At 10pm on 4 July 2024, the night of the general election, all those worried about the rising far right took a sharp intake of breath as the exit poll predicted Reform UK would win an unprecedented 13 seats. When the votes were finally all counted and the group had only won five seats, many were relieved.
This result was inconceivable just a month before. The party had underperformed at the May local elections, picking up just two councillors, and with Richard Tice as leader, Reform looked unthreatening in the general election polls.
This all changed when Nigel Farage re-entered the fray and replaced Tice as leader. Reform surged in the polls and on 14 June, the party overtook the Conservatives for the first time. By the day of the election, it was clear that Reform was likely to have a good night.
With 4.1 million votes — 14.3% of the total — the result represents the largest ever vote share for a far-right party at a general election. Reform came second place in 98 constituencies, 89 of which were won by Labour, including large swathes of the North East, Midlands and South Wales, and gained above 20% of the vote in 148.
Newly crowned-leader Nigel Farage scored a convincing win in Clacton, taking 46.2% of the vote and a majority of 8,405 over the Conservative incumbent. This represents a swing of 45.1% from the Conservatives to Reform in the constituency, the largest in the country.
The party’s sole incumbent MP, Tory defector Lee Anderson, was rewarded by avoiding the fate of most of his former Red Wall Tory colleagues. He netted a commanding 42.8% of the vote to defeat the Labour candidate in Ashfield, though with a slightly lower vote share and majority to his 2019 victory.
Tice and Rupert Lowe, the former Brexit Party MEP and Southampton FC chairman, also won their seats of Boston & Skegness and Great Yarmouth, though with lower majorities of 2,010 and 1,426 respectively.
The one breakthrough from Reform’s candidate list, which largely consisted of paper candidates, was James McMurdock of Basildon South and East Thurrock, who beat the Labour candidate with a wafer-thin majority of just 98 votes.
The party would later add another name to their caucus: Jim Allister, leader of the hardline Ulster unionist party Traditional Unionist Voice, who announced that he would accept the Reform party whip at Westminster.
The election result, shocking as it was, did not occur in a vacuum. The rapid rise of Reform emerged from an existing climate of prejudice and anger that has been fostered for years by mainstream politicians and elements of our media. Whether it is endless newspaper headlines demonising Muslims and asylum seekers, or then-home secretary Suella Braverman describing the arrival of desperate people by boat as an “invasion”, all have fed into the climate that Farage and Reform UK exploited.
Most prominent is GB News, an increasingly influential media outlet for far-right opinion that regularly pushes radical right and conspiratorial narratives. While viewpoints vary across its programmes, a number of GB News’s most high- profile presenters use the platform to promote harmful conspiracy theories and socially divisive, hyper-partisan political narratives. Importantly, the channel has also provided Farage, Anderson and Tice with their own shows.
Beyond GB News, there is also a growing roster of columnists in The Telegraph and The Spectator who seem obsessed with fighting back against “wokeness” and the “liberal elite”.
In addition to all of this is the impact of social media, most notably the toxification of X (formerly Twitter) under Elon Musk’s ownership. While social media has always posed a problem, X, with its lax moderation policies, poor enforcement and embrace of formerly banned extremists, has become a safe place for extreme people and politics to flourish.
All of this has combined to help foster a fruitful climate for a party like Reform UK.
One of the most troubling aspects about Reform’s success at the general election is that it was achieved with very little party infrastructure.
Reform is not a traditional political party but a limited company, with Farage as the company director and majority shareholder.
During the election, the “party” lacked a significant activist base and had very few functioning branches. Despite its lack of a professional ground game consisting of organised activists targeting constituencies informed by data insights, it still came away with over 14% of the vote.
In the months since the election, the party has already claimed that it will democratise and build a formidable ground operation with a stated aim of setting up 120 new branches across the country. A smattering of meetings have already taken place.
The party is now able to draw on a significant registered supporter base that grew dramatically upon Farage’s return, rising to an estimated 76,000. How many of these will be converted into activists remains to be seen.
However, one major issue Farage will continue to grapple with is how to deal with the extremist activists within the party. On 5 July, during his first speech as an elected MP, Farage vowed:
“Above all what we’re going to do from today is we’re going to professionalise the party, we’re going to democratise the party and those few bad apples that have crept in will be gone, will be long gone, and we will never have any of their type back in our organisation.”
However, Farage’s prospects of “professionalising” and detoxifying the project appear dim. Every one of his prior vehicles has been dogged by scandal and disorder, and Reform’s anti-migrant, reactionary, conspiracy theory-tinged platform will continue to act as a magnet for bigots and eccentrics.
Despite now boasting MPs in Westminster, Reform will continue to pose as insurgent outsiders. Some commentators have wrongly argued that radical right populists in positions of power will struggle because they lose their ability to claim they represent the “pure people” against the “corrupt elite”. This is not likely to be the case with Reform, especially as it has such a small number of seats.
Reform MPs will present themselves as islands of “common sense” and champions of “the people” within parliament. If anything, we can expect them to use their new positions to “expose” how corrupt/out of touch/dangerous the “elite” really is from inside the “belly of the beast”.
Reform is now well-placed to exert a toxic influence on the rest of British politics. Reform itself will seek to present this election as “proof” that it represents the true voice of “the people”, especially in relation to its core issues, notably immigration.
This claim will be aided consciously and inadvertently by some media framing. While 14% is a deeply concerning statistic, it remains a small minority of the public, especially when turnout is factored in.
One unhelpful side effect of overstating Reform’s strength is that mainstream parties will then seek to pander to a distorted vision of what “the people” supposedly want, shifting the centre ground ever further right on a range of issues. The Conservative Party will be especially susceptible to this.
However, Labour is also not immune to this danger. Social democratic parties have a long history of shifting right on issues such as immigration in a misguided attempt to undercut a growing radical right threat. The evidence is very clear that this does not work.
Another risk is that Labour decides not to expend its resources fighting Reform with full force, believing that its success is to Labour’s advantage because it will continue to split the right-wing vote and/or unite the centre and left against a more worrying threat.
Sadly, there is little evidence that Reform has peaked, with some recent polls still placing the party above the Conservatives. In coming months, we are likely to see the growth of a nationwide branch structure which will aim to mobilise activists in communities already susceptible to the far right.
Farage has already identified the English County Council elections as his “first big target”. Reform hopes to field over 2,000 candidates and co-opt the Labour vote via similar ground-level local campaigning that UKIP used effectively in the early 2010s. Reform will also likely prioritise the 2026 Senedd elections in Wales. The ultimate aim however, is to “replace the Conservative Party” as a national contender at the 2029 general election.
With the cost of living crisis still raging and the Labour government’s honeymoon period ending, the divisive and opportunistic politics offered
by Farage and Reform has far from reached its ceiling.
The real danger comes if the government fails to meet the material needs of the communities that Reform is targeting. Worse still, if the government seeks to occupy Reform’s space with ever more right wing rhetoric on immigration and asylum seekers, this will only serve to legitimise Reform’s politics, increase the salience of its issues and thereby boost its electoral success in the long term.
With local and Welsh elections fast approaching, there is no time for complacency. The time to understand and oppose the threat is now.
Reform UK’s rise is a threat to our communities, spreading division and pushing far-right ideas. In the 2024 General Election, they garnered 4.1 million votes, making it the largest GE vote share ever for a far-right party in the UK.. Download the report today for analysis on why this happened and what we can do to stop them.
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