Reform is on the back foot but not beaten

Since September 2025 polling for Reform has been falling gradually, from around 30% to around 25% now ( PollCheck, based on an average of several polls).

The drop is significant but not so dramatic that we can be sure Reform is on a continuous downward trajectory. Other data indicate, unfortunately, a relatively healthy outlook for the far right party.

For example, 81% of people who support Reform today also voted for them at the last general election. In other words, the big majority of Reform voters are loyal, in spite of Farage’s tantrum over his right to be a millionaire MP. Polling for Reform is also higher than 25% in the north of England. It stands at 30% in the north-east. Reform is building a core vote in some parts of the UK.

The data also show the limitations of Reform’s appeal — it’s high only in specific regions and among a certain demographic, the over-50s. Could Labour could win, or win back, some Reform voters?

Since Burnham began his rise to the leadership, Labour’s showing in the polls has risen from around 18% to 26%. Labour has gained at the expense of Reform, as have the Tories, but also from the Greens and the Lib Dems, who have dropped in the polls. This is significant, but could be short-lived.

Burnham has yet to show his promised dramatic shift away from the priorities of the Starmer government. His promises, the £2 bus fare cap, or scrapping of VAT on electricity bills, are details compared to the needed: a programme of rebuilding public services, especially the NHS. Such a programme could win over disillusioned older working-class voters of all age groups and rebuild core support for Labour.

Moreover, the prospects for Burnham’s “business-friendly socialism” — relying on growth to bring increased government income and spending, and only greater state involvement in the running of privatised services rather than reversing privatisation — do not look good. Perpetual and expanding wars in the Middle East are helping to push the global economy towards a crisis. That will bring rising energy bills and inflation, a slowing down of economic growth, rising costs for government borrowing, and maybe much worse. All will increase political pressure on Burnham to keep to strict “fiscal rules”, to be timid on increased taxes on the rich, and not to bring the changes working-class people want to see.

While Burnham and Labour dither on adopting a bolder path, the far right are upping the ante. Since the Clacton by-election Reform has announced welfare policies which would throw millions into deep hardship:

• making non-UK citizens ineligible for almost all benefits (this affects around 1.3 million people on Universal Credit, half of whom are not in employment);

• switching to a lower measure of inflation for uprating benefits each year, reducing the value of benefits forever.

• making the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) a means tested benefit, much tougher to qualify for, and less of a cash payment, more of a payment in kind.

Reform effectively want to introduce something like New Labour’s draconian and unjust Work Capability Assessment which caused huge stress and even suicides among disabled and ill people.

These policies are for the better-off who will never need these benefits and the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary base of Reform, a base Farage does not want to lose to the further-right Restore Britain.

Benefits

Labour should not pander to Reform’s reactionary stance. That will only help to further normalise hostility to benefit claimants. Burnham should remember the justness of last summer’s opposition to disability benefit cuts. Unfortunately he is already talking about making it harder to claim benefits.

The far right’s technique of proposing outrageously reactionary policies has successfully ensured mainstream bourgeois acceptance of their narratives. For example, all kinds of distorted information about migration is now casually circulated by almost every politician and media outlet as “received wisdom”. In a recent Ipsos poll 67% believed the level of asylum-seeking to be excessive.

Yet asylum seekers are a tiny percentage of inward migration to the UK, the numbers are decreasing, and the UK is one of the least generous hosts of refugees in Europe.

False received wisdom bolsters the far right racist populist campaigns for mass deportations by Reform and Restore Britain, the hate speech about “invaders” from Tommy Robinson and would-be Tommy Robinsons, and the pogroms against migrants on the streets of Belfast.

The left’s responsibility

It is the urgent responsibility of the left to combat these divisive lies — about claimants, migrants, and other hate figures of the far right. We must hold “respectable politicians” who help create these narratives to account. We champion instead the example of the many people in Belfast who stepped in to offer food and shelter to migrants.

There are many difficult practical steps to take. The left needs to mobilise in the trade unions to fight for the policies thousands of union members have voted for — to tax the rich and rebuild public services. Leaders of Labour’s trade union affiliates need to stop passively complaining about Labour leaders and start to fight them on clear goals — for a wealth tax, against benefit cuts, for restored public services. Unions should defend migrants by propagating the facts and by organising migrant workers into unions.

We need labour movement-community anti-far right campaigns everywhere which can do these things in local workplaces and on the streets. We need to turn working-class people away from the far right and show that it is possible to fight for our own class interests.

* All figures in this article are taken from PollCheck unless otherwise