Note: this article was written in late July 2024, the week prior to race riots powered by misinformation that swept across England and Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Pseudoscientific, conspiratorial, religious and overtly non-reality-based policies have always crept in on the edges of UK politics. In the 1990s, the Natural Law Party delighted TV viewers – if not voters – with party political broadcasts highlighting their belief that transcendental meditation and yogic flying would end poverty and bring about world peace, before ultimately disbanding in 2001.
Jump forward to the 2024 elections and the Scottish Family Party stood on a rather different religiously-motivated platform, based on “Judeo-Christian-inspired values.” As such, their 2023 policy document opposes same-sex marriage for the sake of children, which is of course completely contrary to the repeated, worldwide evidence. Scottish voters reassuringly and overwhelmingly rejected the party’s candidates.
Towards the mainstream, though, parties mostly seek to distance themselves from such fringe beliefs, with the Green Party’s growing aspirations clearly highlighted by their leadership moving away from – for example – support for homeopathy. While vestiges of those beliefs remain, such as the quickly-amended policy on natural childbirth, the speed with which it was amended this year shows that there is clearly risk in being associated with “woo-inclined” policies, and highlights a divide in the Greens between the old guard and younger, more evidence-focused supporters.
In fairness, not all such “woo-inclined” thinking is confined to the Greens, or even the left. MPs from across the political spectrum, from Labour and Conservative to SNP and Liberal Democrat, have signed Early Day Motions supporting homeopathy, although thankfully all these EDMs were from 2010 or earlier. An optimist might speculate that as the evidence on homeopathy has become more well-known, so MP behaviour has adjusted accordingly.
One political party in 2024 bucked the mainstream tendency towards following the evidence. Right-wing populist party Reform UK, which received the third largest number of votes (but came a distant joint-sixth in terms of constituencies won), embraced many policies in direct contrast to the other widely supported parties.
For example, on climate change, deputy leader Richard Tice said:
Net zero will make zero difference to climate change… The idea that you can stop the power of the sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous.
The science, of course, says that humans, not the sun or volcanoes, are responsible for climate change. While the majority of UK voters do believe that climate change is real and requires action, there remains a persistent core of people more likely to vote for a party advocating the opposite. It is hard to see what can be done to change minds on this, considering the extremely high visibility and awareness around this issue.
Or to take a “culture war” issue, Reform UK’s manifesto promises to “scrap Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DE&I) rules that have lowered standards and reduced economic productivity.” Again there is a sizeable minority of British people who think that EDI initiatives lead to unfair outcomes, and to whom Reform UK can appeal. This is one area where evidence and self-interest can meet: diversity in corporations, contrary to the Reform UK claims, correlates very clearly with economic benefits and improved financial performance. EDI isn’t just the right thing to do; it is the profitable thing to do. In the continuing cost of living crisis and economic underperformance of the UK, this may resonate with at least some anti-EDI hold-outs.
Beyond the manifesto, party leader Nigel Farage posted the following on social media:
Reform UK will reject the influence of the World Economic Forum and cancel Britain’s membership of it.
Aside from being nonsensical – no country is a member of the WEF – this kind of message directly reaches a certain group of conspiracy-minded folk who see the WEF and Klaus Schwab as being behind every conspiracy around, from Covid vaccinations and the Great Reset to 15 minute cities and eating insects for protein. Whether or not Reform UK intended to reach these audiences, they clearly did, with Sky News reporting that conspiracist groups on Telegram “posted 5,239 messages about Mr Farage/Reform UK – more than any other party”, and that:
One of the most prominent groups that focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory… said it would be launching a Reform UK based group on Facebook with QAnon content in order to “bring a lot of traffic to the group”.
Al Baker, managing director of Prose, which analysed the data from Telegram, notes that while being a Reform UK voter doesn’t mean you are a conspiracy theorist, if you are a conspiracy theorist then “you are far more likely to support Reform UK than other parties.”
For some on the fringe, though, Reform UK does not go far enough. In The Light Paper and similar channels on Telegram, arguments erupted during the election campaign and its aftermath as to whether Reform UK are “controlled opposition”, if a vote for Reform UK was participating in a “psyop” and giving legitimacy to “globalist” Labour by boosting turnout, and whether Nigel Farage and Richard Tice are really out to fight the system – or just in it for themselves…
![A hex-map of the UK's 2024 general election results by seat, showing largely red from Labour's significant margin of victory](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/512px-UK_2024_election_hex_map_simple.svg_.png)
As Al Baker notes, however, many Reform UK voters are likely unaware that they voted for the conspiracy theorists’ party of choice. Most Reform UK leaflets, after all, focused on their core policy messages around immigration and small boats, NHS waiting lists, taxes and energy bills. Most wider media coverage of Reform UK is, of course, based on the ample time given to Nigel Farage’s views by broadcasters and print alike.
Of the largest parties, Reform UK voters were least likely to vote tactically, with 85% of their voters saying they are making a positive choice to vote for Reform. This is unusually high compared to most parties’ voters in the UK. Whether motivated by conspiracy theories and culture-war grudges, or anger about the cost of living, immigration and the NHS, these voters aren’t going away. The systemic unfairness of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system can’t be guaranteed to keep them out forever.
How to reach some of the one in seven voters who are enthusiastic about a party like Reform UK is something we should all take seriously.