Jamie Gollings: The Tories might already have their answer to Reform

Jamie Gollings is Interim Research Director at the Social Market Foundation.

The surge in opinion polling for Reform is on everyone’s minds in Westminster. As Nigel Farage’s party looks set for gains in next month’s local elections, both Labour and the Conservatives are scrambling to find a response.

The Social Market Foundation – Britain’s leading cross-party think tank – has this week published Understanding Populism, a first-of-a-kind look into the constituency-level factors that correlate with increased vote share for populist parties like Reform.

Polling is great at telling us which kinds of people vote for different parties, and what their priorities are. What our analysis adds is information on the community and policy context that they’re living in – what is happening to house prices, or to crime, or to their local schools? This provides new insights into what might drives populism, and where mainstream parties could seek to improve.

Firstly, we compiled data for over 500 English constituencies, with 73 different variables spanning demographics, the economy, public services and geography. Using multiple regression analysis, we were then able to determine the shared factors in constituencies where the Reform vote at the last election was highest.

There were three themes that came through strongly, and that we believe should be the focus of policy work to address the rise the populism.

The most significant predictor of Reform’s 2024 vote share was the proportion that had a degree; the higher the qualification level, the lower the populist vote. This resonates with what opinion polling has previously found – writing for the SMF, political analyst Professor Rob Ford revealed the extent to which educational attainment linked to voting behaviour in the Brexit referendum, and it can be seen in surveys in the run-up to the 2024 general election too. Whilst the link is clear, the exact mechanism is less well understood.

Is it something about the people who end up going to university, something liberalising about the university experience itself, or something to do with the life that graduates end up leading? One hypothesis is that the quality and esteem of non-graduate jobs is lower than it was in the last century. The Trumpian response to this is to attempt to roll back the economy 50 years, but for the UK – where manufacturing has dropped from 25 per cent to 10 per cent of employment since 1980 – how realistic is it to bring back the good non-graduate jobs of old? Equal focus should be given to improving the jobs being done by those without degrees today.

A second theme was around ethnicity. The analysis showed that places with larger but falling white populations tended to drift more towards Reform. Building an immigration system that people can have faith in is clearly part of that, and at SMF we have looked about how to build that trust. However, even if the flows of migration fall, the increasing segregation of schools and housing by income level and ethnicity needs to be of concern too. As Jon Yates argues is his book Fractured, we also need to build a ‘common life’.

Populism is always limited by the fact it depends on division, but Conservatism – from Disraeli’s One Nation to Cameron’s Big Society – has built broad coalitions when it has pursued social cohesion.

Today there remains an important intellectual task and strategic decision for Badenoch’s Conservatives to seek to solve the social, not just the economic, challenge that the UK faces – and not to reinforce or mimic Reform’s ‘them and us’ portrayal of British society.

The third big theme was the public realm: how their neighbourhoods feel and citizens’ sense of security. Crime is part of that story and higher crime was another important predictor of the Reform vote share in the regression model. Another factor, and a positive one for the Conservative party, was on Levelling Up. The model found that having a greater allocation of Levelling Up funding led to a lower expected Reform vote. This does not guarantee a cause and effect – it could be that funding was allocated to places less likely to swing hard towards Reform – but provides encouragement not to drop an agenda that seeks to share economic growth around the country and enable people to feel its benefits in their town centres.

For Kemi Badenoch then, as she begins to map out a route back to government – and defend her parliamentary party from the threat to her right – she could take on one policy that, to borrow a phrase, is somewhat ‘oven ready’: setting out a detailed plan for Levelling Up that could revitalise so many communities across the country in need of economic growth. This should form part of a programme, along with policies to foster social cohesion, improve the quality and esteem of work for non-graduates, tackle crime and build trust in the immigration system, that counter the main factors that correlate with populist support.

If she does build such a policy platform, she just might be the first Westminster leader to have found a solution to her Reform problem.