Sunder Katwala is Director of British Future.
As Big Ben struck ten on election night, the biggest surprise in the 2024 general election exit poll was not the widely anticipated Labour landslide, but that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK were projected to pick up 13 seats.
By dawn that had faded to something of a Farage mirage, though Reform still broke through to take five seats, including its leader finally making it into the House of Commons.
Farage dominated much of the election campaign, after his late decision to run as a candidate and take over as Reform leader. He promoted Reform as challenging the Conservatives for second place, though the party ultimately finished almost ten per cent adrift of the Conservatives on 14 per cent.
It also hit trouble during the campaign, with controversy over Farage’s position on Ukraine and arguments about racism and extremism from Reform candidates and campaigners. This placed a ceiling on Reform’s support.
New Focaldata research for British Future finds two-thirds of the public (65 per cent) think Reform must do more to ensure they don’t run extreme candidates, with just eight per cent disagreeing. Some 60 per cent of Reform’s own voters agree that the party needs stronger action to keep out extreme voices, with 14 per cent disagreeing.
The public consensus on this spans all mainstream political views: some 82 per cent of Conservatives, and eight in ten Labour voters, think Reform needs to do more to root out extreme candidates.
The Reform leadership, after the election, accepted this criticism – yet it was much more ambivalent during the campaign itself. Reform had weak vetting during its rapid selection of several hundred candidates, but Richard Tice had been swift to suspend overtly racist candidates this spring.
That changed with the change of leadership to Farage. The party rejected pressure from conservative media outlets, including the Daily Mail, Times and GB News, to drop overt racists.
Farage u-turned during his BBC Question Time special – removing three racist candidates live on air when read their indefensible quotes. Yet the party also continued to recommend that people vote for the suspended candidates.
Half the public (51 per cent) agrees that Reform risks bringing prejudice into debates about immigration, and only 19 per cent disagree. The Reform voters surveyed rejected this criticism, by 62 per cent to 17 per cent, along with all of the other criticisms of the party, bar the problem of needing to take stronger action on extreme candidates.
Our post-election poll asked voters about Reform’s impact and voice by testing reactions to both positive and negative statements about this new insurgent party, using questions previously asked about Farage’s UKIP party after the May 2015 election.
Overall, the survey finds that Reform’s ‘marmite’ appeal in 2024 is strikingly similar to that of UKIP almost a decade ago. This helps to illuminate how closely the Reform 2024 vote maps onto UKIP’s 2014 appeal – again winning four million votes and securing 30 per cent in ten constituencies. Reform hopes to build on its 98 second places, though UKIP was second in 120 seats nine years ago.
Clacton was won both times – by Douglas Carswell then Farage – while the collapse of the Conservative vote is the main reason that Reform has won another four seats.
Asked if Reform UK is “racist”, opinions were split. But more people thought the charge valid than rejected it: 41 per cent of respondents say that it is, while 30 per cent say that it is not. Here, Farage’s party today has a worse reputation on race and racism than did UKIP in 2015, when the general public had a narrow plurality view that it was not racist, by 43 per cent to 40 per cent.
Most Labour (54 per cent) and LibDem (66 per cent) voters think that it is fair to call the party racist, while Conservative respondents are equally divided, with 37 per cent arguing that the party is racist and 34 per cent that it is not.
Some 86 per cent of Reform voters rejected the charge that it is a racist party – while four per cent believe that it is. This may indicate that Reform has a small fringe of overtly pro-racism voters, though clearly most of its voters believe it is important to be on the right side of foundational anti-racism norms.
Reform – like UKIP – strikes a strong chord with a group who feel it is bringing something new to the political process, while being seen as a divisive and dangerous force by those with the most liberal views. The findings show that this reputational risk on racism and prejudice does extend into conservative audiences, who the party would need if they wanted to compete more broadly for votes and seats.
Four out of ten people across the public as a whole support positive statements about Reform – 43 per cent, for example, say it is an important new voice saying what most people think. The idea that Reform is mainly a mainstream party with a right to their view secures a plurality of public support, by 42 per cent to 24 per cent (+18); almost a decade ago, UKIP secured a 41 per cent to 29 per cent (+12) margin on this.
That the general public also leans towards agreeing that ‘Reform is mainly a divisive and dangerous party’, by a margin of 43 per cent to 28 per cent (+15), shows an ambivalence about Reform’s mainstream status.
Farage is clearly a major asset to a six-per-cent party, with his appeal to a quarter of the public. He could be much more of mixed blessing to a party that needs to increase a 24 per cent vote back into the mid and high-30s at least. Farage has ended the campaign with public approval ratings of 27 per cent and disapproval of 65 per cent.
That illustrates why Vote Leave – facing a 50 per cent winning post – took a strategic decision to curtail his visibility in the EU referendum campaign. The evidence of the “Farage paradox” was that the visibility and profile of UKIP and its leader were good for Remain, rather than Leave.
The next Conservative Party leader will face a new Farage paradox: whether they could win with or without him. The Tories could not reconstruct a winning coalition without winning back Farage’s votes. But they would fail, too, if tacking right stopped them winning support back from Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
The Farage ceiling would make it much more difficult to secure the broad appeal that a governing party needs, when the Reform leader has such a polarising reputation with the public and such a mixed one among centre-right voters too.
