Reform UK Doesn't Really Care About Democracy
The threat to democracy today isn't "sectarianism" or "family voting." It's the Trumpian impulse to cast doubt on legitimate election results.
It’s funny, isn’t it? When Reform UK wins a race, we’re told that the Patriots Have Spoken. Even a narrow victory on a minority of the vote is the purest expression of the people’s will. But the moment they lose, our democracy suddenly teems with fraud and “sectarian” extremism. To Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Matt Goodwin, the integrity of British democracy appears to rise and fall along with their party’s electoral fortunes.
Despite polls forecasting a nail-biting race in Gorton & Denton last week, the Green Party won decisively by more than 4,400 votes. Reform UK and Labour were both roundly defeated. And Reform quickly concocted a Trumpian narrative casting doubt on the results.
Alongside the Conservatives, they began widely circulating reports of “widespread family voting” — allegations that relatives were coerced into voting a certain way — immediately after polls closed. Those claims have been contradicted by local election officials and are rightly being examined by authorities now. But without an official verdict, they’re being used to call the results into question.
Matt Goodwin publicly questioned “the extent to which the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election is a free, fair and democratic election.” Farage claimed that British elections are “riddled with fraud, intimidation and outright cheating.”
There is a familiar paradox here: distrust in elections is stirred up in the name of protecting them.
Farage, of course, has a long history of this sort of thing – railing against postal voting (despite reportedly casting his own vote by post in 2024), and warning of widespread fraud that investigations repeatedly fail to substantiate. He’s even gone as far as backing Trump’s 2020 “Stop The Steal” conspiracies about Joe Biden stealing US Presidential election. It’s a consistent pattern: whenever Reform (or their allies) lose, the system must be rigged.
Goodwin gave the game away when he unveiled his “strategy for saving our democracy,” centred largely on tightening eligibility and restricting aspects of the franchise. Conspicuously absent, it won’t surprise you to hear, are structural critiques of First-Past-the-Post or the vested interests buying up our political system (not to mention the billionaires bankrolling his own party). The focus falls instead on tired cultural and demographic anxieties.
On LBC, Goodwin warned that “our democracy will start to look like some corrupt political system closer to Lebanon or Sierra Leone rather than a modern Western liberal democracy.” Their entire voter fraud narrative is pre-built into their existing beliefs about demographics, the true patriots hampered by the foreign-born insurgents.
But, whatever you may think of Zack Polanski’s party, the insinuation that the Greens’ victory can only be explained by coordinated “sectarian” Islamist mobilisation collapses under even the mildest scrutiny. This is a socially liberal party with a leader who identifies as Jewish and gay. Candidate Hannah Spencer spent her campaign speaking primarily about public services and the cost of living. There’s nothing wrong with running ads in Urdu or appealing to Muslim voters or any minority community for that matter – that’s just part of running an election campaign!
And the “sectarian” buzzword is particularly ironic, because if anything it’s a much better word to describe Reform UK. Goodwin ran his campaign warning about threats to the UK’s “Christian heritage.” Top advisor James Orr (a key architect of the party’s platform for Government) is himself a religious fundamentalist who supports restricting access to abortion in all circumstances. Reform politicians express their vision of politics as a civilisational battle between the Christian west and Islam.
Labour, to a lesser extent, have also bought into the framing of the Greens as an extremist threat. While Keir Starmer vaguely acknowledged that his party has “lessons to learn” from the by-election, he also criticised what he called the Greens’ “divisive, sectarian politics.” Home Office Minister Mike Tapp suggested that “voters were tricked by the extreme left” – it couldn’t possibly be that they just lost public support.
This kind of reaction, in my view, shows why a different political party was viable in a historically safe Labour seat. Ordinary people – even those who might not like their policies – do not broadly view the Green party as a nefarious fifth column of Islamic sectarianism. It’s a tough sell. Reform UK and Labour come out of this looking like sore losers, turning to desperate nonsense instead of simply conceding with grace and civility.
This melodrama around “family voting” and “sectarianism” may hold traction within the political class – which is still clinging to FPTP and the two-party system – but it feels alien to real voters who engage with politics only intermittently. Most will find this narrative condescending and irritating, politicians blaming voters for their inability to win.
What they’ve seen is a bunch of politicians and partisan pundits who can’t stand losing. They see Farage and Goodwin looking weak and whiney, scolds that complain endlessly instead of taking defeat on the chin. And they see Labour, who effectively blocked a more viable candidate in Andy Burnham, unable to admit that they’re haemorrhaging their voter base. It comes off as petty and paranoid. Beneath the dignity of people who want to run the country.
Try telling a punter in a Denton pub that their neighbour's vote was part of a dark sectarian conspiracy. Try convincing them their new MP, a former plumber who owns two greyhounds, is a secret Islamist hell-bent on destroying Western civilisation. There’s a strong chance they’ll think you’ve lost it.
For Reform UK, "democracy" is not a set of principles to be upheld. It's a results service. When it delivers for them, it's sacred. When it doesn't, it's corrupt. And their strategy is not to accept defeat, but to poison the well so thoroughly that no future loss can be accepted as legitimate either. This is the Trump playbook. Manufacture distrust. Weaponise demographic anxiety. Train your supporters to see every election they don't win as a conspiracy.
Starmer’s Labour and the media are doing a disservice by flirting with that narrative. In the proper democracy we’re fighting for, elections would be conceded without having to allege “fraud” or “tricks.” Sometimes you just lose. But you do yourself and the country no favours by blaming it on everyone else.
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It's interesting isn't it that suddenly we have election observers called something like the democratic alliance or whatever they've called themselves. I follow politics quite closely and I've never heard of these people before it's funny they have popped up in this election.
Do you think there's any chance that some investigative journalists somewhere might look into the claims that they have made and also who they are and who's backing them because I wouldn't mind betting they are not an independent electoral panel; after all we have the actual Electoral Commission, weak as piss though they are, who are supposed to monitor the conduct of elections.
Heaven forfend that Reform are connected to them in some way.