Always happy to answer your questions
@Duane Dibbley
Why are Reform so popular?
Do you want the long or short answer?
The long answer will be an 'essay' type response, but in short Nigel is seen as a common sense leader who understands and cares for the silent majority of forgotten, disrespected and discarded Britons.
He has also managed to do what Nick Griffin (BNP) and Paul Golding and Ashlea Simon (Britain First) couldn't and that is grow a party on 'the Right' which has gained support and traction twice - once with UKIP during its rise to power in the 2010s and now with Reform UK in the 2020s. In doing do, he has stymied the growth of those other parties on 'the Right' who don't have the attraction that Reform UK do - ask yourself why Britain First, Advance UK, BNP etc. never appear on the Polls.
It's the Political equivalent of taking non-league Wrexham to the brink of promotion to the Premier League in a short space of time. They've grown at the expense and stupidity of their rivals, especially Labour, who have done the hard work for them in making themselves completely unelectable.
What has changed that has meant the solid institutions of Labour and Conservative are no longer effective?
They no longer work for the people, but rather are dead set to work against the people and people can now blatantly see that there is no future for the UK with those two parties - the Tories crashed after Covid (the events of Summer 2022 which resulted in Boris Johnson resigning being a key factor) and not even two years into their reign, Labour have become even less popular than the Tories by offering less freedoms, more tax and employing frauds like Rachel Reeves into high office.
It's damage which the two parties inflicted on themselves - political suicide in any other guise.
Social changes led to party changes. Whigs and Tories became Liberal and Tories, which turned into Labour and Tories after WW1 where Liberals collapsed from a majority to a minority party and never took control again (I scanned wiki).
If Reform are going to do to the Conservatives what the Labour party did to the Liberals; absorb the members and change the message, then why has that occurred?
Let's not forget that whilst at the 'top table' there have been Conservatives defecting to Reform UK, lower down the table there have been Labour, Lib Dems and even Greens who have decided that Reform UK is the party for them. The message is that those disaffected people feel that Labour and the Tories no longer care about the electorate and it is time for much needed change.
If Reform UK is to play in the top league, then they will (unfortunately, perhaps) require the services of people who have experience of being in office and know the mechanisms of Parliament. Up until Summer 2024, the party only had one MP with experience of this (Lee Anderson) and now we may shortly have nine, perhaps even ten if another by-election is called following the events of today.
The message IMO hasn't really changed, what has changed though (again IMO) is that Reform UK successfully took advantage of a power vacuum in the Centre as the Tories tried to pivot to the Left and make themselves more appealing and acceptable to the Guardian classes - it didn't work, and Kemi Badenoch trying desperately to get die hard Lefties to give the Tories a try was never going to work. The result is that the Tories no longer know who they are nor what they stand for.
What shift have we seen in society for this effect to happen?
Whilst other parties are trying to pivot Left in order to look presentable, and also hoover up the 'Youth Vote', Reform UK are able to steal the Centre yet remain a Right Wing party as anything which we would have thought of as normal or centrist thinking years ago is now verboten thanks to the woke rules of society which state that a woman can have a penis, eating grass lowers carbon emissions and licking toilet seats means that you stand against big orange meanie nasty Trump.
In essence, Reform UK have maintained that common sense matters more than common purpose and as such whilst the world has gone mad over the past 10-15 years since 'Occupy Wall Street' Reform UK's attitude has been to take the view of 'no, there are only two genders' and 'we cannot import endless migrants and think we won't suffer culturally, societally and/or environmentally.'
Other parties have lost ground as people, predominantly since the return of Trump as POTUS, have now gone fully Right Wing or are leaving the Left because it offers them nothing and they are going to stay as Centrists if they're not completely in favour of Reform UK (you have to bear in mind that a growing trend, as seen in Gorton & Denton, is that a growing amount of people now want 'definitely none of the above'). What remains of the Left is now just a volatile hotch-potch of angry and disillusioned protestors who believe that the world should kowtow to them 'just because', as a result they only offer problems and never any solutions.
This is where younger voters will, in time, definitely break with the Left as they don't want the problems which we have faced - they want the Climate Change problem gone, they want Africa to not be a basket-case and for countries there to grow and thrive without our help, they want an end to wars globally etc. and who can blame them? There will have to come a point soon where financing these unfixable problems becomes 'not a cool thing to do' and the drive and desire to improve things here becomes paramount.
Bridgend County Council, for instance, spent more on Climate Change initiatives last year than on improving Bridgend Town Centre and also broke its own rules by not introducing mandatory disability access which is a law left in from our time in the EU. The people there are angry, but the Council insist that this is what the people want. Yes, before you ask, it's a Labour-run one.
The shift is accelerating and at the start of 2026 I believe it's caught Starmer cold on many fronts - Epstein, Burnham, Trump showing up how useless he is, more U-turns than Maureen from Driving School. Even those who oppose Farage now want urgent change and even Zack Booby Man has dared utter those two words which see rainbows appear out of nowhere - General Election.
The TLDR is don't blame Reform UK for being successful without trying that hard, blame the others for trying so hard to fail that it's led to this inevitable schism and change in the political order.
