Aiming to copy the UKIP ‘playbook’, Reform is to wage an insurgent campaign, in a bid to gain TV exposure for its senior representatives.

Amid Tory voter jitters, Reform UK, the rebranded Brexit party, is witnessing a surge in the polls. Earlier this month, a YouGov poll put the party in-line with the Greens on 6 percent. An earlier YouGov poll, the first of the year, put Reform at 7 percent, just two percent behind the Lib Dems.  

Reform UK is seeking talks with broadcasters to allow its candidates to have airtime in the run-up to the local elections, the Mirror has revealed. When deciding which parties should be given airtime, TV bosses take polling figures into consideration, alongside other factors such as how many elected representatives a party has. Increased exposure should bolster poll ratings further, giving Reform a better case for representatives to be given greater airtime, insiders told the newspaper.

As UKIP leader, Nigel Farage was given plenty of airtime, being a regular guest on shows like Question Time. In 2014, the BBC was accused of being biased towards the right-wing party and giving it too much airtime. The corporation received more than 1,000 complaints about its coverage of the European and local May elections, saying it was giving UKIP excessive airtime. Farage’s relentless campaigning was attributed to David Cameron’s decision to announce an EU referendum, in an attempt to stop fractious Tory voters from voting UKIP. 

 A Reform source told the Mirror: “Since the peak of UKIP last decade and the emergence of the Brexit Party, broadcasters have been forced to rethink how they cover UK politics.

“This has led to guidelines over the share of political coverage having to reflect present polling over and above outmoded calculations based on past election results – and this of course has left the door wide open for Reform UK to be given far more prominence on mainstream TV and radio than it is currently getting.”

‘Industrial heartland’ seats

Reform UK is led by multi-millionaire property developer and financier Richard Tice. It was founded with support from Nigel Farage in 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating hard Euroscepticism and a no-deal Brexit. In January 2021, it was rebranded as Reform by Farage as an anti-lockdown party.

The party as its sights set on what Tice refers to as “industrial heartlands,” namely in the Midlands, the north of England, and pro-Brexit coastal communities in the east and west of England.  According to its ‘Outline of Reform UK’s policies to Make Britain Great,’ one of the party’s key policy pledges is to reform border control and immigration. It plans to “adopt the tactics used by Australia when they stopped the boats.” 

In December, the party had 600 candidates and had gained 7,500 new members since Liz Truss stepped down as prime minister.

Tory jitters

Conservative circles are becoming more and more uneasy about Reform taking a significant slice of the party deserters. 

As one senior Tory MP said: “Reform could absolutely kill us in the polls.”

Speaking to his fellow GB News host Dan Wootton in December as support for Reform increased in the opinion polls, Farage warned that the “conditions for a political insurgency are there.”

Now the party hopes increased airtime will bolster chances for such an insurgency.

Meanwhile, it’s uncertain whether voters jumping from Tory to Reform would be good or bad for Labour.  Some believe that ‘politically homeless’ voters could vote Reform rather than Labour. However, taking right-wing voters away from the Tories could prove beneficial to Labour, especially in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, which Labour lost out on in 2019 and which Reform is targeting.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward

Image credit: Creative Commons – Moorebig50

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