I’m a liberal, metropolitan Remainer. So why am I warming to Reform?

In January 2025, I signed with Swift Press, a great independent publishing house, to write a book called The Rise of Reform. It would be an examination of Nigel Farage’s upstart party and how it might grow from where it was already into an organisation capable of governing Britain. I was excited to take it on. However, there were several immediate issues I faced after signing the agreement: for a start, I didn’t have a single contact within Reform UK.

The other dilemma was that I am a very liberal sort of person who lives in London and would ideally like it if the United Kingdom rejoined the European Union. In other words, I am not someone who you would have pegged as a possible Reform convert. Yet I was determined not only to get under the skin of the party, but also to report back on it in the most objective way possible. I vowed to simply write about whatever I found out there, beyond the M25, in the most honest way I could.

I got lucky and landed some interviews with high-ranking Reform people, right off the bat. Richard Tice agreed to speak to me; I thought I would get 20 minutes tops with him, and then he gave me an hour and a half of his time. It was a fantastic interview as well, with some great anecdotes sprinkled in.

Yet the real eye-opener in my research was speaking to the party’s footsoldiers, the Reform activists on the ground in places like Hartlepool, Lincoln and Runcorn. Those who were standing locally for the party, or if not, giving up their weekends to knock on doors or deliver Reform leaflets. And these people were nothing like what I expected. Nothing at all.

I will admit that my liberal, metropolitan assumptions made me feel certain that I would meet a lot of racists (closeted or otherwise), conspiracy-theory nuts and just general far-right yobs when seeking out the Reform Party in the wild. Yet I found none of those things while meeting and chatting with Reform activists in places like Bootle or Spalding. What I found, every time, were groups of very normal, down-to-earth, mostly working-class British people who felt let down by a system that frankly, it was easy to see why they felt let down by. I heard nothing racist or homophobic or fascistic in all my travels around the country, speaking with hundreds of Reform candidates and activists. In one sense, they were all disappointingly well-behaved and lovely.

I even met some ethnic-minority Reform candidates, some of whom were immigrants. One who sticks out for me was Ahmed Ibrahim, a man who had come to Britain from Egypt 17 years ago. He was standing for Reform in Tower Hamlets. I asked Ahmed what attracted him to the party. He told me:

‘For me, in my mind at the time, there was no way to be with Nigel Farage. But then I said, okay, why don’t I listen to the guy? I was just rejecting him because of assumptions. Then, I listen, and Nigel makes sense… I attended a couple of branch meetings here in Tower Hamlets. And I didn’t see any racism at all. Like normal people, yes, some of them, they have a stronger view. But I’m telling you, I have stronger views than them, even on immigration!’

The best anecdotes from my travels in Reform-land came via the great British public, those people I encountered while watching Reform activists knocking on constituents’ doors. That experience gave me a whole new insight into the country on its own.

The folks who answered their doors to Reform activists broadly fell into one of three categories. The first were those who were either enthusiastically going to vote Reform or were at the very least heavily leaning towards Farage’s crew. Some of you reading this may be sad to note that I encountered a hell of a lot of people who fit into this group out there.

The second bunch were those who would rather drink sulphuric acid than even consider voting Reform.

The final category involved those I found most depressing – the people who said they weren’t voting at all. They had decided they weren’t going to take part in any elections, not in a resigned or embarrassed way – no, these people were not going to be voting for anyone as a statement of intent. They were proud to be non-voters. Their non-voting was a political statement, ironically enough.

‘They are all crap, all the parties, total crap’, a man told the Reform activists I was with on his doorstep one afternoon. I stepped in and asked him, ‘Okay, but if you had to pick one party that you thought was the most crap of them all, which one would it be?’. He looked intrigued by the question and took a moment to think before answering. ‘Wouldn’t choose between them, they are all the same.’

A lot of people said things so negative (and possibly libellous) about Keir Starmer, I couldn’t possibly reprint any of them here. ‘Starmer should be in prison for what he’s done to this country already!’, which I heard from a man in north Wales, was probably the most vanilla. There was also a lot of anger directed at the Labour Party more generally. ‘I was a proud trade-union member before I retired’, said one man in an impoverished part of north-west England to the Reform canvassers who had knocked on his door. ‘I have voted Labour all my life. But couldn’t do it again. They aren’t the same party now.’

Almost no one, in any of the places I visited, mentioned the Conservatives – at all. It was like they didn’t exist, even in places where they had been dominant for decades.

Of course, the people who hated Reform really, really hated Reform, often expressed with a viciousness that was shocking. The way that Reform activists dealt with these outbursts made me like them even more. ‘Thank you for time, have a good rest of the day’, they would say to someone who had just called them a fascist and told them to ‘fuck off and die’ for good measure. The way Reform activists behaved in these situations was always reassuringly British to me.

Whether you agree with Reform UK on policy or not (and I still have many reservations in this department myself), you shouldn’t confuse that with your feelings about the party’s activists. Calling them fascists and racists simply doesn’t work for liberals, as May’s election results clearly demonstrate. This assertion about them just isn’t true either, as I found out for myself.

Now that I have finished writing The Rise of Reform – due for release in September – it makes me feel a little sad that I have no more cause to spend time with groups of Reform activists, in a pub after a day of canvassing, somewhere in the north of England or the Midlands. I will miss them.

That’s why I am hoping Restore does not spoil things for Reform in the upcoming Makerfield by-election. Here is a chance for a true working-class movement to bring down the Labour Party, an organisation established to represent the working class in Britain that has clearly lost its way. A lot depends upon Reform winning this by-election. I wish them the best of luck.

Nick Tyrone is the author of The Rise of Reform, published by Swift in September 2026.