17-05-2025
Reform UK's taproom revolutionaries
Photo by Oli Scarff/AFP
From a corner table inside The Talbot, Mark Butcher is plotting political domination. 'Reform aren't happy with just going after the parliamentary seats, the council seats,' he says. 'I think the important thing is we are going after the grassroots. We're going after the social clubs, the pubs, the Conservative clubs, and the Labour pubs as well. That's where the grassroots voters are.' Butcher is wearing a matching pair of checked trousers and waistcoat with his sunglasses pushed up onto his head. Chairman of the Blackpool and Fleetwood branch of Reform UK, he is in an ebullient mood. His party are leading the national polls, tipping 30 per cent, and he senses blood in the water.
For his day job, Butcher runs a local soup kitchen, but he plans to stand in the next general election in one of the city's two constituencies. He believes he will win either by a large margin: his Labour opponent will be 'annihilated'; the local Conservative party has already 'given up'. We are meeting at Britain's first Reform-branded pub, where we sit with its two owners, Nick Lowe and Peter Flynn, and several pints of Stella Artois. Outside, much of the façade has been repainted a bright turquoise. Reform election material is pasted over the bar. Only an engraved slab of brickwork above the front door reveals the venue's former name: The Talbot Conservative Club.
Across the country, voters are pulling behind Nigel Farage. At last month's council elections his party took control of ten local authorities and two mayoralties, and won a Westminster by-election to boot. We cannot rule out the possibility, Professor John Curtice wrote afterwards, this could prove to be the end of a century of Conservative and Labour dominance. Reform's critics have long contended, however, that while the party has achieved a breadth of support it has little depth. Until February, it was owned by Farage as a private limited company. It has no tradition of mass mobilisation and owes its support largely to its leader's appearances on television, they argue.
The renovation of establishments like The Talbot seems to suggest something different. Throughout the 20th century, parliamentary democracy rested on a foundation of mass participation. Working men and women joined unions and fought to shape the Labour party. Conservative clubs embedded their party in local communities via cheap alcohol and popular entertainment nights. But as traditional production lines shut down, the forward march of labour halted and society atomised, these institutions decayed. Now, Reform is reviving them. And, with union leaders drawing up a strategy to combat Reform's appeal among their members, it appears that both Farage is the only British political figure capable of winning support in both the working men's club and the Tory taproom.
Lowe and Flynn were both members of the communally owned Talbot Conservative Club, founded in 1927, when they decided to buy it in 2009. 'The no smoking ban come in and that was the nail in the head,' says Lowe. 'It was literally going bankrupt. We proposed that we take over the club. 'We'll pay its debts off. We'll do it up.'' After 16 years of running the site as a regular pub, financial motivations also played a part in its Reform rebrand. With electricity costs spiking, Lowe hopes tying his business to the country's most popular political party will bring punters through the door. As we speak, the plan appears to be bearing fruit. Flynn pops out to talk to two men before paraphrasing their excited reaction: 'We've seen it on Facebook. We've come for a pint. Well done, well done!' While a few customers have said they will no longer use the pub, ten or 20 more have expressed support, Lowe claims.
The few punters drinking on a sunny Tuesday afternoon have no issue with their local's political turn. Tony, 72, a former painter and decorator, says he voted Labour all his life because he was a working man. Now he backs Reform. 'They lie less,' he says. 'Starmer was elected on lies. Most people have had enough of the lies – he hasn't smashed the [people smuggling] gangs.' The only thing Starmer smashes is cocaine, adds his friend Dave, 57, who works in child safeguarding and believes claims he has seen online that the prime minister snorted drugs en route to Ukraine with Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz (the cocaine in question was a tissue on their train table).
Smoking in the pub garden in the sun, Michele, 57, and Amanda, 47, say they have barely seen Nigel Farage on television. Local support for Reform is an organic phenomenon, they insist. 'Everything's dying in Blackpool,' says Amanda. 'There's no tourist season anymore.' Neither of them have voted for years, but they say they will turn out for Reform – alongside Amanda's 23-year-old daughter, who discovered the party on TikTok and thinks they're more honest than other politicians.
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The Talbot's renewed politicisation began four years ago when then Conservative MP Scott Benson helped to organise a community meeting on anti-social behaviour that filled the 150-seat function room upstairs. 'People were saying what they felt and what was going on and what hadn't been done,' Lowe says. 'These people have lived here their whole life and they feel intimidated.' This isn't local paranoia. As tourism and local industries have declined, living standards in Blackpool have tumbled. On one notorious central street, says Flynn, 'even the dogs walk round in pairs'. His friends who run shops around the North Pier see marauding gangs of children steal brazenly. On almost every measure, Blackpool has become one of Britain's most deprived areas.
In Flynn and Lowe's telling, support for Reform has grown naturally from local anger at the failure of the Conservative government and Labour council to deal with the city's decline. Both men defected from the Tory party within the last year without telling the other. 'We've got a lot of other people's problems,' says Butcher. 'Families who get forced out of certain towns for antisocial behaviour end up here. We're the dumping ground.' He offers a defence of legal migration as vital to Blackpool's economy – without it there would not be enough workers for the holiday season – but claims locals are angry at an influx of new arrivals and spiking crime rates in the last few years. In a city built on holidaymakers, the requisitioning of The Metropole, a prominent seafront hotel, to house asylum seekers has become a totemic issue.
Over recent months, The Talbot has been hosting Reform meetings and will now function as the party's base for the South Blackpool constituency. Butcher thinks he is likely to secure a second pub to match it in Blackpool North and Fleetwood. He hopes they will help his party recreate the Tories' old ties to the community. At The Talbot Conservative Club, Flynn remembers, you would always see activists and councillors in their shirts and ties on a Sunday afternoon. Butcher, whose father was a member, has fond memories of its meat raffles. 'Every Christmas, we'd have parties upstairs,' he says. 'The Tories were very connected with their people… they did it very well, the social side of it.'
Twenty minutes' walk from The Talbot stands The Imperial Hotel, a great Victorian edifice of red brick that would once play host to every major political figure in Britain during party conference season. I walk around its bar with Tony Williams as he points at photos of Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Tony Blair visiting the city. Once the bassist in Stealers Wheel and Jethro Tull, Williams, now in his late seventies, was driven to enter local politics when he moved back to Blackpool and saw how poorly his area was being run. For eight years, until he resigned acrimoniously in 2023, he led the Conservative group on Blackpool council and, in his own telling, helped to manage the area's slow decline. Now, he is a member of Reform and believes they will win both of the city's seats at the next election.
'In the late Sixties there was a culture in Blackpool of people who were proud to be Conservatives,' Williams says, 'who were proud to donate, who were proud to fundraise and be part of a Conservative community. That just eroded.' When I ask him about the city's remaining Conservative clubs, he can't remember all their names. 'The two main parties are so alike,' he adds. 'I've seen from the members of Reform now there's a very strong will to get things done. There is a definite will within the party to sort this mess out.'
Willpower is not the only thing that's lacking among Reform's reeling opponents. A few streets away at the Claremont Conservative Club the mood is sleepy in the mid-afternoon heat. Pulling pints behind the bar, Henry, 24, says he has never voted and has no real desire to start. Smoking a cigarette next to the bowling green that dominates the club's garden, Eddie, 66, one of only two customers and a lifelong Conservative voter, tells me he likes what Reform are doing. 'The trust in the two main parties is gone,' he says.
According to Peter Sykes, the chairman of the club committee, while the Claremont is still affiliated to the Conservative party, the vast majority of members are not. 'When I joined you had to meet the chair, have an interview and swear allegiance to the party,' he remembers. 'Ladies were not allowed in the games room.' He worries that being connected to the Tories now turns potential customers away, but the Association of Conservative Clubs helps the place keep its head above water financially. No national party representative has visited since 2007, when the Conservatives last held their autumn conference in Blackpool. And while Sykes is still a supporter of the Tories, he has heard his members 'gushing' about Farage's plans to slash immigration. 'I'm afraid the depth of support for the Conservative party in Blackpool is withering away,' he adds glumly.
Around the town centre, even if they've not yet arrived at Reform, nobody is willing to defend mainstream politics. Denise, 70, says she loves Blackpool but has seen it changed by migration since she first visited as a child. A lifelong Labour voter, she believes Starmer is 'putting open borders before his own people'. At the last election she voted Reform. Former hospital porter Bob, also 70, will not stop railing against the elite when I ask him how he will vote. As he mentions former prime ministers, a passing man overhears and shouts: 'Tony Blair's a c**t.'
At The Talbot, Butcher sketches out a grandiose vision of how Reform can win political power – and rescue Britain from atomisation. The party will found Sunday league football teams for children and adults, he says; it will run cricket and rugby clubs. His network of 200 active volunteers are already establishing a ground game to take on the Labour machine. If regular people were to start joining explicitly political sports clubs and pubs, it would represent a reversal of every hyper-individualising trend of the 21st century so far. But Butcher believes that latent patriotism, a desire to save the country, will drive locals into Reform's arms. 'We're all fed up – and it's not just fed up. It's gone beyond being frustrated. People are being forced into action,' he says. 'Normal, everyday people are becoming activists.'
Darker currents are also brewing in Blackpool. David Shaw, a newly elected Reform county councillor in Lancashire, tells me a local anti-migrant 'vigilante group' recently tried to rent a room at his Fleetwood pub for a meeting. For now, they are said to only be planning to observe and photograph immigrants. What will come later is unclear. Shaw says he refused to accept their booking and told them he wanted no part of such action.
Public rage at the establishment will see Britain transformed by the next election, Butcher insists. He foresees a Nigel Farage-led government with the Liberal Democrats as the official opposition. 'If we protest, we'll be arrested. We can't say anything online, we'll get arrested,' he says. 'So what are we supposed to do? Let's sign up to Reform. This is the only driving force that is available.'
[See also: Farage rising]
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