10,000 angry white men and me: my night with Reform UK

At Reform UK’s rally in Birmingham, the line to the men’s toilets is the longest I have ever seen.

Snaking around the circular foyer of the city centre’s Utilita arena are dozens of men from all walks of life. Young, pale men in grey and blue suits, diminished clones of American white nationalist leader Richard Spencer circa 2016; groups of lads clutching plastic pint glasses as tattooed biceps burst from under t-shirts; middle-aged men in casual clothes, hair slipping back from the foreheads; and older men in tweed country jackets, Reform rosettes pinned to the lapels. Some are wearing ‘Save Britain’ baseball caps, others sport caps embroidered with ‘Make Britain Great Again’. They queue, twitching, willing the line to shorten so they can get back inside in time to hear Reform leader Nigel Farage.

In contrast, there’s no queue for the ladies. Reform’s voter base is majority male, although there are some women here, most of whom seem to have come with their husbands. It’s a mix of working-class women in cotton tops and jeans, and country club women with glossy hair over blazers. They eye me suspiciously – unsure why a young woman is here alone. But mostly, it’s just men. And apart from the staff pulling pints and checking bags, every single face is white.

Reform has landed in the centre of the UK’s most diverse city, famed for its ‘curry mile’ and being the birthplace of the balti curry dish. Traditionally Labour-voting, Birmingham has been at the centre of numerous political rows, not least the long-running equal pay dispute that led to the Labour-led council declaring bankruptcy in 2023. It’s also a hub of politically active and engaged young people – people who are pro-Palestine and anti-cuts, and who are out on the streets surrounding the venue tonight to show they are anti-Reform. As I make my way past the protest, a Reform volunteer greets me with a thumbs up and a “well done, you made it through”. The woman behind me grumbles that “our taxes are paying their benefits” – referring to the left-wingers with their signs.

The arena is seated according to the region attendees travelled from. I’ve chosen to come ‘undercover’ so that I can talk to them on their level, rather than as an identifiable journalist. I find myself surrounded by people from Devon, Gloucestershire, Dorset and the wider south west, chatting to a friendly and earnest retired man about his belief in UFOs, and how much he enjoyed American hard-right political commentator Candace Owens’ Youtube series, which makes claims such as that French first lady Brigitte Macron was born a man. “Climate change,” he told me, as though trying to tick off conspiracist talking points, “is not a crisis.”

My newfound companion is a former Conservative voter, who has turned against the party. When I ask why, he references how the One Nation Tories – a group characterised as ‘anti Brexit’ and sidelined by Boris Johnson and subsequent leaders – make the party too left wing. He also shared how he and his friends joined Labour to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015. Not because of a sudden commitment to socialism, but in the hope that his leadership would destroy the Labour Party. A hatred of Labour, particularly prominent Labour women, is a clear theme from the speakers and the crowd throughout the night.

Reform boasted that 10,000 people were attending tonight’s “sold out” launch of their local election and mayoral campaign. Still, it’s hard to ignore the hundreds of empty seats. Dr David Bull, Talk TV personality and compere of tonight’s event, announces that the rally will start late due to protesters outside blocking long queues of people desperate to get in. But I’ve got a friend in the protest, who tells me no one is blocking the entrance. And while a dribble of people fill up some of the seats, huge chunks of the arena remain empty.

Behind me, a woman is expressing her concern that Labour will refuse to call an election in 2029. (The party has never said anything to suggest this is a possibility, with senior Labour figures instead having started discussing their 2029 election campaign in the immediate aftermath of their general election win last year.) The man in the next row explains he is here to see what Reform UK is all about, as you can’t trust what they tell you on the mainstream media. My neighbour has just got onto the subject of the dangers of Covid-19 vaccines when the background pop music gives way to some generic rock drumming, and Bull swings into action.

Galvanising the base, with an eye to outside

Bull kicks off proceedings by reminding us that this is the biggest ever political conference since the Second World War – a debatable claim, not least since this is a rally, not a conference – and that events are being watched online around the world, including “in the Oval Office”.

He then takes us on a tour of the set: a broken Britain high street with piles of waste and rubbish bins representing Birmingham’s long-running bin strike; a “Labourbrokes” betting shop (a pun on betting firm chain Ladbrokes), where the odds are good for a Reform 2029 election win; a cinema screening a film called “tax me if you can”, starring Starmer and the farmers; and a closed down pub named the Royal Oak. The camera zooms into posters of Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson in clown make-up. People laugh. I remember to laugh too.

The event appears to have three purposes. One is a form of bonding – an opportunity to bring together Reform members and fans, arriving on coaches or as groups of friends in cars, with the demographic spanning conspiracists to disaffected Tories and Labour voters, anti-migrant and anti-LGBTQ+ voters, and the new far right. The latter are young men who have been radicalised in their bedrooms, to the point where they think it is cool to emerge into multi-ethnic Birmingham dressed like a relic from the 1930s. They have been radicalised not by contact with Islam or blackness or feminist women, but with their online critics.

The second is to galvanise local election voters, with multiple references to the hard work local councils do, how winning local seats helps the party ready itself for national power, and how low voter turnout in the locals helps Reform win big. And the third purpose is to get media and social media buzz. The expensive set, the big names, the references to the US – all is done with an eye for creating shareable content.

Flanking the stage are rows of special guests including, Bull exclaims in excitement, Arron Banks, the financial backer of Leave.EU and the self-proclaimed bad boy of Brexit. Banks has flown all the way in from Cape Town to announce his candidacy for the West of England Metro Mayor with the slogan Banksy for Bristol – a play on the city’s most famous artist.

By 8pm, and seemingly having accepted that the empty rows will be staying empty, the rally properly begins.

Deputy Reform leader Richard Tice is first to take to the stage. He gets some cheers when he talks about protecting British steel, and for mocking “Mad” Ed Miliband and net zero, but his comments on economic policy fail to ignite the audience. While people are happy to boo Rachel Reeves, they seem less engaged with exactly why they are meant to be booing her.

The European lager is flowing, but there’s a low energy to the event. Bull rouses the crowd to cheers when he mentions farmers and potholes, but a reference to Labour’s welfare cuts is met with a stony, even bored, silence. There are cheers for veterans’ housing, less interest in mentions of council debt.

Two subjects appear guaranteed to get this audience going, however: immigration and gender. Reform mayoral candidate Andrea Jenkyns, a former Conservative MP who defected months after failing to win re-election last year, gets a huge roar of approval when she says there are only two sexes and that biology matters. Her speech is MAGA-coded as she commits to setting up a Musk-style DOGE project if she wins her council, in order to root out the waste of “DEI”. The second big cheer comes as she condemns illegal migrants in “luxury hotels” being given free driving lessons by Conservative councils. “Send them back,” men shout in response.

The star turns

The music switches to a football chant and the crowd gets to their feet, braying “here we go, here we go, here we go” as Reform MP Lee Anderson – another Tory defector – takes to the stage, opening his speech with a broadside against LGBTQ+ rights.

Anderson denounces schools teaching children that there are 72 genders and bringing in drag queens with "feet like barges” to read stories to five-year-olds and corrupt their “innocence”. He rails against rainbow lanyards worn by NHS staff and recommendations made in an academic paper that the term “midwife” should be replaced with “perinatal practitioners”. “Bollocks!” various men call out.

I remember to laugh and clap along but I’m starting to feel horribly, horribly sad. The raging against rainbow lanyards brings up memories of growing up under Section 28, the Tory law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools and by local authorities between 1988 and 2003. There is, of course, a performative element to rainbows in the workplace – symbolic representation does not translate to substantive change. But it’s better than when any visual expression of LGBTQ+ people in publicly funded spaces was effectively banned.

The crowd amped up on gender, Anderson moves onto immigration, spitting rage at the thousands of “undocumented young men” who have crossed the English Channel since Starmer came to Downing Street. It’s not correct – the people crossing the Channel are not all young men and the fact he has the figures proves they are not undocumented. But this crowd is not interested in accuracy.

Anderson’s anti-migrant statements are met with more roars of “send them back”, before he launches into an attack against “Marxists” and academics who unfairly accuse any criticism of immigration as racist and Islamophobic – a “made-up word,” he says.

The speech is red meat to a red-faced audience: dogwhistles about Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s “laziness”, migrant crime, two-tier policing, and a “Marxist” enemy. But there is one more speaker to come; the man everyone in this arena is here to see.

It’s time for Nigel Farage, entering the arena on a JCB Pothole Pro, lent for the event by the company’s chair Lord Bamford, a man perhaps best known for bankrolling Boris Johnson.

This was Farage’s big moment – his speech designed to excite the base while also reaching further, to show a new audience that his party has transformed from the chaotic, poorly vetted mess of the July election and is ready to win power. He celebrated how he had come out of retirement, returning to UK politics from the US where he has an “influential” friend – the thinly veiled reference to Donald Trump got some cheers – because “I genuinely believe that if we don’t address the level of economic and societal decline [...] in a few years this country won’t resemble anything we grew up with and that we love.”

It’s a dogwhistle statement to his fans, not least the deliberate use of “decline”, but crucially Farage’s speech is a determined effort to pitch Reform as a broad church. “We couldn’t give a damn what your skin colour is,” he tells the 99.9% white audience. “We couldn’t give a damn what religion you are [...] We don’t care about your sexual preference – in fact, we’d rather not know.” That raised a raucous laugh. “We want to live in a country that treats everyone exactly the same so long as in turn they respect us, our values and our way of life,” Farage finished, to cheers.

To win in 2029, Farage needs Anderson and Jenkyns to bellow about gender and illegal immigrants. But he also knows he needs to mainstream the party. His pitch that evening is not to the arena crowd but to the disenchanted centrists on their sofas who might see this on news bulletins and social media as they weigh up the candidates in May’s local and mayoral elections. He wants to appeal to former Tory and even Labour voters who are sick of poor public services and litter-strewn streets, who feel the country no longer works for them and who don’t care if their vote makes it worse for others.

The contrast as I walk back to my hotel through Birmingham’s Friday night is dizzying. Families have been taking part in Friday prayers, and girls in skimpy dresses and high heels are hanging off one another’s arms, laughing raucously as they make their way to the next bar. Couples are dining in high-class Indian restaurants and friends are sharing tapas in European-style cafes.

Reform does not have much of an audience here, but the event is not for the Brummie night-out crowd. It worked by bringing together its audience who may look different from another – the coach of pensioners up from Poole, Deanos in cars driving down the M6, and young far-right men in their shiny suits – but who bond over a shared ideology of decline, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation. They’re angry. They’re resentful. And they want to create a Britain in their image.

Tickets to Reform UK’s rally cost £5.