Reform voters are now the largest mass political movement in the UK. While their leaders are bereft of both principles and plans, dismissing all Reform voters as idiots and racists is a lazy cop out that serves nobody.
Voting Labour is an act of crass immorality and stupidity, voting Tory suggests a drag anchor of stasis and apathy, voting Lib Dem smacks of a lack of passion and imagination, but voting Reform is an act of unmitigated masochism and self harm - but it is important we understand why people do it.
On one level its the logical fallacy outlined in Yes Prime Minister, my dog has four legs and my cat has four legs - therefore my dog is a cat. I want reform and here is a new party called Reform so i’ll vote for that. Dominic Cummings used the word Brexit to work the same scam, Morgan McSweeney deployed the word ‘change’ and the Democrats tried the word ‘joy’. It didn’t work for the Democrats because not enough people in the states wanted ‘joy’ - they wanted revenge, which brings us to the masochism of voting for Reform.
Imagine a child wants an ice cream, their parents say no and the child is left angry about not getting what they want and their lack of agency - perhaps in a hot moment they might even start hating their parents. After a while the parents see how upset their child is and offer an ice cream, but the child screams ‘neaaww!!’ and knocks the ice cream out of their parent’s hand and on to the floor. That’s masochism, any parent will recognise it, the child is too into hating their parent in the moment to take the thing they really want, such moments need careful handling.
Many (most?) people in the UK don’t get much careful handling, they are consistently told in both word and deed that their happiness is irrelevant, perhaps this is a hangover of empire, but more saliently it is why the UK consistently ranks as one of the most unhappy nations in Europe. A shocking but normalised backdrop of familial, educational and neoliberal socioeconomic squashes, dehumanises many Britons, seeing them as little more than throwaway units of consumption and production.
One can see from this standpoint, why many focus on the (wilfully over-hyped and politically weaponised) topic of economic migration that is portrayed as further diluting an already anaemic sense of belonging and adding to a sense that to a certain establishment, working class Britons are as disposable as a used vape. Reform voters may be muddled about the motives of Farage, but they ain’t wrong about that last bit.
The throwaway working classes of Britain, face accusatory pressure from people (usually in comfortable positions in the media, government / politics) that they must remain vigilant about (and indeed accept responsibility for) the hurt feelings of a wide range of people in OTHER groups.
It’s easy to see how exhausted white, heterosexual males scratching an increasingly precarious living in a nation that has never cared about their feelings, might resent the quivering sensitivity demanded of them for gay rights, trans rights, people on the ‘spectrum’, ethnic / religious minorities and all the rest. They might just think that being in the majority ethnic group in the UK is actually a curse rather than a benefit, after all there are no government grants for organisations combating discrimination against the white-van-man, no benefits for people in work who lie awake at night worrying about having to put their car repairs and urgent dental work on their credit card - quite the reverse, these are the people that late stage capitalism loves to exploit to the max.
Now Reform are not any kind of an answer for the precariat (they’ll make it worse), but it is nigh on impossible to explain this to Reform voters and here is why:
Reform voters (and many voters for all the other parties) are often not making an evidenced based judgement but an emotional one, they quite understandably HATE the establishment that dehumanises and discards them and more than anything they want to STICK IT to that establishment, they don’t WANT to check the credentials and plans of their chosen champions and the more that smug liberals tell them they should, the less inclined they feel to do it.
This is the masochism, what matters is not healing or hope, but the hatred (carefully cultivated for decades by the billionaire owned media) for what they see as a shadowy triumvirate of invaders - immigrants, the woke and the loony left.
The British political / media class has nobody but itself to blame for the looming triumph of the Farage / Trump playbook. For decades voters have been promised change and got nothing but more of the same and worse. The lived reality of the political clock in the UK stopped under Thatcher and has not changed since. Those parties like Labour and the Lib-Dems who delivered more status-quo neoliberalism are particularly to blame.
Reform voters will soon have the rare pleasure of sticking a plastic straw up the noses of at least some of the establishment, it doesn't matter to them who benefits or even what happens next as long as Starmer, the immigrants and the woke get shafted by it.
This mostly blind back-lash that Farage is surfing has been long in the making and I doubt much can be done to mitigate it now, but for those minded to try...
...start by trying to understand the emotional landscape of Reform voters first, hear and acknowledge their pain, respect their concerns and fears, listen to their frustration and frayed sense of betrayal and try to offer more hope than a one shot stab at revenge. This job has been made very difficult by identity politics and decades of betrayal from faux left wing hustlers like Blair, Brown and now Starmer but there is little to be lost from the effort and perhaps everything to gain.
Sometimes political change is more about a heartfelt commitment to listening and healing than it is about winning the argument. The Greens, now the champions of the left-liberal progressives, would be especially well served by remembering this.