BREAKING. Reform tops national polls - I said this would happen
A huge moment in British politics
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Well, I said it would happen and today it happened.
For the first time in history, Nigel Farage and the Reform party have topped the polls, sharing first place with the Labour Party, on 25%, and 5-points clear of the Tories.
The bombshell poll, by Find Out Now, a respected pollster, also shows that Reform is the most popular party among men, has already won over one in four people who voted for Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party back in July, and is more popular than the Tories among every age group except pensioners.
I’ve been pointing to the coming ‘inflection point’ for some time.
And now, after Reform’s impressive general election result back in July, the remarkable unpopularity of the new Labour government, which I also predicted, and the continuing collapse of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, it’s finally here.
What’s driving it?
Well, if you’ve been with us for a while then you know exactly what’s driving it.
The top two concerns for Reform voters are to stop the illegal migration small boats crisis in the Channel and lower the overall level of legal immigration into the country.
They are also strongly distrustful of the establishment, very pessimistic about the direction of travel, and absolutely convinced that things like mass immigration, state multiculturalism, and rampant globalisation are making life worse, not better.
The elite class likes to tell you these are all fringe concerns that do not reflect the wider public mood out there in the country. But this is nonsense.
Many of these concerns are now also shared by a large and growing share of the wider British population —not only Reform voters.
Contrary to what all those left-wing academic “experts” predicted, people like Jonathan Portes and Robert Ford, that as mass immigration took off the British people would increasingly become supportive of it, the very opposite is happening.
As I pointed out a few days ago, the share of all British people who think immigration is “too high” has now surged to 70% —a record high.
Remarkably, only 15% think the current level of immigration is “about right” —which maps onto the roughly 15% of people in this country who hold radical left-wing progressive views, like those academics, fanatical in their pro-immigration outlook.
At the same time, the share of Brits who think mass immigration has been “mostly good” for the country has collapsed, to a record low of just 18%.
While half of all British people now openly say mass immigration has been “mostly bad” for Britain, this figure then rockets much higher among Reform-friendly groups.
The share of Conservative Party voters, for example, who think immigration has been bad for Britain has rocketed from 39% in 2019 to 63% today
The share of Brexit voters who think so has surged from 48% to 65%. The share of working-class voters who think so has jumped from 34% to 48%.
And the share of older voters who think so has increased by 20-points to nearly 60%. Even one in three Londoners now think immigration has been “mostly bad”.
They are right to think this way, of course.
What voters are finally realising is what we have been tracking right here on this Substack for years now —a failing policy of low-wage, low-skill, and culturally incompatible immigration which is making us poorer and dividing the country.
All this, in other words, is now rapidly expanding the amount of space for Reform.
Spiralling public concern about the extreme policy of mass immigration is now colliding with one of the worst cost-of-living crises on record, a visibly incompetent political class on both the Left and Right who refuse to do what is necessary to regain control of our broken borders, and the increasingly unavoidable conclusion, as reflected in the rape gangs scandal, that the policies of mass immigration and state multiculturalism are not only failing and making us poorer but are driving up crime and threatening the very security and safety of the British people and their children.
Throw in to this mix an increasingly professional Reform party, which is now attracting serious donors and serious people, and you begin to see how a revolt that started on the margins of Britain’s political life is not only entering the mainstream but is now starting to push ahead of the old parties, as I predicted right here.
How far could Reform go?
Well, look, first-past-the-post systems are a total nightmare for insurgent parties. As French political scientist Maurice Duverger first wrote back in the 1950s, the biggest obstacle facing disruptors in these systems is to convince voters they are not ‘a wasted vote’ —and this remains a major barrier to entry for Reform.
But, having said that, we are also living at a time when politics and the wider system is remarkably volatile. As I’ve said before, we just went from a massive Tory majority, in 2019, to a massive Labour majority, in 2024, in only five years.
The era of tribal allegiances, the era of strong public loyalty to the old parties, the so-called ‘golden age’ of representative democracy, in other words, is over.
Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are still acting as though they are living in this bygone era, with Kemi Badenoch even saying today that she will not release policies for two years (!) But this era is well and truly over.
Which not only means that politics has become much more chaotic, fluid, volatile, and unpredictable but also means something else which I genuinely believe.
Anything is possible.
So stay with us, right here, keep watching this revolt, keep supporting our work, because I have a funny feeling that we are truly on the cusp of something historic.
Maybe now the ‘silent’ majority, many of whom are afraid to support these majority opinions, even in their own homes, can now ‘come out’. Is it possible that even the BBC and C4 will smell the coffee, as Facebook and CNN have, and start to report even-handedly? Whilst I doubt it I will welcome it.
Ps when will Tommy Robinson’s sentence end? With time off for good behaviour and time on remand it should be fairly soon?
Incredible achievement by Reform. Nobody is listening to the Tories anymore. They can do their trick of talking in conservative language (talk right, act left) but their credibility is zero, nobody trusts them and all today's problems can be traced back to their continuity Blairism of the past 14 years. The sands are shifting. Legacy media is dying. Fact checkers are dying. Power to the people!