STATE OF HATE 2025

GREGORY DAVIS

When Nigel Farage announced last June that he would be returning to take up leadership of Reform UK ahead of the imminent general election, even he could not have imagined that the party would receive over four million votes and, six months later, be topping some polls and being seriously talked about as a possible government.

Reform UK’s upturn in fortunes lie partly in Farage’s charismatic leadership but also in the increasing disillusionment of voters towards the mainstream parties.

Farage replaced Richard Tice, who had managed to steer the ship for the preceding two years without major catastrophe and seen a small but steady rise in its polling, though was clearly not fulfilling its potential. It clearly underperformed in the 2024 local elections, which took place just weeks before Farage took over the party, picking up just two councillors.

Given the general disillusionment with politics, it was widely believed that only the return of Farage could “super-charge” the party’s prospects. The speculation had been fuelled in part by Farage’s own apparent indecisiveness. Just two weeks earlier he had ruled out a return, saying he would prefer to spend his time on a more important campaign – that of his friend Donald Trump:

“Important though the general election is, the contest in the United States of America on November 5 has huge global significance […] I intend to help with the grassroots campaign in the USA in any way that I can,” he said in late May.

Citing “a terrible sense of guilt” over disappointing his supporters, Farage finally announced that he would stand in the constituency of Clacton, Essex – despite having earlier questioned whether he could bear to “spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton”.

With their talismanic leader in place, Reform UK came in a strong third place with 14.3% of the vote, although in the warped reality of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system this translated to just five seats: Clacton, Ashfield, Boston & Skegness, Great Yarmouth and Basildon South & East Thurrock.

Clacton and Ashfield were comfortable victories for Farage and Tory defector Lee Anderson, while Boston & Skegness and Great Yarmouth were much closer for Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe. Basildon South and East Thurrock was a nailbiter, with Reform’s surprise victor James McMurdock winning the seat with a margin of just 98 votes.

Elsewhere, Reform UK candidates received more than 20% of the vote in 148 seats and came second in 98 seats, mostly in the North East, Midlands and South Wales, with Labour taking first place in 89 of them. However, many of these were won with overwhelming majorities, and six of the seats where Reform came closest to winning were held by the Conservatives, sometimes in close three-way races with Labour.

POWER AND POLITICKING

Now with a foothold in Parliament for the first time, Reform UK set about grappling with the challenges that come with being a truly national party. The election campaign had revealed the chaotic nature of the party’s candidate selection, with at least 166 of its previously announced candidates dropped or swapped in the months prior to polling day.

While the reasons for most of these changes were not made public, there was a drumbeat of stories emerging from the work of HOPE not hate, various newspapers and online activists exposing shockingly unsuitable candidates that had somehow been selected to stand.

The Reform candidate for Derbyshire Dales, for example, was revealed to have posted on X/Twitter that “by importing loads of sub Saharan Africans plus Muslims that inter breed the IQ is in severe decline”. Jonathan Kay, then-candidate for South Ribble, similarly stated that the UK was “importing so many 3rd world immigrants whose average nation IQ’s are between 68-84, into a country whose indigenous populations IQ is 100”.

Other candidates had attacked the Jewish community for their supposed role in founding communism and encouraging immigration, the latter a version of the White Genocide conspiracy theory that constitutes a key tenet of neo-Nazi movements worldwide.

Reform’s then-candidate for Orpington, Mick Greenhough, argued on Twitter that “Ashkenazi Jews have caused the world massive problems” due to having “started socialism”. Paul Carnell, then- candidate for Cannock Chase, recommended a pro- Nazi Holocaust-denial documentary as showing “the other history not taught in Zionist Indoctrination Camps (schools)”.

It was especially notable that, in many cases, the candidates had published their loathsome views on public social media platforms under their own names, apparently unconcerned about whether such posts might preclude them from a Reform candidacy.

The embarrassments stemming from the party’s abject failure to vet candidates did not end with the campaign. Just over a month after the election, it came to light that their surprise winner in Basildon South and East Thurrock, MP James McMurdock, had served a prison sentence for attacking an ex-girlfriend outside a nightclub.

In response to the revelations, McMurdock claimed that he had “pushed” the victim and caused her to fall over, and denied suggestions that he had kicked or punched her, saying that it was the “biggest regret of my life”. Reform UK initially suggested that it had known about the conviction, but had selected him because the party “believes strongly that people can change their lives”. However, when it emerged in December that McMurdock had in fact pleaded guilty to kicking the victim at least four times as she lay on the floor, the story changed somewhat. While insisting that the conviction was “irrelevant” to voters and quickly attempting to switch the topic to the number of TikTok followers he had, Farage appeared to suggest that the party had not in fact been aware of it.

“James McMurdock was one of those many candidates who wasn’t vetted at all,” Farage noted. “Look, I didn’t know any of this when I took back over as leader.”

The party made a risible effort to blame a professional vetting agency for this failure to perform even the most basic checks, despite admitting that they had selected and announced the candidates themselves and had only belatedly hired the agency when the first scandals had already emerged.

Nor has there been any sign of improvement in the party’s internal processes. Just a few weeks prior to the national conference, at which Farage promised the party would “weed out candidates that are totally inappropriate” in order to build an “election-winning machine”, the party appointed David Hyden-Milakovic as county-coordinator for Staffordshire.

Having already been exposed for his links to the neo- Nazi Patriotic Alternative group and his posts to an antisemitic TikTok channel, Hyden-Milakovic appears to have been subject to an internal disciplinary process that concluded in December and allowed him to stay in his role, but then resigned two days after HOPE not hate published a blog highlighting it.

Nonetheless, the replacement of Richard Tice as chair of the party, just one week after the election, appeared to show that the party perceived its chaotic organisation and highly-centralised and undemocratic structure as needing to change.

“This is just the beginning,” Reform Chair Zia Yusuf announced just a week after the election. “The important work of professionalising the party, building national infrastructure and continuing to grow membership has already begun.”

Tice was moved from Chair of the party to Deputy Leader, replacing Ben Habib in that role, which prompted the latter to become increasingly critical of Farage and the direction of Reform UK over the months that followed.

When Habib quit the party altogether on 29 November, Farage responded that it was a “champagne moment” to finally be rid of the “very bitter, very twisted” man, but his glib response might have been something of a misstep.

Habib is a popular figure on the radical right, perceived as being relatively intellectual but ideologically hardline, and many of his criticisms of the party are uncomfortable ground for Reform’s supporters – and hard to refute.

Lee O’Shea, county organiser for the West Midlands, stated that Habib’s departure had not gone down well with the rank-and-file. Writing via a pseudonymous Twitter account, he replied to Habib’s tweet suggesting that the news had ruined a meeting he organised:

“Sad day, by coincidence I held a RUK meet last night. You are held with extremely high regard, many disappointed in @Nigel_Farage”. This news put a right downer on the event.”

Habib is a vociferous critic of the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework, for example, and insists that Brexit “is not done”. For the faction that defined themselves by total intransigence on matters large and small during the Brexit years, it is uncomfortable territory to be facing allegations of realpolitik and betrayal from an erstwhile supporter.

DEMOCRATISATION?

But it is on the matter of party control and democratisation that Farage and Yusuf might find Habib’s criticisms most stinging. In stark contrast to most political parties, which belong to their members in the form of an unincorporated association, Reform UK was registered as a private limited company in 2018, and is controlled outright by Farage with 53% of the shares.

In September 2023 Farage told the party conference in Birmingham that he had set it up in this way to remove the possibility of the party being “hijacked by extremists and bad actors” – later referencing Jeremy Corbyn as an example but perhaps also thinking of the rebellious cranks who plagued his leadership of UKIP.

Farage has decided, however, to give up his shares in order to hand control of the party to its members. Speaking at the Reform conference in September, he said: “You, the members, will own this party. You will own this party, not me. And we will have a board to manage the party, with significant elected representation from the members and that board will be there to safeguard how we’re operating, to prevent entryism.”

However, the new constitution represents only a small shift towards democratisation, and falls far short of the democratic nature of any comparable political party. According to the draft constitution circulated to members, the board that manages the party will consist of eight voting members:

• The party leader
• The deputy leader
• Three members appointed by the leader
• Three members elected by the membership

Such a structure hands considerable power to the existing leadership, and the constitution goes further in cementing Farage’s role at the head of the party. A no-confidence motion in his leadership can only be proposed if more than 50% of the parliamentary party write to the party chairman – but only once the party has more than 100 elected MPs.

The restrictions on a membership-led effort to replace the leadership are equally stringent. For the membership to propose the motion, at least 50% must write to the chair to request it – meaning that on current membership numbers the chair’s office would have to process at least 92,580 letters or emails in order to establish that the threshold had
been reached.

Habib was scathing in response, describing the draft constitution circulated to members as “badly drafted, incomplete and ill-thought-through”. He suggested that the announced plan to convert Reform UK Ltd into a company limited by guarantee was not even legally possible, and that a new company would have to be launched.

By February 2025 there was no sign that the new constitution had taken effect. The party has not filed any paperwork with Companies House or the Electoral Commission to suggest any significant changes.

ROOTS & BRANCH REFORM

While announcing that ex-Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns had defected to Reform and would stand as their candidate for Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Farage stated that the party – which had previously done little to establish local support networks – was now pursuing the “Paddy Ashdown model”:

“Paddy Ashdown was that dynamic leader of the Lib Dems who understood that until he’d won a significant number of district council seats and county council seats, you weren’t even in the race to win parliamentary election seats or by-election seats […] That is very much the model that we’re following.”

Since the general election last July, the party has made clear strides towards pursuing this strategy. Since announcing their intention to “professionalise and democratise” at the party conference in September, the party has set up hundreds of local branches, with more launching every week. Reform UK now boasts 52 councillors across the country, not including parish or community councillors, as well as a further six who sit on Derby City Council as a local franchise, “Reform Derby”. However, only a small number of these were elected under the banner of Reform.

Just ten of Reform’s current roster of councillors have been elected as candidates of Reform UK, five of whom have been elected in by-elections since the general election. Another 24 Reform councillors were originally elected as Conservatives prior to defecting and the remainder as Independents or Labour.

As might be expected, Reform has not been too picky about who it lets in to the fold: in Derbyshire the party accepted two county councillors, Philip Rose and Alexander Stevenson, who had both been suspended by the Conservative Party: Rose for antisemitic social media posts and Stevenson for comparing the vaccine rollout to the Holocaust.

Both men would soon leave the party in acrimonious circumstances, defecting en masse with eight town and parish councillors. Ironically, Farage responded to their defection by accusing them of being an “out-of- control branch” that had put forward candidates who had failed vetting.

Reform candidates at local by-elections have had a patchy response. The party has put up candidates for 86 of the 184 local by-elections since GE2024, of whom just seven were duly elected.

By-election losses or gains should not be taken as overly significant, however. Turnout is so woefully low in many that they are of little value in gauging the mood of an area. In December, for example, 18-year- old Kieran Mishchuk was elected for Reform in the Milton Regis ward of Swale Borough Council on a turnout of just 17%, with a vote tally less than half of that of his Labour predecessor in the seat.

The proportion of by-elections that the party contests has increased recently, however, and the creation of hundreds of constituency branches will likely mean a much more enthusiastic engagement with local politics.

Most of the areas in which Reform candidates are achieving breakthroughs are fairly unsurprising – mostly places which have seen strong results for UKIP or local independent groups over the past decade.

Other areas have been more surprising. The ward of Marton in Blackpool, for example, was won handily by Labour on a 51% vote share at the 2023 local elections, with the Reform candidate coming last on 9.5%. In October 2024, popular local Reform candidate Jim O’Neill won the seat with 38.7% of the vote.

While Reform has yet to win a seat on a local council in Wales, it is likely to be a key target for the party in the year ahead. Reform came third in Wales at the 2024 general election with 16.9% of the vote, failing to win any seats but coming second in 13 of Wales’s 32 seats. Their closest results included the constituencies of Llanelli and Montgomeryshire & Glyndwr, where the party fell short by just 1,504 and 3,815 votes respectively.

But Reform’s focus in Wales will now be very much on the Senedd elections that will take place in 2026. Farage has said his party aims to be the “main challenger” to Labour’s dominance, and suggested that Reform should have a formalised structure, including a leader for Wales, in place by that point.

THE TRUMP CARD

One factor that is already proving complicated for Reform UK in the months ahead is their transatlantic relationships with the two radical-right figureheads of our age: Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Farage has worked hard to hitch his wagon to Trump, frequently flying to the States in an attempt to curry favour. But whilst he revelled in Trump’s win, Farage did feel obliged to acknowledge that Trump is not a popular figure in the UK, though suggested that this unpopularity is largely a matter of “style” rather than well-substantiated fears about his policies and personality:

“Whether you like Trump’s style or not – and many don’t, many find him a bit outlandish, a bit New York for their tastes…”

If Trump’s presidency is anything like as vindictive and chaotic as it has appeared so far, this association might provide some difficulty for the Reform UK leadership in the years to come. Trump is widely disliked in the UK, with just 18% of Brits favouring him to win the presidency. That number rises to 54% among Reform voters voters, whereas there were 26% who preferred Harris.

Another relationship that has already proved problematic is that with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. In December 2024 rumours began to swirl that he might be considering making a $100,000,000 donation to Reform UK. Citing unnamed business people and Conservative Party officials, The Times suggested that the owner of X/Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX might be considering a “f*** you Starmer payment” that could “open the door to near-limitless anti-government advertisements from Reform”.

While the sourcing of the story and the sum was vague, Musk’s antipathy towards the Labour government and sympathy towards Reform is well-evidenced, as is his track record of using his obscene wealth to pursue political goals.

Nigel Farage was quick to welcome Musk’s support: “I am very pleased he’s backing our party, even if reports of his potential financial donations are somewhat over-exaggerated,” he said. “Whether we like everything he says or not, he’s a hero.”

Embarrassingly, he would then immediately be presented with an example of a dislikeable statement from his hero. Apparently peeved by Farage’s distancing of his party from Tommy Robinson – like many within Reform itself – Musk tweeted: “Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

THE PATH AHEAD

Reform’s steady rise in polling since the general election, which has seen them come in first place in two separate polls in January, will be put to the test at the 2025 local elections. While several county council elections have been delayed by a year to allow for local government reorganisation, there are still many in which Reform expect to do well. These include Kent, County Durham, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire.

Reform will also be posing a serious challenge in the Greater Lincolnshire, Doncaster and Hull & East Yorkshire mayoral elections.

In addition to the council and mayoral elections, Reform will also be hoping to do well in a likely by-election in Runcorn, where the current MP Mike Amesbury recently pleaded guilty to assault.

These elections will be the first major outing for Reform’s brand new network of constituency branches. It is too early to say how effective local branches will be at this stage; while some in Reform will have prior experience campaigning for other parties, others might have a steeper learning curve. It is likely, however, that all will be fired up with the enthusiasm that comes with campaigning for a new party that is climbing the polls, a stark contrast to the position of Labour and the Conservatives.

While it is too early to predict election outcomes, as unpredictable events – local and global – upend our news cycles on a regular basis, the only thing we can say for certain is that Reform UK poses an immense challenge to those who reject the politics of division, and looks likely to do so for the foreseeable future.