The surprising truth about Reform voters

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the surprising truth about reform voters.

0:22Guardian columnist Aditya Chakraborty has a challenge for you. Shut your eyes for a second and see if you can imagine a reform voter. Are you doing it? You probably can because you've seen so many of them on telly or read about them in the paper. Nigel Farage, I think he's fantastic. He thinks he's fantastic for the country. Heard their vox pops. At least he says how it is. Who are you imagining? They're going to drag us back to the EU kicking and screaming. You're going to get more woke agenda. you're going to get more green agenda. An older chap? Pink of face, perhaps? Someone who wants the old England back.

1:03I don't know who you're going to vote for then. I'm going to vote reform, but... They think we're all going to hell in a handcart, and they know who to blame. The illegal immigrants. It is a national emergency, as Nigel says. We have no idea where a lot of these people are. But forget your preconceptions. Hope Not Hate, the anti-racism organisation, knows who would actually vote reform if there were a general election tomorrow. They've asked 11 ,000 people, the biggest survey of reform voters to date. And what they found is much more complicated and a lot more interesting than you might think.

1:42Actually, what this report shows you, what all of this analysis shows you, is that reform voters are not who you think they are. they're much more varied and they're not even necessarily concerned about the same issues that you would think they are. The results suggest an unwieldy coalition of voters, a coalition that will be really difficult for Nigel Farage to please, containing many voters who could potentially be won back by other parties. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Frustrated, disillusioned, fragmented. Reform's messy voter base.

2:22Aditya Chakraborty, welcome back to Today in Focus. Thank you, Ellen. It's really nice to see you here in the studio. We're going to talk today about this fascinating piece of polling by Hope Not Hate. Just how big is it and what is it setting out to do? So it's a report from Hope Not Hate and the polling was done by Focal Data and what the report is based around is a survey of over 11 ,000 people who if you had an election tomorrow would go and vote reform. Right. And the questions they're asking are essentially, why are you voting for reform? What issues are you seeing in them? And what kind of voter are you?

2:54And that's why it's so interesting to me, because it's the largest survey we've ever had into reform voters. And reform voters are arguably the most important voters we've got in the country at the moment, because on the last 150 opinion polls, reform comes out top. So these are the voters who could well be getting behind the next government of the UK. It's a really fascinating report. It's called Fed Up and Rolling the Dice. And in this report, the researchers identify five distinct tribes, don't they, of reform voters. And both people who have already voted reform and people who are thinking of voting reform next time.

3:28Can we just take each one in turn, starting with the first group, the working right? So, hope not hate, call them working right. I've heard this segment of voters referred to as the left behind, as the blue collar voters, as the white working class. These are basically the voters who have been following Farage since the days of the Brexit party, and they've come with him to reform. They may be the kind of the classic fodder that you'd see in Vox Pops on the telly, or you'd see profiles of their towns. So you're talking South Wales, you're talking North East, you're talking places in the East Midlands.

4:02Post-industrial. Those kind of post-industrial heartlands that used to vote Labour maybe 10 years ago and now have kind of left Labour behind. They're older. they are definitely white, largely white. These are people who feel very economically insecure. They really want extra rights workers. They want high wages. And they're turning to reform into Nigel Farage because they think that he will stand up for their rights in this deteriorating economy. And so that probably won't surprise a lot of listeners. They'll be like, oh, that's exactly who I thought votes reform. So take us through the other tribes.

4:37The interesting thing about the working right is that they are only one in four of all reform voters on this survey. So the next lot that you've got to meet are the hardline conservatives. And the hardline conservatives are one in five of all reform voters. Yeah, 18%. So just under, yeah. And they tend to be in exactly the kind of areas that people think about when they think about safe Tory seats. Golf clubs. Exactly. So if you were thinking about the kind of places where Jeremy Hunt is still MP, very vulnerable. Surrey, is it? Where is Surrey? Yeah, exactly, Surrey. And basically, these are people who want the very opposite things from the working right.

5:15On the one side, you've got people who feel they're in an economically precarious situation. On the other side, you've got people actually doing pretty well, thank you. And what they really want out of a government is lower taxes. Yeah, they want to keep more of them. They want to keep more of them. And the biggest split of all is actually on things like workers' rights and minimum wages, because people in the working right would like those boosts to the skies. and the hardline conservatives were like those absolutely tamped down. So these are two segments, two large segments of the reform vote that want absolutely different things at the same party.

5:45And so if you add those two groups together, that's 44 % of the people who were surveyed by Hope Not Hate. The other three groups, I think, are the most interesting. So it's more than half of them. And these are the groups where arguably there are real opportunities for people who want to defeat reform next time round. I think you're absolutely right, Helen. I mean, the biggest single segment of reform voters are what Hope Not Hate call squeeze stewards. And these are people who are really feeling the cost of living crunch. One place where you could think of them is a place like Hitchin in Hertfordshire, are really worried about things like the environment.

6:19They might not be talking about net zero and what's come out the latest COP summit, but they're very concerned about why their waterways are full of poo. And they're angry at the water companies, right? So it certainly isn't all about flags for that lot. Then there's a group called Reluctant Reform and they are actually a little bit bigger than Hardanget Service. They're 19%. And these are people who feel like they've been pushed into backing Farage. Actually, they've got not just one clothes peg on their nose, they've got a number of clothes peg on their noses when they think about Nigel Farage.

6:52But they're there because they are protesting against the other parties who they feel have let them down. You tend to find them spaced out across the country, but often on the outskirts of cities. Then there's a group called the Contrary Youth, just under one in 10 are reformed voters. These are young people who could go in any which direction. What they're not having is mainstream politics. They're extremely online. They're often fiercely well-informed on politics. They will get their ideas from wherever across the political spectrum. And it doesn't matter if they're full of contradictions because in essence, what they know is they're being let down.

7:40So if you take those five groups, that is quite an unwieldy coalition for Nigel Farage to try to hold together. And we'll come on a bit later to talk about those challenges. But what about gender? I think the stereotypical reform voter is an old pink-faced man. Well, what this report shows you is actually, I mean, there's as many women in the mix. In some of those segments, actually women's slightly larger segment than men. Yeah, and the reluctant reformers, which is a not-insubstantial group, 56 % of them are women. Absolutely. So it's certainly not all white, male and slightly older. Some of those groups are actually pretty young.

8:14And contrarian youth in particular are about 15 % black and minority ethnic. And then reluctant reformers, you've got something like 6 % ethnic minorities, which is slightly below the population's hold, but is a lot more than you might think from the coverage. But I guess with the other three groups working right, hardline, conservative, squeeze stewards, they're all 98 % white. So it is predominantly a party that appeals to white people currently. And how much uniformity is there in terms of the views of these reform voters? I guess what I'm really asking is, is it all about immigration? It's not even all about immigration.

8:48I mean, you would certainly say, as you'd expect from a party that's banged on about immigration ceaselessly ever since it was born, that reform voters are marked by a greater hostility to immigration and to multiculturalism than people in other parties. But even then, some of those segments, the younger, the contrarian youth, the reluctant reformers, the people who feel they've been pushed into supporting reform, they're actually pretty pro-multiculturism. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. Half of the reluctant reformers support the UK being part of an international agreement that says that people fleeing war or persecution should be allowed to apply for asylum here.

9:23and 58 % think that on the whole immigration has been a good thing for the UK. 60 % think that Britain should be multicultural. So you are seeing in the reform voters actually a sense in which immigration is a kind of wrapper that's going around a series of other concerns which might be much more economic or much more driven by frustration about their own communities and what's going on in their High Street, right? I think for other parties, what you would take away from that if you were looking at how to appeal to those voters is you can't outdo reform when it comes to immigration and flags. But you shouldn't necessarily assume that all reform voters are dead set against immigration because over a quarter of them are actually fairly pro-immigration.

10:13They see benefits in it. So I guess there's two things with immigration, isn't there? There's one, whether they think that the country needs immigrants to do certain jobs. And there's also, I guess, national identity and cultural identity, British identity. What do we learn in the report about those views? As you might expect from reform voters, a lot of this report talks about their attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism. and when you ask reform voters should Britain be white and Christian fewer than one in three say yes even of those segments the working right the people who you think are the reform the farage hardcore right even then it's a large minority it's 42 % but it's still a minority of people who think it should be white and Christian and then you go down to some of the other segments that are pulled out like contrarian youth and reluctant reformers.

11:11And they're much easier with multicultural societies than Farage would have you believe. I do still find those statistics pretty shocking. 42 % of a group of people openly saying, I want Britain to be white. I mean, what a shift. Do you find that shocking? I find that, people might have thought it. I find it surprising now that people are saying these things openly. You see, I think two things when I face that. One is, you're talking about people who already live in white communities. They're merely describing what they're seeing, right? They live in towns which are white. What they're not, often, these reform voters, they're not Christian.

11:47They're not practicing Christian. They knock down the church every Sunday, let alone in the midweek to help out with stalls. These are people who are largely secular in their daily practices. So when they say white and Christian, I do wonder what they mean. But the second thing that makes me less shocked about it, Helen, is we're in an era in which those kinds of views are now much more acceptable. Yeah. And I think part of what you see reflected in some of these sentiments is that these kind of proxy explanations, that it's all default for the migrant, that small boats somehow account for the decline of an entire country, I think they show the acceptability of those sentiments now without the sense that people necessarily believe them.

12:31They may not believe them at all. They may just think that's a useful explanation of what's happened. Bear in mind, if you're in an area which is largely white, where there aren't that many migrants, the kind of area, for instance, that Nigel Farage represents, Clacton, characterized by very low immigration, yet here is the guy who is the anti-immigrant politician. So what's going on there? They're voting against people they can't see, which makes me think, actually, they can't be so angry in their guts about immigration because they don't have to live with immigration. No, but I guess Nigel Farage's constituency encompasses some of the most deprived communities in the UK.

13:10Absolutely. So they're looking for somebody to blame. Absolutely. They're looking for people to blame and they've got plenty to get angry about, but it's not immigration that they've got to get angry about. It's the conditions of their high street. It's like they've got more months than money, basically.

13:31there's clearly this split between reform voters on the importance or not of britain being a white christian country what other splits were there that what other splits did you see um in terms of the different groups where they really have contrasting views i think the thing really stands out is how bothered they are about the environment and the spoiling of the environment yeah that surprised me. Yeah, which makes you just think, you know, people think about an environment sometimes and they talk about CO2 and they, you know, we can't go over 1.5. That's not the way these people are thinking about an environment.

14:03But they have perfectly legitimate concerns about why their waterways are polluted, about the fact that the parks are unkempt after all these years of austerity, about the fact that there's more pollution in the air. Immediately, you start to see ways in which people from other parties, whether they're Labour or whether they're Zach Polanski, they could reach out to these voters and maybe prize them away from Farage because they're not necessarily committed to him, right? No, and I was interested to see how little climate scepticism there was actually among most of these cohorts. So if we talk about the squeezed stewards, which again is the biggest group, 29 % of the whole, 100 % of them agreed with the statement, climate change poses a threat to the future wellbeing of me and my family.

14:45And these are people who are voting for a party that has a mayor, Andrea Jenkins, who just denies that climate change is real. I think you've really hit on something there. Reform at the elite level is full of climate deniers. And yet at the ground level of actual voters, there are people who are much more bothered about the climate and what's happening to the world that they'll hand on to their kids than you might think. Again, it makes me think that there is a very unwieldy coalition of voters now that are in the reform basket. and there is so much you could go at. There are so many areas that reform's own voters have with the policies of reform that if you were just to make something that apparent and offer people a decent alternative, who knows what might happen.

15:32And what about social issues? I mean, you could call them culture war issues. I'm not sure if that's quite the right term in this case. Things like abortion, for example. Where do reform voters stand on that? If you ask the average member of the UK population, is abortion morally wrong and should it be made illegal? Only about one in five of the population would go along with that as a statement, right? Right, 20 % or something. Yeah, 20%. Reform voters are actually more relaxed about abortion than the average Briton, right? But then you look at this segment called Contrary in Youth, who you might think would be all like, do whatever you want.

16:08Actually, nearly half, 48 % of them, think abortion is morally wrong and should be banned in most or all circumstances. What's going on there then? I think there are an awful lot of people who've had their minds warped by the internet, is what I think is going on there. Right, yeah. It's so extreme, isn't it, the idea that abortion is wrong in all circumstances. And perhaps not unrelated, I thought it was really interesting that the contrarian youth group was much more likely than the older groups to be religious. And when they were asked how much religious teachings and values influence their lives, one in four, so a quarter answered a lot.

16:47And that's not just Christianity, although that was overwhelmingly the largest group, but also Islam and then to a lesser extent, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Yeah, I mean, I think we are in Britain very used to the idea that we live in a secular country and a country that's got increasingly secular over the past 30, 40 years. Actually, there's a plenty of evidence now that shows that the young not just in this country but across the west as it were and even in places like India they're now becoming more religious again and religious in different ways religious in quite a literalistic way where they want things um kind of commandments almost that you follow now which is a very different way of religion certainly than I'm used to thinking about in Hinduism but that is now something that's becoming a thing And also, just like over in the US, people who were willing to take as their new heroes, people who behave in a very un-Christian certain way.

17:43I mean, Nigel Farage has spoken up for Andrew Tate, who is a self-described misogynist facing charges of how he's treated women. He's talked to Andrew Tate as being an important voice for men who he feels are being emasculated. So maybe there's a bit of this going on. But secondly, we're all now under the star of Donald Trump, right? And what is Donald Trump most, what's one of his most famous sayings? Well, you grab him by the pussy. So we are in an era in which some of these attitudes are now becoming licensed in a way that they weren't for a previous generation. And you mentioned Andrew Tate there.

18:19What did the research say about who reform voters are listening to? Who do they look up to? The really interesting thing is, for the most part, they watch and listen and read similar things to the rest of the population. The one channel that they like is the news channel that was created for them, GB News, which has Nigel Farage as a presenter, which is supported by people who support Nigel Farage and has many kind of reform talking points. They certainly do go online. But, I mean, there is a section of reform voters who are very into The Guardian, I would say, Helen. Contrary and youth are really down with The Guardian.

19:0220 % of them read The Guardian, is that right? Something like that? I mean, I would encourage more of them. But yeah, they're really into The Guardian. So it's not like they are in a completely different information ecosystem. And I think there's sometimes a really prejudiced view that says, oh, reform voters are low information voters. They don't really know what it is they're getting for. They're just protesting. Actually, no. And one of the things that stood out from Hope Not Hate's focus groups was that one of their respondents in the focus group said, oh, I vote for reform after I'd read all five party manifestos at last summer's election.

19:39So oftentimes they're very high information. They might even be much more hooked up to news stories than other people. But the idea that they are working on completely different parallel lines of information is not true. And I suppose the other figure hanging over all of this is Tommy Robinson and the pull that he seems to have over reform voters. Well, one of Nigel Farage's biggest claims is that basically, if he doesn't get his crack at power, if he's out of politics, then the next thing you get is someone much further to the right. of the working right, the kind of the bedrock of the Farage vote, almost half are likely to support a street movement led by Tommy Robinson, 47%.

20:19And 44 % have a positive opinion of this guy who has been in prison, who has spouted some of the most racist beliefs on a public platform. And yet there he is as a kind of legitimate figure for a significant section of reform voters. Actually, what I think is going on there, Helen, is I think Nigel Farage has himself been pushed further and further to the right by the influence of Tommy Robinson. A year ago, Nigel Farage would never have countenanced forced deportations. He always said that's a line I won't cross. Yeah, mass deportations. And now... Twelve months later, he now supports them, which means effectively that reform have got an immigration policy that is further to the right than the BNP had in 2000 under Nick Griffin.

21:04So you now have a party that's been radicalised right by this figure who's not in politics, who has no voters, who exists online, spends a lot of his time out of the country and gets his money from goodness knows where. And yet there he is as a huge influential figure on the number one party in Britain.

21:27Coming up, why a Nigel Farage win might not be inevitable.

21:42What are the dangers do you think there are here for Nigel Farage? Oh, I think huge. I think absolutely huge. I think the British political and media establishment have worked themselves up into a kind of chicken-licking view of the world in which the sky is falling down and reform are going to get into Downing Street and Nigel Farage is going to be prime minister or possibly even king, who knows right yeah as if it's a foregone conclusion not necessarily so especially not this far out from an election for one a lot of people that have been surveyed here basically like reform as a protest against politics Nigel Farage has spent more years as a professional politician than Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves put together he spent 25 years or thereabouts at the European Parliament and in the House of Commons right that's one thing Keir Starmer's only spent 10 years in the House of Commons for another thing All parties, once they get to a certain size, they become coalitions of voters and they represent very different interest groups.

22:41What you're seeing is what was once a very coherent single issue party almost is now finding quite difficult to juggle all the different issues that voters now want dealt with by reform. And you saw this actually physically in Nigel Farage this summer. So the guy who was a year ago talking about immigration, small boats and the rest of it, this summer he starts talking about the cost of living crisis. And if you look at Reform's local election campaigns, they always put cost of living at number one. What have Reform got to say about the cost of living crisis? I can tell you from looking at the policy, very, very little, right?

23:20They're having now to juggle with so-called normie issues in a way that they're not used to dealing with, right? And, I mean, will Nigel Farage read Hope Not Hate's report? I don't know. But if he does read it, what should he take from it if he wants to keep this unwieldy coalition together and onside? So you're asking me here, Helen. You're asking me here. Have I got this right? You want me to don the boating blazer, lift a pint to my lips, have a fag on the go and be Nigel Farage. OK, so here's what I would take away from that. One, there's quite a lot in which Nigel Farage has to start worrying because the closer he gets to power, actually the less his party and the less he himself as a politician look ready for it.

24:02Because one of the things about becoming a party of government is that people start to go to you expecting you to govern and they come to you with certain policy issues about the economy, about the environment all sorts of things that this guy has never really campaigned on in his life. Most of his career has been about Europe and then the latter part of his career has been about immigration and the failures of the political elite. Fine. that gets you so far as a protest party it's gotten very far as a protest politician it doesn't get him into number 10 necessarily and so I think I would be worrying quite a lot about the fact that the party A.