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10,000 angry white men and me: my night with Reform UK [1]

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Date: 2025-05

The arena is seated according to the region attendees travelled from. I’ve chosen to come ‘undercover’ so that I can talk to them on their level, rather than as an identifiable journalist. I find myself surrounded by people from Devon, Gloucestershire, Dorset and the wider south west, chatting to a friendly and earnest retired man about his belief in UFOs, and how much he enjoyed American hard-right political commentator Candace Owens’ Youtube series, which makes claims such as that French first lady Brigitte Macron was born a man. “Climate change,” he told me, as though trying to tick off conspiracist talking points, “is not a crisis.”

My newfound companion is a former Conservative voter, who has turned against the party. When I ask why, he references how the One Nation Tories – a group characterised as ‘anti Brexit’ and sidelined by Boris Johnson and subsequent leaders – make the party too left wing. He also shared how he and his friends joined Labour to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015. Not because of a sudden commitment to socialism, but in the hope that his leadership would destroy the Labour Party. A hatred of Labour, particularly prominent Labour women, is a clear theme from the speakers and the crowd throughout the night.

Reform boasted that 10,000 people were attending tonight’s “sold out” launch of their local election and mayoral campaign. Still, it’s hard to ignore the hundreds of empty seats. Dr David Bull, Talk TV personality and compere of tonight’s event, announces that the rally will start late due to protesters outside blocking long queues of people desperate to get in. But I’ve got a friend in the protest, who tells me no one is blocking the entrance. And while a dribble of people fill up some of the seats, huge chunks of the arena remain empty.

Behind me, a woman is expressing her concern that Labour will refuse to call an election in 2029. (The party has never said anything to suggest this is a possibility, with senior Labour figures instead having started discussing their 2029 election campaign in the immediate aftermath of their general election win last year.) The man in the next row explains he is here to see what Reform UK is all about, as you can’t trust what they tell you on the mainstream media. My neighbour has just got onto the subject of the dangers of Covid-19 vaccines when the background pop music gives way to some generic rock drumming, and Bull swings into action.

Galvanising the base, with an eye to outside

Bull kicks off proceedings by reminding us that this is the biggest ever political conference since the Second World War – a debatable claim, not least since this is a rally, not a conference – and that events are being watched online around the world, including “in the Oval Office”.

He then takes us on a tour of the set: a broken Britain high street with piles of waste and rubbish bins representing Birmingham’s long-running bin strike; a “Labourbrokes” betting shop (a pun on betting firm chain Ladbrokes), where the odds are good for a Reform 2029 election win; a cinema screening a film called “tax me if you can”, starring Starmer and the farmers; and a closed down pub named the Royal Oak. The camera zooms into posters of Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson in clown make-up. People laugh. I remember to laugh too.

The event appears to have three purposes. One is a form of bonding – an opportunity to bring together Reform members and fans, arriving on coaches or as groups of friends in cars, with the demographic spanning conspiracists to disaffected Tories and Labour voters, anti-migrant and anti-LGBTQ+ voters, and the new far right. The latter are young men who have been radicalised in their bedrooms, to the point where they think it is cool to emerge into multi-ethnic Birmingham dressed like a relic from the 1930s. They have been radicalised not by contact with Islam or blackness or feminist women, but with their online critics.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/undercover-in-reform-uk-rally-angry-white-men-nigel-farage-arron-banks/

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