The tightrope Farage is walking on race – and why he can only lose

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15 hours ago

What were Reform playing at this week, apparently allowing their newest MP Sarah Pochin to ask Keir Starmer at Prime Minister's Questions whether he would follow other European countries and consider banning the burka? After all, it seems to have led to the resignation of their successful chairman Zia Yusuf.
To answer this question, it is worth looking at Reform's other interventions on cultural issues in recent times. For there have been a number of occasions when senior Reform politicians have brutally engaged in the most sensitive and controversial cultural areas. There is a clear pattern.
Just recently, Nigel Farage made clear he felt Lucy Connolly, the mother jailed for posting offensively on social media about the riots that followed the appalling murders of children in Southport, should not be in jail.
Last July, Connolly posted on X hours after Axel Rudakubana murdered three girls in a knife rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport.
She wrote: 'Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f---ing hotels full of the b------s for all I care, while you're at it, take the treacherous government politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these [Southport] families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.'
Politicians from across the political spectrum have said that the punishment meted out to Connolly was disproportionate.
Farage went further than most, saying: 'The sentence that was given to her was absolutely excessive and while she should not have said what she said, understand there were millions of mothers at that moment in time after Southport feeling exactly the same way.'
The Reform leader also recently said we need to choose which migrants from which countries come to Britain. At the same time, he has been vocal about the grooming gangs that existed across northern England, refusing to condemn some of Elon Musk's increasingly-bizarre social media commentary about the issue at the start of the year (Musk falsely claimed that the Home Office had sent a memo to police ordering them not to investigate alleged abuse because young women had 'made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour').
There are many other examples of Farage seeking to intervene on cultural issues, while carefully walking along a tightrope.
In the past, when Farage was merely the most prominent politician in two start-up parties – Ukip and the Brexit Party – his strategy was obvious: simply to generate attention. At that time, he could say things which many (even most) people found offensive, because all that mattered was going up a few points in the polls by attracting small numbers of people who agreed with him.
But Reform now engage in these sorts of culturally assertive interventions for a different reason: to provoke a reaction from opposing politicians, putting them in a hopefully impossible position with some of their working-class voters.
That mentality was clearly at play when Pochin asked Starmer this week whether he would 'follow the lead of France, Denmark, Belgium and others, and ban the burka' – and Yusuf, before he resigned, seemed all too aware of it, writing on social media: 'I do think it's dumb for a party to ask the PM if they would do something the party itself wouldn't do'.
And for interventions that don't involve a public question to the Prime Minister – such as Farage's pronouncements in speeches and Q&As – Farage and his team know full well that their influence in the media is such that political opponents will be asked for a response.
The ideal scenario for Reform is for Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, and their collective MPs to say, no, they do not agree with Reform's latest cultural pronouncement. The resulting clips, usually without the context of Reform's original comments, can look as if the politicians in question were going out of their way to, for example, support Lucy Connolly's imprisonment, or, in this week's case, for the normalisation of the burka.
Reform seem to think there is no risk in campaigning like this. They assume their core and prospective voters will not be offended by their own comments, but might be irritated watching opposing parties disagree. And, to be fair, you could see that Starmer did not want to engage on the burka this week, presumably for fear of looking like he was going out of his way to support it.
But this is another example of Reform being stuck in their own past. They still campaign like a little party, as if their primary objective was to get to 15 or 20 points in the polls, not to form a government. This week's intervention was a mistake, and not just because it cost them a competent chairman; it risked making the party look eccentric at best and sinister at worst.
On the specifics of the burka, the opinion research is hard to read, not least because voters are nervous talking about it. While there has been little recent polling, in 2017, a YouGov survey found that 48 per cent would support a burka ban while 42 per cent would oppose it. My very strong impression is that most voters would not like to see significant numbers of people wearing the burka, because of the physical barrier it places between the wearer and everyone else; it is obviously also something which has barely been seen in this country, even as multi-racial Britain grew post-war.
However, if they were asked to consider the implications of a legal ban, I suspect most voters would not want the state to get into the business of policing clothing, because they believe personal choice should be respected (yes, there is a debate about how much choice wearers have, but this will be lost on the majority of voters). Most voters would, in turn, be horrified to see women in burkas being physically barred from particular places, let alone arrested. While 'classical liberalism' in Britain is dying – and with it the belief in a small state – this would still cross a line for most people.
More broadly, this cultural intervention, and others like it, will only dissuade Reform's next set of target voters to back them. Given their objective is to form a government, they need to get to 35 points at least in the polls to give them a chance (they are currently probably just shy of 30 points). This means significantly expanding from their base of disaffected working-class voters (who will always be their most important) and going after people who only recently voted Tory or Labour.
The primary barrier, for these voters, is absolutely not that Reform is insufficiently Right-wing, or insufficiently patriotic, or culturally assertive. The primary barrier for them is whether or not Reform looks professional, mainstream (of sorts), and will focus on things that really matter and that other parties fail to engage on. This group of voters will not vote for a party which looks like a European populist party, or indeed the Trump administration.
A recent poll suggested Reform's lead over Labour had narrowed by a couple of points. You cannot make this assertion from one poll; polls move all the time. But there is no doubt Reform has had a bad couple of weeks. Firstly, their implausible mini policy package which promised massive spending paid for by cutting waste; and now a pointless row over the burka which appears to have cost them a chairman.
Their focus on cutting conventional immigration, changing asylum laws, stopping small boats, reducing the influence of woke and getting the police focused on real crime will appeal to most voters; and the other parties are struggling badly to answer these policy challenges. When it comes to winning over the public, they would be well advised to stay focused on these issues and leave the cultural commentary to others.
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