Reform and women
Steady on
As J’accuse predicted on Friday morning a slew of bad advice has been given to Reform following the defeat in Makerfield, with two Reform aligned figures taking to the media to insist on moderation to appeal to women.
The first and worst of these interventions came from ‘Reform insiders’ who told the Observer that it was time to ditch Zia Yusuf and that red lines on extremism should be firmly reimposed, this is apparently taking the form of ‘personal pleas’. The article does not acknowledge that Reform began to perform marginally better after the Nowak murder and the subsequent hardening of rhetoric. It was suggested elsewhere in the article that there are ‘serious splits within the party that are going to break out at any point’. This is the corrosive rigmarole which makes running a functional government in this country impossible as every actor within a given political vehicle is professionally motivated to leak to the press to advance their own career interests. It is why Yusuf’s proposal to fill the cabinet with appointments from the House of Lords is so attractive.
I am 90% sure that one of these ‘sources’ is in fact one of Reform’s self-appointed spokespeople who is a useless post-liberal with very longstanding connections to the machinery of the Conservative Party. This person is going to be one of the locus points that the media uses to tease out ‘Reform splits’ and they will give quotes to journalists over and over again unless they are publicly excommunicated – which will, at the very least, prevent journalists from citing this individual as a ‘Reform insider’ or ‘Reform source’. More widely it is important that Reform adopt a very strong stance on this internally. The No.10 of Dominic Cummings had various strategies for preventing leaks, including seizing people’s phones and giving out different versions of documents with visible differences such that once it leaked the source could be traced and fired. Given how much more difficult it will become in government it would be wise to begin best practice now.
Another article came from Gawain Towler who wrote an article focusing on women and their reticence to vote Reform. He believes that Makerfield must be a wakeup call for Reform regarding its failure to win over women, particularly after running Kenyon despite his locker room talk vis Carol Vorderman. He points out that in the age 18-24 category support from young women is only 7%, whilst for men it is 14%. He suggests that Farage is too blokey and confrontational on television, that women aren’t as keen on deportations and Reform instead should focus on how children are being harmed by the crossings – finally that good engagement with schools, the NHS and ‘social care’ is more important than his tough press releases on immigration. I recommend reading the article in full as it also has other interesting insights (e.g how women often find ‘lady MPs’ unrelatable).
I hold no animosity to Gawain Towler who is a sovereign individual but I am sceptical in the extreme that the support of young women can be done by Farage changing his language or Reform councillors delivering on social care well. This understates that scale of contempt that young women have towards Reform and also the extent to which they have firm moral commitments to migrant rights and Palestine. All buttressed by another advantage the left has in that every single cultural institution in the English-speaking world has been taken over liberals and leftists and their values are transmitted through almost all modern celebrities like actors and musicians.
Every popular film, song and television show which has been produced in the last forty years reinforces a clear moral framework that is positive about migration and is varying degrees of sceptical about billionaires and new technologies. Often these cultural products will include characters and story arcs to stigmatise ‘populists’ and the ‘far-right’. Individuals within cultural institutions which do not hold these views either keep quiet or are purged.
The internet provided an escape from this in the 1990s by bypassing the institutions which could enforce moral control over the text which could be published in books, newspapers or in video form. AI promises to expand this revolution by allowing anybody talented enough to create studio-quality films and television without the connivance of Hollywood. Prominent streamers, most of whom are at least contemptuous of political correctness, have far more cultural sway over young people than the BBC – which is partly why Starmer is attempting to ban them. The possibilities that have arisen and are arising are only possible because of technology, which is why anybody who positions themselves against social media or AI is an enemy to progress and a friend to woke.
Most women under thirty are not choosing to avoid Reform because Farage seems too blokey with his pints of beer. A great number of them subscribe to the mainstream view that Reform is a party for racist fruitcakes and loonies as this is generally how Farage is presented to them. Others who might be somewhat sympathetic avoid it because supporting your political party carries a tremendous social penalty in their peer group, particularly amongst educated people.
There is a structural issue on the right whereby ‘young people’ market themselves as ambassadors for Gen Z and thereby have an incentive to misrepresent what most people under the age of thirty believe. It profits these individuals for them to tell the right-wing donor class what they want to hear – namely that there is some sort of nascent right-wing rebellion amongst the youth, and that by giving them enough money, or even ‘buying them a coffee’, they can help red pill more teenagers.
Of course the opposite is often true. Often the ‘young person’ receiving sponsorship from donors is in fact in their late 20s or early 30s, almost always they are a visibly strange person whose endorsement of a concept repulses their peer group. The real audience for the YouTube videos and Substacks that these people produce is mostly middle aged men who want to believe that there are sensible young people who also find Andrew Doyle funny and don’t go in for gender woo woo.
