-migration party, but it has again deftly tried to keep messaging so that everyone can see what they want. The headline of their 2024 manifesto was eliminating "non-essential" migration, a phrase that gives a great deal of leeway in balancing economic interests against reducing numbers. Such mealy-mouthiness might not suffice next time.

The argument with Lowe over "remigration" points towards this problem. Even among anti-immigration voters, there are a whole range of positions. These range in severity and respectability from cutting current levels of net migration to returning to something like pre-Windrush demographics. The "remigration" argument highlights this tension. Even that term has a contested meaning on the right – for some, it is about deporting unlawful migrants and criminals; for others, using policy pushes to encourage the return of recent arrivals, and for a small extreme, it means mass deportation of large swathes of foreign-born people, including naturalised citizens. Again, the challenge Reform has is consolidating a voter coalition that ranges from the most extreme to the more moderate versions of this – pinning their project to any iteration of it risks alienating the others.

In conclusion, Reform is a land of contrasts.

There are many reasons for Reform to be buoyant at the moment. The party is riding high in the polls, has a good chance of flipping the Runcorn by-election and taking a big chunk out of the Tories at the locals. Yet, to really succeed, they need to do something Farage projects have previously failed to do: building a bridge between their initial supporters and mainstream success. Doing that successfully will mean negotiating some of these contradictions. That presents an opportunity for the other parties to squeeze them.

For Labour, Reform's big weakness is its Thatcherite leadership. You see them pressing this with ads about Farage's previous comments on NHS funding. They should go further, however, pushing at what promised tax cuts could mean for the very towns they are trying to rival. Given Labour's current fiscal choices, this is more difficult, but if (or when) Reeves has to put up taxes, they should try to skewer Reform on their enthusiasm for cutting levies for the rich. This could help peel away some of Reform's base back in towards Labour.

On the Conservative side, it is a different dilemma. The Tories should be aiming for Reform's economically right-wing voters, highlighting that Farage's party is likely to be beholden to more significant public spending to satisfy their base. The party should also be stressing its cultural differences from Reform, especially around those niche issues where Farage is out of kilter with Tory voters. Of course, to do this, the party has to start seeing Reform as a rival.

The ambiguity of Reform is both a strength and a weakness. For a time, it allows people to see what they wish in it and to project their views onto the party. It also, however, runs the risk of falling apart into a mess when no one is satisfied. The more the party is drawn out on individual issues and forced to put ideas to paper, the greater this risk becomes. There is some irony, of course, that this is essentially the situation the Tories found themselves in after 2019 as they struggled to incorporate the so-called Red Wall into their broader coalition. That failure empowered Reform, but it could undo them in turn.

Winning elections requires mass appeal that brings together your base with persuadable voters. Reform’s base so far is primarily a mix of the disaffected and anti-establishment. Poorer, less educated, older than the median voter. Whether they can combine this with the voters they want – affluent tax cutters across Middle England – will be the defining challenge for them for this parliament. Farage has never managed it before, and with the chance of Labour, the Conservatives, and internal rivals squeezing him, he may fail again.

Farage's fumble in Birmingham speaks to this. He may want Reform to be a low-tax, swashbuckling party, but that is far from what his base is asking for. The question is whether he can convince them to come along while building enough of a brand to draw in other curious voters. Most of the time, Farage has been adept at reading the mood of his voters, but this becomes harder as the party grows. Combining tax cuts, economically left-behind areas, cranks, and floating voters is a tricky circus to be the ringmaster of. Should his opposition, both internal and external, marshal in the right way, it could again prove to be his downfall.

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