In the absence of any avowed reform voters putting their 2p in I would say the following:
cause people are sick of the tories, but don’t like labour. Reform fractured the conservative vote. I’m astonished they made 4 seats, but they actually won more votes than the Lib Dems who won 48. Even madder- Labour won less votes than they did under Corbyn but ended up with the biggest majority since the 19th century. FPTP does some weird and wonderful things!
Mostly people who aren’t left leaning are not so concerned with the appearance of their vote or virtue signalling, so if someone runs on a policy of “I’ll sort out the immigration issue”, then they’re happy to hear it. The tories have sworn for years they’ll manage immigration but they never did. Labour advertise they won’t.
It was an interesting experience in Australia 20 years ago when the same debate happened. 50-100k illegal immigrants coming in annually and most of them crowding into the cities. Obviously they’re unable to afford to live in the more salubrious parts of town, so they move into the congested suburbs where services and infrastructure is already creaking. The same debate happened “oh you people who don’t like immigrants/vote one nation are all racist” and so no one admits to voting for reform (or Pauline Hanson’s one nation party as it was in Aus), but they do because they’re sick of having to deal with the issues that immigration causes.
dismissing everyone who votes Reform as racist is a mistake. Mostly they just want to be able to go to the GP, to go to A&E and wait less than 4 hours and to use buses and trains. They get lured in by parties like reform cause the major parties are dishonest.
No one says “immigration is at the level it is because we don’t have enough children. In consequence we need to bring in lots of people or our economy will collapse. But because they’re migrants with different cultural values and multiculturalism is really hard to get right, and we tend to fuck it up, they end up crowding out poor areas where services are already pretty bad.”
i would bet that Nigel Farage isn’t even a racist. He’s just an opportunist. We’re living in the worst cost of living crisis since the oil shocks of the 70s. Even before the COL crisis, wages have been stagnating and inflation rising (steadily around the 2% mark). More and more people are dissatisfied and no one is being honest and explaining what’s going on and how it will ever get fixed. When people are desperate they will turn to someone who appears to be being honest, and at least identifies openly something they experience: immigration causes issues.
Im not here saying we shouldn’t have immigration- it’s absolutely clear that with a negative birth rate immigration is an absolute must. But it causes issues and governments tend to be bad at managing migration. And the people for whom it causes issues are upset about it. So they voted Reform. It’s a finger to the Tories, not an “I hate foreigners”.
Well mostly- there will obviously be some racists in there. But overall I would expect that racism is not why people voted Reform.