What messages might Reform be vulnerable to?

Exploring weaknesses in the Farage brand - an experiment.

Since this year’s local elections, Reform have started to consolidate their position as the main right party in British politics. As they do so, most of the research – including my own effort back in April – has tended to focus on the party’s strengths and what is pulling voters towards them.

A bit less is known, though, about their potential vulnerabilities. What kind of messaging strategies might Farage be susceptible to, for instance?

I’ve had a go at poking around this via some new Persuasion research out today with the New Statesman – you can hear me discuss it on their latest podcast. The full research is here. I’ve summarised the results below, with some thoughts at the end on what it might mean for Reform’s opponents, especially the Labour government.

Methodology - and message tested

First a quick word on how this was done, which is important to understanding the results. We used Randomised Control Trial (RCT) message testing, a technique I like because it allows you to see not just if voters agree with a message but if it shifts their underlying attitudes.

Six thousand UK adults were recruited into the experiment via the polling provider NorStat in late April. We then separated them into six demographically identical sub-groups. Five were ‘treatment groups’ – they each saw one anti-Reform ‘play’ or message. One was a control group: they saw no message.

At the end of the experiment every group, including the control group, takes the same survey on their attitudes to Reform. In the analysis phase we look for differences in the attitudes of treatment groups compared to control. Any statistically significant difference can be attributed to the message seen – a persuasion effect.

We tested the following theories:

· Group 1: asylum seeker deportations. This group saw a 50 second Sky News clip involving footage the government put out of its asylum deportation program in action. This was an attempt to test a more ‘deliverist’ theory that you reduce people’s appetite to vote Reform if you show you are taking their concerns seriously.

· Group 2: climate change denial. A clip of Sophie Ridge interrogating Richard Tice over his climate change denial.

· Group 3: Labour NHS attack. An ad using Farage’s remarks on the NHS to suggest he wants to privatise it.

· Group 4: Corporate interests. A fairly punchy populist message, highlighting the money that Reform has taken from different interest groups, oil and gas especially, and used it to question Farage’s motivations.

· Group 5: Britain’s Trump. This is similar to the argument deployed by Mark Carney in Canada against Pierre Poilievre. It seeks to tie Farage to Trump both ideologically and personally.

You can see in the full deck what these looked like in practice. Of course, budget restraints meant there are several we could have tested but didn’t – more competence based ones for instance, or attempts to tie Farage to Liz Truss. For this reason and others the research can’t be the final word, just hopefully an interesting opening salvo.

Results: what worked?

The effect sizes across many of the treatments were reasonably small – a reminder that a lot of political theatre can either wash over people slightly or speak only to the converted.

But there were two that really did seem to move things.

The first of these was the Trump related message. This saw an 8-10% ppt decline in people’s favourability towards Farage and Reform as a party, also reducing the belief that Reform are “fighting to improve issues that matter to me”.

This is explicable enough. Contrary to what you’d think from various parts of the media, Trump is deeply unpopular in the UK including with some Reform voters. This is partly about values but also just the chaos factor associated with him. Using Farage’s personal closeness to Trump to make an argument about his ideological closeness, and what that means for the country, proves damaging to Reform.

By far the most impactful in this experiment, though, was the ‘corporate interests’ message. This pushed down not just on favourability to Farage, it was the only message to significantly reduce willingness to vote for Reform. It decreased Farage’s numbers as best PM, increasing Starmer’s lead over him in the two-way version of this question.

This worked the way it did for several reasons, I think. Firstly it tapped into a general mood of cynicism to politicians and hostility to big business that does, like it or not, exist across swathes of the public at the moment. Secondly though, it provided an explanatory framework for Farage’s positions on workers rights or tax. Effective attack narratives explain to voters – or seek to explain – why their opponents have the views they do, rather than assuming they already know.

What didn’t work?

I’ll come on to the wider implications of these results in a second, but a quick word first on those that didn’t really move the dial.

Most notable among these was the deportation video. The only statistically significant effect here was to increase the salience of immigration among respondents. There is some evidence it actually increased sympathy to Reform – although this was slightly outside statistical significance. This will be partly be because it was portrayed by Sky as Labour responding to Reform.

I personally don’t read these results as ‘Labour should do nothing on asylum’ – in the end, it is a top 3 issue even for their voters. But it does show the difficulties of the issue.

Ultimately, it badly needs to reduce the salience of small boats as an issue before the next election; it’s the TV visuals of boat arrivals that are particularly helping Reform. Realistically, achieving that cannot just be about pushing other debates to the top of the agenda, even if some of it is. Some of it has to be about fixing the underlying issue.

The trouble is, until you have done that - and voters feel you have done so – there does not appear to be points available in ‘getting caught trying’. Constantly commentating on the incremental progress you may or may not be making is not especially useful. All it does is further stoke the salience of an issue that, while unresolved in the eyes of voters, benefits the party most trusted on the issue. This is the fatal position Rishi Sunak found himself in.

Elsewhere, Tice’s climate denialism did not convert many people, I assume, because those who are outraged by this are already unfavourable to Reform. Why the Labour NHS video did not work, I don’t know for sure – but it’s not the first time I’ve seen that line not convert many people. It likely works well as a Labour base play, but does not – right now at least - appear believable to Reform swing voters.

So what?

It’s important to acknowledge various limitations to what we did here. Firstly it’s testing in the laboratory, not the messy real world. Some treatments were video while some were text, one had the Labour brand in it (not very strong right now), others didn’t. So it’s not perfectly clean - if you want to pick holes in it you can.

But the reason I’m confident enough to publish is that broadly it backs up existing research.

The Trump connection in particular comes through in all polling, and often spontaneously arises as a concern in focus groups.

The impact of the ‘corporate interests’ message also affirms a clear theme of our ‘Reform curious Labour voters’ research. That is: Reform is strong when the conflicts in British politics are cultural. They are potentially weaker, and Labour stronger, when the conflicts are economic. Presumably this is partly why Farage has moved to neutralise this part of the Reform brand recently. But it remains the party’s soft underbelly.

More generally, based on everything I’ve seen, it’s my view that the best place for social democratic opponents of radical right parties to be - within the modern media environment and attention economy - is in the centre on culture (safe and unspectacular), and on the left on economics. And actively seeking conflict and attention on the latter to raise its salience - especially as it relates to voters’ cost of living concerns.

Now, all this is clearly not so straight forward for Labour specifically. For a start, they have decided to get close to Trump, betting that the deliverist benefits (eg lower tariffs) will pay greater electoral dividends than the emotional appeal of separation with the White House.

In addition, they will likely worry that punchier ‘many not the few’ type attacks risk looking anti-business or anti-growth at a time when the economy needs both.

In this regard there was an enlightening passage in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In. It reports that Starmer was ready to ambush Sunak at last year’s second TV debate on his time as a hedge fund manager, and his companies’ role in the collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland. This will almost certainly have been based on internal testing. But Lord Ali vetoed it at the last minute over concerns of it backfiring with Labour’s own donors and the business community.

David Shor, a key pollster in the Kamala Harris campaign, had a strikingly similar experience – finding economically populist messages the most effective against Trump in internal testing - only to be over-ruled.

This shows a few things. In the messy world of politics, what we might euphemistically term ‘stakeholder considerations’ can distort message selection and strategy. (It also partly underscores the desperate need for progressives to have theories of economic growth that distinguish between growth creating parts of business and the more destructive elements - but that’s separate conversation.)

More than anything, though, it’s that the approach you take to your opponents has to cohere with your overall strategy and messenger. When it comes to Starmer, it may well be that his biographer Tom Baldwin is right – that he is at heart no pugilist or rabble rouser; more a compromise seeker and conciliator. In which case, insurgent messaging may not suit him very well, and he’d be better off with a more authentic approach.

The main challenge with that right now is there seems to be a few different versions of the Prime Minister, each slightly at war with each other. At some level, each reflect multiple different theories of how to see off Reform. At the very least this will need to be sharpened down into one by the time of the next election if Farage is to face more formidable opposition.

~ @SteveAkehurst
~ ‪@steveakehurst.bsky.social

• The full research is here.

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