I attended my first Reform rally and it's clear why Labour and Tories are worried

Nigel Farage's Reform UK were in Birmingham on Friday, drawing thousands to Utilita Arena. I was among them to find out more.

“Racist scum out of Brum!” went the angry chant from the 300 or so protestors who had gathered close to the Utilita Arena on Friday night, behind a circle of police and security, to throw insults at the thousands attending Reform UK’s Birmingham rally.

"Reform stand for everything we hate,” said one of those protesting, Doug Morgan, assistant secretary of Birmingham National Education Union. “They stand for division, they stand for scapegoating. They stand for making people feel small…

“Reform is a racist party, Reform is dangerous to our communities. We have to come together to call them out for what they are.”

A couple of hours later, Reform posterboy Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield, got a huge cheer from inside the hall for his quip: “I’m not sure what smells worse - Birmingham’s bins or that lot out there.” ‘That lot’ were ‘woke lefties’, he said - the types who have run the country into the ground by opening their arms to all-comers despite scarce housing and resources, allowed our towns and cities to become overwhelmed with anti social behaviour, don’t know there are only two genders, and have allowed Britain to lose its way. “We want our country back,” he proclaimed. “For that they call us racists.”

We can expect to hear a lot more exchanges of this ilk locally over the coming weeks and months, as the region prepares for council elections (not until May, 2026, but the build up starts now).

Friday’s Reform UK event, and the anti-Reform events held in the city to act as a counterpoint, is the subject of today’s Inside Birmingham newsletter. Thanks for joining me.

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I arrived at the Reform UK event on Friday night on a fact finding mission to help assess how realistic the party’s chances are of electoral success at local elections to build on their parliamentary breakthrough.

With four MPs - one of them, Rupert Lowe, now ostracised in a public falling out - the party has signalled it is a force to be reckoned with, no matter the controversial and suspect status of its views on migration, trans people, Europe and human rights, Gaza and people on benefits.

Protestors prepare to head towards Centenary Square after showing their anger at Reform UK’s rally in the city

In Birmingham and the Black Country, Reform poses a genuine threat to the status quo. With barely any sign of volunteers out on the doorstep during the 2024 General Election campaign, and no local strategy to speak of, the party still polled around a quarter of the votes around these parts. Imagine what could happen with some resources and a masterplan?

It’s why Labour and Conservatives alike are worried. Friday’s Birmingham Mail was wrapped up in a four page spread paid for by the Labour Party, warning against Reform’s plan to privatise parts of the NHS. Billboards appeared around the city that reiterated the message.

There are many more attack lines to come in the weeks ahead. The question is whether the Government, the mainstream parties and left-leaning opponents have learned anything from the events in the USA to counter Reform’s appeal. Insults is not enough.

Reform in 2024

What do Birmingham Erdington, Smethwick and Wolverhampton South East have in common? In all three local constituencies, Reform candidates were runners up to Labour at the last General Election. In four more areas, Reform’s vote share was more than 20%.

In all more than 160,000 voters in the area backed Reform candidates. It was a warning shot rather than an onslaught, but the party has momentum.

Reform nationally is currently polling second, according to YouGov, only marginally behind Labour and ahead of the Tories. Nigel Farage is 3/1 to become Prime Minister, according to another.

Polling by Opinium appears to show that Reform’s popularity depends on stoking a negative rhetoric, and there is plenty of it to go at. Reform voters are more pessimistic about the economy than the rest of the UK - 80% of Reform voters think things will get worse over the next 12 months, compared with 60% of all voters.

They also are much more concerned about immigration than others, with 77% putting it as one of the most important issues facing Britain compared with 39% overall. Previous polling has also revealed them to be more sceptical about sending British troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers and more positive about Trump.

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My night inside the Reform rally started pleasantly enough. I spied a front row seat empty, in the North East section between two charming gents who at first were happy to share their thoughts on Labour, Farage and Reform, though one pointedly stopped talking to me after I revealed I was a journalist.

Reform claimed it had filled the venue in a ‘sell-out’ but it was clear there were thousands of empty seats in the upper tiers. Set up to hold around 10,000, I’d estimate the real number of attendees was more like 6-7,000 - still a vast increase on the 2,000 or so who turned up at the last Reform event in these parts, at the NEC.

There were significantly more men than women here; and the audience was almost wholly white. The only brown and black faces I spied belonged to the staff on security and bar duty. Reform’s chairman, the millionaire British entrepreneur, Zia Yusuf, didn’t make a public appearance or speak a word to the assembled gathering.

Most attendees arrived on coaches or in shared cars from all across the country. My neighbours were at a rally in Darlington a few weeks earlier and had travelled across the country to ‘give Nigel some umph’, as the smartly dressed pensioner next to me put it.

The ground level ‘stage’ was turned into a vignette of a modern community, replete with a shut-down pub, a vandalised bus stop, grafittied barber’s shop and a bookies, overflowing bins and a potholed strip of road.

The intent was to hammer home how bad things have got for residents in some parts of the country; conditions ripe for Reform to ride to the rescue to ‘fix’ broken councils across the country.

It was a wittily contrived set, complete with joke posters variously portraying Keir Starmer as a clown in a circus, and Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick as the stars of ‘Tory Story’, on a journey to ‘oblivion and beyond’.

Road signs dotted around the auditorium declared how many potholes there were in each county, a ticker relayed the extent of council debt by area and the ‘excessive’ pay levels of council chief executives were a running theme.

The event, streamed live on youtube, was the official launch of Reform’s bid to take council seats across the country in the imminent May local and mayoral elections, and then on to next year.

Dr David Bull, the former Brexit party MEP - described by party deputy leader Richard Tice as a ‘modern day Larry Grayson’ - made the case for Reform being on a pathway to government.

Getting rid of potholes and restoring high streets is high on the agenda, he said.

Attacks on poor bin collection rates, the civil service’s high administrative costs and Labour’s economic policies didn’t appear to excite the audience much, despite Bull’s best attempts.

That was all about to change, first with the introduction of Arron Banks.

Banks, the Leave.EU founder and massive donor to the party, had flown in from Cape Town, summoned by Farage, to announce his candidacy for the West of England Metro Mayor with the slogan Banksy for Bristol, a take on the city’s famous street artist.

He’s on a mission to ‘destroy the Tories’, he proclaimed, while he described himself as being ‘as popular in Bristol as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah’.

Up popped former MP and now Lincolnshire mayoral candidate Andrea Jenkyns: “We Brits are sick of soft touch Britain. We are sick of being back in the queue and we are sick of seeing illegal migrants getting free hotels,” she declared.

She told of one local council giving free driving lessons to migrants - she paused for the audience to be as horrified as she obviously was by this revelation - and spoke of the bill that was being ‘wasted’ on foreign interpreters in Lincolnshire.

Like a panto villain, she presented a plan to ‘build homes for migrants’ as boo-worthy, and the people around me obliged. “Send them back!” came one lone voice, then another.

She proclaimed she would have a ‘Lincolnshire First’ policy on housing, jobs, welfare and health. She didn’t define what enabled someone to claim to be ‘Lincolnshire’ but we can guess.

Lee Anderson, beloved of the faithful who whooped at his appearance, drew a loud cheer when he declared there is "no such thing as Islamophobia" and it is a "made-up word". That Labour lot keep ‘banging on about it’ when it ‘doesn’t exist’, he shouted.

He laid into Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for being lazy, and magnified concerns about two-tier policing. He tore into ministers including Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, referring to one as ‘Rachel from accounts’ and the other as ‘unhinged and mad’ for daring to worry about climate change. ‘Nuts Zero’ or ‘Net Stupid Zero’ is how Reform label any policies aimed at reducing environmental harms.

But it is his anti-migrant statements that drew most roars of approval. He merged his sentiments into one confusing declaration: "I want a country where people can book a same day GP appointment…they can feel safe on our streets, they can be confident that our borders are safe, they don't have to worry about paying for their fuel bills, they should not be scared to speak their minds.

"And finally I want to live in a country where kids can go to school and not be told they could be 72 different genders and be told constantly they may have been born in the wrong body. This nonsense must stop."

He referred to a ‘6’5 drag queen with feet as big as barges reading stories with innocent five year olds’ as he whipped up the audience, telling them that teaching unions were behind this ‘nonsense wokery’.

When Reform take over, he would ‘root out’ leftie teachers ‘intent on poisoning our children’s minds’.

He told the rally: “People are now turning to Reform UK for our common sense policies. People are sick of waiting hours for an ambulance that will turn up with a rainbow painted on it, people don’t want to see police officers dancing the Macarena…we just want them to do their jobs.”

As he stepped away from the podium to a standing ovation, I sat mutely in my seat. I was feeling sullied by my own silence in the face of his anti-LGBT rhetoric; wrong for not standing up to correct some of the misinformation he was spouting.

Then it was Farage’s turn. He took to the stage to loud music, hanging out of the door of a JCB digger, before he pledged to create a “British form of Doge”, Elon Musk’s controversial cost-cutting unit. He took aim at net-zero policies and complained that tax policies including inheritance tax were driving multi millionaires out of the country.

He promised to ensure that dodgy characters who had sullied Reform’s reputation by being blatantly racist or homophobic on social media would not get through tough new vetting.

Reform would end ‘unskilled migration’, while leaving the European Court of Human Rights would mean the right to family life for migrants would be abandoned. The crowds were on their feet and stamping when he declared: “Everyone who comes here illegally will be deported.”

Farage, currently MP for Clacton, told the gathering: "I came back out of retirement to do this, I'm not mucking about. I've got one very clear, simple goal and that is that Reform win the next general election and turn this country around."

He celebrated how he had returned to the UK from the US where he had been spending time with an “influential” friend (guess who) 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.”

He pledged to make the UK a welcome home for millionaires, not drive them away through changes to the non-dom tax status.

"We need to encourage people who have got money to come and live here and pay tax and subsidise our public services,” goes his pitch for axing taxes that harm the rich.

Instead, funds will be raised by slashing public services and the civil service. "Frankly folks, what we need in this country to pay for the cuts that people deserve and need, we need a British form of Doge, as Elon Musk has got in America. Let's have a British Doge."

He pledged to return the winter fuel allowance ‘cruelly’ taken from pensioners, and ensure anyone earning less than £20,000 pays no income tax.

And he vowed that nobody entering the UK illegally, no matter why, would ‘ever be given leave to remain’. "It is unfair. It is wrong. It is also deeply unfair to those who have come here legally, and that's worth thinking about, and let me tell you, everyone that comes illegally will be deported, full stop."

Farage ended with an appeal to those who might be spooked by the likes of Jenkyns and Anderson.

“We couldn’t give a damn what your skin colour is,” he told the audience. “We couldn’t give a damn what religion you are and don’t care about your sexual preference – in fact, we’d rather not know,” he laughed. (‘I agree, I agree, we don’t want to hear about that, it’s disgusting how they go on about it,’ says a voice behind me to a neighbour.)

“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.”

It triggered the longest of the night’s standing ovations.

The anti Reform response

While I was inside the Reform event, there were two protest events taking place.

In Centenary Square, protestors who had been outside the Utilita Arena heckling Reform attendees gathered to hear live music and speeches, with a clear focus on Reform.

The second event, in Digbeth, was convened by disillusioned ex-Labour members. Lozells-born Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana, John McDonnell and Apsana Begum all have the Labour whip suspended over their backing to lift the two child benefit cap.

Ostensibly a chance to criticise Reform, under the headline No Thanks Nigel, it was also an opportunity to attack the new Government and their former party.

My colleague Joshua Neicho was inside and reported his findings:

In her headline speech, Sultana said the Government and the media were to blame for stoking last summer's riots with inflammatory talking points about migrants. "The Far Right is back and this time they've got new weapons - a media machine pumping out lies, MPs dog-whistling the racists, social media algorithms feeding kids fascism in between TikToks," she said. She accused the Labour Party of "chasing Reform's tail, mimicking their rhetoric, boasting about deportations - truly disgusting.”

"This isn't the change that people voted for - it is a betrayal".

She told attendees: "This will be the first rally among many, it's the start of a movement. We're not begging for change, we're fucking demanding it."

Doug Morgan, Assistant Secretary of Birmingham NEU, said the union would be ‘telling our half a million members that Reform is a racist party, Reform is dangerous to our communities. We have to come together to call them out for what they are."

Martin Hoare, President of Birmingham TUC told the crowd: "There isn't much going for this city. The council is completely inept, austerity has been imposed on us. What we do have is a successful multicultural society. We must build on that."

Hoare later told Joshua that he thought Farage picked Birmingham for the Reform Party launch event "because he knows it's a key stage of Ramadan. He's chosen the fact that people are observing Ramadan as a moment to disrupt the city."

He pointed to fees that migrants pay to the Home Office and to access NHS services as giving the lie to claims that migrants drain the economy, and argued the demographics of Reform supporters attending Farage's rally are the ones "most likely to need professional services of migrants".

He said he worried Birmingham's financial crisis could threaten community cohesion in the city.

Host of the Digbeth event Mish Rahman, a former member of Labour's NEC, said he thought it was a good counter-protest in terms of sending a message that there's an alternative to the likes of Reform. "We're letting people know that people like Farage aren't welcome in the city," Rahman said.

What next?

Birmingham City Council is currently under the cosh, facing a multitude of problems due to its financial crisis, bin strike and overwhelmed public services.

The Labour led council is under fire, along with its government, while the Tories are blamed for the austerity that triggered so much of the poverty and disconnect being felt in communities around the city.

Reform has an opportunity to capitalise on that discontent.

An all out election takes place next May, and the chances of Labour holding onto power locally are remote. That will pave the way for a shake up - with the Lib Dems, Greens, local Tories and Independents expected to benefit.

Reform will certainly be in the mix.

A shared ideology framed around a declining city, a sense of outrage about perceived ‘wokery’, fears that immigration and LGBT ‘tolerance’ have ‘gone too far’, buoyed by misinformation, make a heady mix for the politically homeless.

People are angry. Many don’t know where to turn. Reform could provide some of them with a place they feel most at home.