Reform’s success is more than a ‘protest vote’

The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey is the gold standard of its kind. Conducted annually since 1983 by the National Centre for Social Research, it does not merely track voting intention but probes the values, discontents and self-understanding of the British people. When its 43rd report turns its attention to Reform UK, the results demand careful reading, because they are simultaneously more encouraging and more challenging for the party than the headline writers have managed to convey.

The report, authored by Sir John Curtice along with Georgie Morton and Jerome Swan, was published on 2 June 2026. Its central finding has already been widely quoted: Reform’s support is driven not merely as a protest against the system, but by a settled, coherent and emotionally committed worldview. Curtice describes Reform supporters as having ‘a level of emotional attachment that neither Labour nor the Conservatives have managed to inspire in voters for decades’. It is an extraordinary achievement for a party founded less than a decade ago, and it should be recognised as such before the problems are discussed.

Reform has been continuously ahead in the opinion polls since the spring of 2025. The BSA gives this polling reality a structural explanation: Reform’s support is not a mood, it is a movement. As many as 23 per cent of Reform supporters say they identify ‘very strongly’ with their party, well above the 11 per cent figure for supporters across its competitors. In an age of political fragmentation, that degree of partisan loyalty is a formidable political asset.

The demographic base, whatever anxieties it may generate in some quarters of the party, is in many respects a strength. Support for Reform stands at 49 per cent among those who would vote to stay out of the EU, while just nine per cent of those who would vote to rejoin back the party. That community, the Brexit coalition, is large, its motivations durable and its appetite for representation acute. Reform has successfully positioned itself as its natural heir to what Curtice describes as the ideological coalition that took Boris Johnson to his 2019 landslide.

Crucially, the BSA confirms that the rise is not built on sand. Although Reform supporters are more likely to be unhappy about public services and the cost of living, the party’s growth since 2024 has been driven primarily by ideology rather than discontent alone. This matters enormously for the question of durability. A protest vote collapses when the object of protest recedes; an ideologically rooted vote persists. The implication, as Curtice notes, is that Labour improving NHS waiting times will not, on its own, puncture Reform’s rise. The party has captured something deeper in the national psyche.

The survey also finds that the average British respondent has moved in what the authors call an ‘authoritarian’ direction since 2022. Support for the welfare state is also in decline. In other words, the electorate is, on balance, drifting towards Reform rather than away from it. Public attitudes on affirmative-action policies, immigration and transgenderism have all moved in directions more congenial to Reform’s platform. The party is not swimming against the tide, but riding it.

Reform supporters are also notably engaged: 43 per cent say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of interest in politics, somewhat higher than the 39 per cent figure among the public in general. They are not apathetic disengagers who have wandered in from the cold – they are active, motivated and committed. That is the raw material of a serious political organisation.

Now for the bad news for Reform. Twenty-eight per cent of men support the party, compared with 19 per cent of women, a nine-point gap that is wider than the five-point difference between the sexes in their propensity to vote Leave in 2016. The gender gap is sharpest among the young. Among those aged under 35, there is now a 13-point difference between men and women in support for Reform, compared with just six points in 2024.

This is not simply an inconvenience. It is a structural ceiling on the party’s growth. There are roughly equal numbers of men and women in the electorate, and no party has governed modern Britain while being unable to speak to one half of it. Nor is it reducible to a simple messaging failure: the gap reflects genuine differences on the issues Reform has chosen to lead on. It is simply a fact that women are less socially conservative.

The education gradient presents a related challenge. Forty per cent of those whose highest educational qualification is below A-level support Reform, but just nine per cent of graduates do so. This is the most dramatic divide in the survey. It makes Reform structurally weak in the professional and managerial classes who disproportionately staff public institutions, shape media narratives, run businesses and dominate the leadership of local authorities. Winning councils, as Reform discovered in May 2025 and 2026, requires the capacity to govern, and governing requires some penetration of the graduate professional world.

The ethnic composition of Reform’s support base is a further limitation. Just one in 12 Britons from a minority ethnic background supports Reform. In large urban areas, this could pose practical problems for winning seats.

The welfare and spending data also contain a cautionary note. Reform supporters are considerably more hostile to welfare spending than the general public, with 78 per cent saying that unemployment benefits are too high and discourage people from finding work, compared with 60 per cent of the general public. Yet only 32 per cent of Reform voters want taxes and spending reduced – the most common response (42 per cent) is that both should remain at the same level. Reform’s supporters are hostile to welfare as a moral and cultural proposition, not as an economic one. The party’s rhetoric of smaller government may sometimes run ahead of what its own voters actually want delivered.

So, has Reform reached its high water mark of public support? Curtice states that ‘something like 30 per cent looks like not an absolute ceiling, but they are unlikely to rise much above that given the character of the campaign issues that they are emphasising’. That ceiling comment deserves scrutiny. At historic levels of vote-share concentration, 30 per cent was not a winning number. In fragmented contemporary Britain, it may be, which Curtice does acknowledge. But ‘potentially’ is not ‘certainly’, and Reform’s route to government requires either broadening its appeal or relying on a degree of vote efficiency that the BSA data cannot confirm.

What, then, should Reform take from this? Several things.

On the gender gap: the party needs to understand that this is not simply a communications problem, as if the right social-media campaign aimed at women would close a nine-point chasm. Women are, on average, more sympathetic to welfare spending and more cautious about the hardest edges of culture-war positioning. Reform does not need to abandon its platform, but it does need to demonstrate that its worldview has genuine application to the lives of women. The cost of living, public safety, housing, GP access and family stability – these are not ‘culture war’ issues, they are the substance of daily life. Reform’s instinct to lead always on immigration risks signalling to women that the party has not thought seriously about what concerns them most. Candidates and spokespeople who can speak to these concerns, without abandoning the broader Reform prospectus, are worth their weight in gold. The party should be looking deliberately for such voices.

On education and class: governing parties need graduates. The party needs, over time, to develop a language that speaks to the entrepreneurial, the technical, the practically educated, as distinct from the credentialled professional-managerial class that it is unlikely to win in large numbers. The small employers and own-account workers in the BSA data are already strongly disposed towards Reform – that is a constituency that could be deepened and organised.

The BSA, in short, confirms that Reform is a serious, durable political force with deep roots in a distinctive and politically committed section of British society. It also confirms that the path to government runs through territory the party has not yet entered: women under 55, graduates, ethnic-minority communities and the professional classes. These are not natural Reform voters and pretending otherwise would be foolish.

But the way to begin closing those gaps is not by softening the platform beyond recognition. It is by demonstrating, in councils, in parliament and in policy, that the socially conservative worldview the British Social Attitudes survey so precisely maps can be translated into competent, honest and effective government. That demonstration, more than any repositioning exercise, is what will determine whether Reform’s poll lead can translate into something more significant.

Will it be the foundation for something historically significant, or merely the high watermark of a long, important, but ultimately unsuccessful insurgency?

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on his Substack.