It was the grand finale of Reform UK’s September conference and Nigel Farage had a serious message to deliver: it was time for Reform to “grow up” and professionalise. He couldn’t do it alone, he told 4,000 hyped-up members who had paid £50 each to bask in his presence. “We will not realise our dream unless the people’s army of supporters are organised, unless the people’s army of supporters are helped to professionalise, unless that people’s army fight elections,” he said. “What we have to do is to be credible. What we have to do is to be on the ground everywhere.” A remarkable number of people have heeded Farage’s call since the general election, when Reform had just 40,000 members. The party now claims to have almost 100,000, more than the Liberal Democrats, and just 30,000 shy of the drastically diminished post-Boris Johnson Conservative party. Jealous that the Lib Dems won 72 seats to Reform’s five, despite Reform receiving a bigger percentage of the national vote, Farage plans to ape their high-intensity, hyperlocal strategy. He wants to blanket communities in leaflets and win council seats, paving the way for more Reform MPs in 2029 and potentially his own path to Downing Street: something he thinks “may not be probable but it’s certainly possible”. There are now Reform branches in more than 300 of the UK’s 650 constituencies, with new ones launching every few weeks. One of them is in Stalybridge and Hyde in Greater Manchester. It was started by Jamie Gregory, a 27-year-old software developer who attended the Birmingham conference with his wife, Evialina, who moved to the UK from Lithuania as a teenager.
Gregory wants Reform to disrupt the local Labour-controlled Tameside council, which is in disarray after the leader, his deputy and chief executive stood down after a highly critical report on its children’s services. His first leaflet drop this month went in hard on child protection failures, promising to “remove complacent councillors” and “defend our children”. Ultimately, Gregory wants to unseat the local Labour MP, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds. Stalybridge was one of 98 constituencies where Reform came second in July, most of which were to Labour, standing a local accountant and carer who campaigned on a shoestring. In true Farage style, the branch launch was held in the backroom of a Stalybridge pub, the Fox Tavern, which was decked out in union jacks and a lifesize cut-out of the man himself. On the bar was a questionnaire asking those who attended for their views on issues including building on the greenbelt and supporting British farmers. A collection went around, raising £200 for a local food bank.
Gregory opened the event, introducing himself as the branch chair. “What we really want to focus on now are local issues, issues that really affect people in this area,” he told the 50 or so there. Wendy Schofield, the branch secretary, told the pub about her political past. “I’m from a Labour background. My mum and all the family voted Labour. I voted Tony Blair in, I voted Boris Johnson in,” she said, before reminiscing about the Stalybridge of old. Unhappy about the closures of youth clubs and the local market, she is concerned about who will live in a local housing development. “We need to know who is going in them houses. Them houses should be for the local people. And that’s what concerns me. British people are not being put first, coming bottom of the rung. And that has nothing to do with skin colour. I’m talking about British people. So that’s Asian British, black British. We all feel the same,” she said. The new branch needed to be permanently on a war footing in case a byelection was called, she said. Rob Barrowcliffe, who came second to Angela Rayner in neighbouring Ashton-under-Lyne in July, agreed, saying he and Gregory had just helped Reform win its first council seat from Labour, in Blackpool’s Marton ward. Reform has since won seats in Wolverhampton and Derbyshire and now has 37 local councillors, most of whom have defected from the Tories. It claims more than 2,000 people have applied to stand for Reform in May’s local elections. They are now being vetted by an external company, to try to weed out the racists and Islamophobes the party was forced to disown during the general election campaign. “I think they’ve learned the lesson from that, and they’re taking things much more seriously now,” said Gregory. “Unsavoury characters” were no longer welcome in Reform, he said. “We want to break this sort of idea that we are sort of BNP-lite, if you like, because we know we’ve got so many fantastic policies and policy proposals that we want to put forward. We’re not just the anti-immigration party. We’re just for common sense, the party of the people.”