In a BBC article titled “Why one small town [Buxton] with very little immigration turned to Reform UK” (28 October 2025), Yvonne, 50, from Buxton, said:
“I haven’t got faith in anything anymore – there’s nobody offering me any hope. They tell you one thing and do something else, so it doesn’t matter who you vote for.”
That sense of powerlessness and hopelessness is precisely why Reform UK is rising in the polls. Yet a Reform victory will not repair what is broken, it will only deepen the divide. Many of its candidates are not genuine reformers; they are opportunists, capitalising on the disillusionment of ordinary Britons.
We have seen this before. In 2014, UKIP, under Nigel Farage, surged in the European elections, winning 24 seats, more than both Labour and the Conservatives.
In an Al Jazeera article published on 6 June 2014, political scientist Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham, said:
“We tracked UKIP citations in the media from the beginning of 2013 until last month, and what was clear was that UKIP was receiving an ever-growing amount of interest. The tone of coverage really shifted – from being unclear about what was behind UKIP’s rise, to a more explicitly hostile response focusing almost entirely on presumed links between UKIP and racism, and finally to where we are today: thinking more seriously about the roots of UKIP’s appeal.”
Similarly, Gerry Hassan, research fellow in cultural policy at the University of the West of Scotland, told Al Jazeera that the mainstream media’s exposure of UKIP “framed and made permissible … a right-wing ratchet effect of British politics.” He explained:
“It made us chase not a caricatured bigoted voter, but a caricatured, populist, superficial politics that looks for easy answers and easy scapegoats.”
Hassan added that in doing so, the mainstream media found in UKIP the perfect opportunity “to fill a void” in British politics:
“Certainly, for some of the mainstream newspapers, UKIP filled a long-term agenda – euroscepticism, the loss of a certain Britain, and other anxieties. The coverage of UKIP was a defining moment in our politics and our media.”
The pattern we see today, particularly in media reporting on Reform UK, is strikingly familiar.
But there is one crucial difference: today’s far-right movements have Elon Musk’s platform, X (formerly Twitter), amplifying their reach and their rage.
When pundits speculate about a Reform UK government by 2029, we should not dismiss the possibility. We have been here before, and we ignored the warning signs then, too.
First dropped: | Last modified: October 30, 2025