Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, is now more popular among male voters than the governing Conservative Party. Nearly one in five—or 19% of—British men back Reform.
The Tories, whose position in the polls has been in freefall amid constant failures to control the nation’s borders and manage the economy, are trailing on a meagre 17%. Twenty-nine per cent of men are either undecided or know they won’t vote, while 41% back Labour.
That is all according to a new YouGov poll reported in The Sunday Times, which also suggests that Reform is ahead of the Conservatives overall in the north of England—particularly in culturally conservative, so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats which leant their backing to the Conservatives in 2019 in the hope of “getting Brexit done.”
The news comes less than a fortnight after former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who is ‘honorary president’ of Reform, said Britain’s political class didn’t understand the significance of former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform UK.
Anderson himself has described the new polling as “staggering,” but “not surprising.”
The results add further credibility to the view that the next general election could be an “extinction-level event” for the beleaguered Conservatives. The party has been in office for almost a decade and a half, but has repeatedly failed to enact its countless tough-sounding, conservative pledges on key electoral issues like crime, the environment, education and, most significantly, immigration.
Then-Tory PM David Cameron said in 2010 that his party would limit legal migration to “tens of thousands” each year. Radically cutting numbers was also a central hope of the pro-Brexit movement. Yet it is now expected that the UK population will hit 70 million 11 years earlier than predicted because of mass migration. And Cameron, who made the phoney pledge all those years ago, has been welcomed back into cabinet—as foreign secretary, no less—by the party’s latest socially liberal leader, Rishi Sunak. The Conservatives, to put it simply, radiate the impression that they haven’t got a clue about how to enact the changes that they promise—or, perhaps, that they just don’t care.
But however much this encourages voters to ditch the Tories and back Reform, Labour is still in prime position to win the next election, after which point Britain’s large anti-mass migration and anti-‘woke’ voter base can expect to be betrayed even further.
