Reform UK is tipped to “sustain” support into the next general election and beyond as the insurgent party is benefitting from two long-run trends.The research by Professor Paul Whiteley of the University of Essex and his colleagues comes as a new Survation poll has Nigel Farage crushing Labour’s so-called ‘Red Wall’, with support in the North and Midlands surging from 18 per cent it achieved at the last general election to 30 per cent.Although elections guru John Curtice suggests it would be unwise to buy into the hype as Reform is yet to break into the mainstream, the party is benefitting from two tectonic shifts in voter sentiment. Prof Whiteley arrived at this conclusion after investigating the sources of electoral support for Reform in the UK general election of 2024. The paper examined four rival, but related, explanations of the electoral performance of Reform at the constituency level in the 632 constituencies in Great Britain and compared this with census data from 2021/22.Identity politics in the form of English identification was found to be a key driver of Reform’s support on July 4.Whiteley of the University of Essex compared the percentage of Reform voters in a constituency with those who identified as English in the 2021 census in England.The census included questions which asked respondents if they thought of themselves as ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘Welsh’.He found a strong relationship between the two measures (see chart above). In other words, the more English identifiers there were in a constituency, the greater support for Reform.This conclusion was reinforced by the fact the more inclusive British identity variable had a negative impact on the Reform vote.This is significant because Englishness is on the rise. Professor Richard Wyn Jones of Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre and Professor Ailsa Henderson of the University of Edinburgh spent 10 years exploring political attitudes in England through their Future of England Survey, the most detailed study of attitudes in England towards national identity and constitutional change.The nine big quantitative surveys of “Englishness” they have conducted since 2011 demonstrate that the number of people who describe themselves as exclusively or mainly English rather than British is growing, and that the notion of “Britishness”— is splintering.The second explanation for Reform’s meteoric rise was democratic dissatisfaction, which is the most challenging one to estimate since there are no direct measures of dissatisfaction with democracy in the census data.LATEST MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENTSIs Keir Starmer finished? Elections guru reveals major plot twist as poll has Reform crushing ‘Red Wall’EXCLUSIVE: Ex-cop claims Labour grooming gang ‘collusion’ is ‘normal’ as he blows lid on cover-upEXPOSED: America’s 34-page hit job on ‘burdensome’ EU has Starmer on brink of torching US trade dealHowever, one way Whiteley got around this was to look at voter turnout, which revealed a strong negative relationship between the number of votes cast and those going to Reform. In other words, when voter turnout was high, the Reform vote declined.As lower turnout indicates political apathy and discontent, Reform benefitted from this mood music at the constituency level.The inverse was also true: many invalid votes, higher turnouts and fewer independents all reduced support for Reform, underscoring that the insurgent party benefitted from dissatisfaction with the established party system in Britain. Public sentiment has curdled since then. A survey by Ipsos UK in January found confidence in the direction of the UK had fallen back to almost the same level as before the election, with 62 per cent saying the country was heading in the wrong direction.The recent Survation poll of 2,032 adults also found that 68 per cent of people polled thought Britain was “broken”.These results suggest that support for Reform is likely to be “sustained” in the future, Whiteley says, adding: “The next general election is due to take place in 2028 or 2029 and these results suggest that Reform will be an important player in that election.”The professor continued: “This conclusion is reinforced by the importance of the identity model and particularly the growth of English identity at the expense of British identity. This is a major driver of support for Reform in Britain.”
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