Chris Bambery looks at the political challenges the left faces from Reform UK, as Labour fails to deliver any real improvement in working class lives

The recent headlines concerning Reform UK have been about divisions within its leadership over its relations with Tommy Robinson and his supporters.

Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, has said that the party ‘want nothing to do with’ Robinson and ‘all of that lot’. Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, also said after the summer riots that he had never had anything to do with ‘the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred’. But two high-profile 2024 Reform UK candidates, Howard Cox and Ben Habib, take a different stance saying that some of those who recently rallied for Robinson in central London were Reform’s ‘own people.’

After Robinson was jailed for contempt of court, Cox, who stood as Reform’s London mayoral candidate and as a parliamentary candidate in Dover and Deal, where he came second to Labour, said Robinson should not be in jail and Tice had been wrong to distance the party from those who attended the rally.

In reality this is a storm in a teacup. Robinson is unlikely to want to join Reform UK, focusing instead on street mobilisations. Those in turn do not threaten Farage and co. In fact, they can benefit Reform UK. A division of labour between the mainstream electoral far right and the smaller fascist street gangs is the norm across the European far right.

The real concern should be that Reform UK can benefit from already evident disillusion with the Starmer government.

Electoral success

Last Week Reform UK won a formerly safe Labour Wolverhampton Council seat in Bilston North. Reform UK candidate Anita Stanley secured 652 votes, almost 200 more than Labour, which only narrowly beat the Greens. The Conservatives polled 257 votes.

Last month Reform UK won the Marton seat on Blackpool council from Labour. It polled

462 votes, ahead of Labour’s 334 votes, and the Tories’ 254 votes. The winning candidate, Jim O’Neill said: ‘Quite early on we were getting the message from some people that they felt betrayed by Labour and they were looking for an alternative. I was just straight talking with people on the doorstep.’ Last month three independent councillors in Mansfield switched to Reform UK.

In Scotland, two Tory Aberdeenshire Councillors, Mark Findlater and Laurie Carnie, defected to Reform UK, becoming its first elected representatives north of the border. They were joined by an Essex County Councillor, Jaymey McIvor, who became the first Tory councillor to defect to Reform UK.

Scotland is not immune from the rise of Reform UK, as some like to think. In a council by-election in Mossend and Holytown, North Lanarkshire, last month. Labour pipped the SNP by 616 votes to 586, with Reform UK coming third ahead of the Tories, admittedly taking just 263 votes to the Tories 127.

A poll earlier this month, asking how people would vote in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, taken in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s budget, saw Sir Keir Starmer’s net approval rating fall to a record low of -28, down from -5 in August. Its support in the Holyrood election fell by seven points, below the SNP.

But John Curtice warned: ‘The proportion of Labour voters switching to Nigel Farage’s party has doubled from 7 per cent in August to 14 per cent now. In July Reform was overwhelmingly reliant on winning over former Tory voters. Now disillusion with Labour at Westminster is enabling the party to spread its wings more widely.’

This means the possibility has opened of the party becoming a key player at Holyrood. It could win as many as a dozen seats in a Scottish parliament election held tomorrow. That would make it impossible both for the remaining unionist parties and for those in favour of independence to sustain a majority government without either reaching out to Reform or reaching an accommodation across the constitutional divide.”

One Reform UK supporter points out: ‘Richard Tice himself has noted, Reform is polling well in Scotland and Wales ahead of the Holyrood and Senedd Elections in 2026, which — and this is the key part — have an electoral system that incorporates proportional representation. This is far more advantageous to a new, insurgent party like Reform than the local elections. Scotland in particular is proving an attractive prospect, with a projected eight Reform MSPs elected if Scotland went to the polls today. A similar situation is also occurring in Wales, although the polling is rather patchier.’

Indeed a poll last month had Reform UK on track to win 17 seats in the Senedd. At the July Westminster election Reform failed to win a seat in Wales, but took 223,018 votes across Wales, making them the third biggest party by vote share, ahead of the Tories. It finished second in 13 Welsh constituencies. Nigel Farage has now launched his party’s campaign for the Senedd elections, confident it can make inroads into Labour’s vote.

Returning to those seats in England and Wales where Reform UK came second, Nigel Farage has said Reform UK will be targeting the former South Yorkshire coalfield in local elections: ‘There are many parts of the old South Yorkshire coalfield that I genuinely believe will be very, very serious target seats for us come the next election,’ he said. He claimed that the party was ‘forming branches rapidly right across Yorkshire.’ Adding: ‘We’re looking ahead to 2026 to 2027 when there are big sets of elections right across the county. The one we’re going to focus on will be Doncaster next year when the whole of that district is up.’

Richard Rose argued at the start of this month:

‘Reform is now at a point where it is a threat to Labour MPs. Of the 98 seats where Reform finished second in last July’s election, 89 have Labour MPs. Electoral Calculus reckons that of the 11 additional seats it would gain according to this month’s poll figures, 10 would come from Labour and only 1 from the Conservatives.

‘In 89 seats Reform is the second-place challenger to a Labour MP. A combination of tactical voting for Reform by Tories whose candidate has no chance of winning and a further attrition of Labour voters could deliver dozens of seats to Reform where it is less than 20 percentage points behind Labour.’

The Tories and Reform

Reform UK has about 90,000 members — just over half the number of members the Tories have. But the latter’s membership is concentrated in winnable seats, Reform UK’s is more spread out. Reform UK’s support in July came from voters who had previously voted Tory and who saw immigration as the main issue. But it would be wrong to see these simply as swing voters Kemi Badenoch can win back. As I have previously pointed the majority say they will not be returning to the Tories:

‘Reform’s rise is due to voters’ protest against a system and the ruling parties that has failed them time and time again. Just 31% of Reform voters considered voting Tory on 4 July.’

In an interesting article in The Conversation, Paul Whiteley points out that the Tories and Reform UK are not, in the main, competing for the same voters:

‘The two parties did well in the same constituencies but appealed to different demographic groups within those constituencies. If they were campaigning for support in the same group of voters they would be rivals, but for the most part they relied on support from different groups…

… looking at the percentage of people in constituencies over the age of 64, most of whom were retired, we see a big difference. There is a strong positive correlation between this measure and voting Conservative (0.45), indicating that the Tories did well among older people. The opposite is true for Reform, since the relationship is negative (although relatively weak at -0.17). Reform did not rely on older people’s support in the same way as the Conservatives.’

Whiteley goes on to say: ‘A similar point can be made about the percentages who worked in professional and higher management occupations. The Tories did well in this group, whereas Reform did badly. Among constituencies with high levels of unemployment, the reverse was true. A high proportion of unemployed people boosted the Reform vote and undermined the Conservative vote.’

In July Reform won two seats in the East Midlands (Ashfield, and Boston and Skegness) and three seats in the East of England (Clacton, Great Yarmouth, and South Basildon and East Thurrock). All Reform gains were from Conservative seats. But as noted above nearly all the seats where it came second were won by Labour, and 60 of these were in the north of England while 13 were in Wales.

If you look at the map of where Reform UK came second in July it also shows they were second in seats in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, Essex and Kent.

Reform UK faces its own internal problems. Its leaders are as capable of turning on one another as a sackful of polecats. It needs to create a local branch stricture and to build a presence on local councils in order to create an electoral springboard. The BBC reports that:

‘Reform UK is aiming to field hundreds of candidates and take seats on county councils in target areas, from Essex and Lincolnshire, to Norfolk and Kent.’ The same piece notes that in September a ‘poll by JL Partners suggested one in four Labour voters was considering supporting Reform.’

JL Partners also asked 16 to 17-year olds during the general election campaign, and found Farage’s Reform UK in second place among them, polling 23 percent. The Greens were close behind on 18 percent. The gender breakdown was even more striking. Reform tied with Labour at 35 percent among 16-17 year-old men. The Tories barely registered. ‘Both genders of that age group [were] turning away from mainstream party politics towards what you might call more populist politics,’ said J.L. Partners director Scarlett Maguire.

These figures suggest a growing threat from Reform electorally, given that Labour is already unpopular and its failure to address the real problems facing British workers will continue. We have to organise against the threat, as well as the overt danger of the fascists and the connections between the two. With the election of Trump in the US Farage will be further emboldened. The left needs to organise in communities and workplaces to stop the far right making gains.