It’s the first sunny Saturday of the year at Doncaster racecourse as Richard Tice takes to the stage at Reform UK’s spring conference.
The party leader is framed by two vast portraits of his own face, smiling beatifically against a Union Jack backdrop. “The sun shines on the righteous,” he declares with a messianic flourish, gesturing around the dark, windowless conference room. “And we are the righteous. We are the reformers.”
The sun shines on the righteous, and — if you recall the second half of the verse from your Sunday school days — on the unrighteous too. Today, it mainly shines on the fed up.
“Middle England is not happy with the way it’s being governed,” Rupert Lowe, who recently stood for Reform in the Kingswood by-election, tells me. The people here today are “people who are disillusioned with the mainstream parties, and they want change”.
Everyone in Britain is fed up. Get fed up enough, in the right way, and you eventually end up here, at this cathedral of the disillusioned of Middle Britain. There are about 1,200 at the moment, but the number of voters fed up enough to turn to Reform is steadily growing out there in the country too.
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The party has been climbing in the polls for the last few months, currently standing on 13 per cent of the vote. Before 2024, it had struggled to convert this into comparable results in by-elections. But recently, it broke the double-digit ceiling, chalking up 13 per cent in Wellingborough and 10.4 per cent in Kingswood.
It has the Conservative Party nervous, just as it did back when it was the Brexit Party, or even — and this is ancient history now — back when a lot of the people involved here were Ukip.
Back in those days, you would turn up to one of these conferences expecting a spectacle: colourful characters in Union Jack top hats, stunts, Nigel Farage necking pints and chain-smoking, a big grin on his face. He’s not here today. He’s in a better place: in Washington at CPac, the annual gathering of mainly American conservatives.
Today the crowd is sombre — made up of accountants and builders, small-business owners and pensioners who are, as Dave Lane, an electrical engineer from Rishi Sunak’s constituency of Richmond, Yorkshire, puts it: “Fed up with the state of the country.” The tone is resigned, miserable rather than angry. I came here looking for a circus. Instead, I found a wake.
A wake for what? For Britain, mainly. “I think back to what it was like when I grew up as a child in the late Sixties and Seventies. It’s a completely different place now — and I’m not convinced in any way that it’s for the better,” Gary, 60, a builder attending the conference, tells me. Reform’s slogan used to be “Let’s make Britain great”. More recently, someone clearly seems to have looked round at the country and decided “great” was a little ambitious. Today the slogan plastered over Tice’s head reads, “Ready to SAVE Britain”.
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What does saving Britain look like? Well, Gary is worried about “levels of immigration into our country, the changing of our culture and our demographics”, and Tice has plans to freeze “non-essential” immigration, leave the European convention on human rights so illegal migrants can be more easily deported, and — as the party’s manifesto puts it — “Pick up migrants out of boats and take back to France (we are legally allowed to do this under international treaties).”
Sorry, did I say manifesto? My mistake. This is not a manifesto. Reform is very firm on that. It is, instead, “Our contract with you”, and then, further down the page, all in caps — “WORKING DRAFT.” It’s a draft because Tice wants feedback on the policies he’s putting forward. He is even happy if people question his maths. In fact, he’s hoping “Latte Labour” does, because Reform “want people talking”. “We want them to attack our policies because our policies should be centre stage in the debate”.
The not-a-manifesto, James Rawson, a 48-year-old accountant in the crowd, tells me, contains “everything you hear about in the pub. It’s all that everyone talks about but never makes it (happen).” Rawson says he’s “no longer motivated to work hard and earn more because of tax policy in the UK” and Tice wants to lift the personal allowance to £20,000 and the higher-rate tax threshold to £70,000. He’s proposing tax relief for people who unburden the NHS by choosing private healthcare, and a crackdown on what he describes as “the bungling, wasteful NHS bureaucrats”.
Rawson has voted Conservative “all my life”. But “the Tories are not Tory any more”. I speak to many like him, but perhaps as many former Labour voters. “Some people say we’re all Tories,” frets Malcolm Webster, the party’s candidate in St Helens, who used to be Labour. “But we’re not. The disillusionment goes across the political spectrum.”
As an antidote to this disillusionment, Tice is offering abolition of the licence fee, reform of the House of Lords, a ban on “critical race theory” and “transgender ideology” in schools and the end of net zero and renewable energy subsidies. To cheers, he announces an inquiry into “vaccine harms”. He claims: “The establishment doesn’t want to talk about this. We’re the only party that says it as it is.” More cheers.
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Another big round of applause comes when Tice declares that “we don’t need anything to do with the World Economic Forum”. I wince slightly. Later a retired former Labour voter called John tells me he worries that there are a few conspiracy theorists kicking round here.
The Word Economic Forum has become something of a bugbear in conspiracist circles. They say the think tank is running the world from the shadows, planning a “great reset” of how we live. Was Tice throwing conspiracists a bone? I catch him later and ask about it, and he tells me of the WEF that “anybody’s entitled to have a debate. What’s not right is that that then dominates how our country is run. The country should be run by our elected representatives, for the British people.”
“People are concerned about this stuff,” says Tice. I think he’s right. But I don’t think many people here actually think the World Economic Forum is secretly running the world. I think perhaps the organisation serves as a proxy: a metaphor for a sense of loss of agency, loss of control. The sense that decisions are being made elsewhere. That some are getting rich while the rest of us are left behind.
As I go to leave the conference, I get talking to Rachel, 57, a florist from Maidenhead, glamorously made up in glitter eyeshadow and elaborate nail polish. Rachel too is here because she is “absolutely fed up” with the state of the government and the country. “I run a small business and we get no help,” she tells me, anxiously. “I don’t know whether I’m staying in business because everything is just ridiculous. We just can’t make a living really.”
“I’m sorry,” I mutter. She laughs sadly, her voice catching in her throat slightly, as she waves me away. “Yeah, I know.” Her friend Deborah — 64, on a mobility scooter, and equally sparkly with her red dreadlocks and glittery nails — smiles at Rachel sympathetically.
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Still, Rachel tells me she is excited that the former Brexit Party MEP Ann Widdecombe is here. “I hope I get to shake her hand,” she enthuses, eyes suddenly brighter and smiling. “That would make me so happy.”
