Three weeks on since the Conservative Party suffered a series of catastrophic losses that led to the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the General Election, the party has suffered yet another blow after a recent survey showed that more young people were keen to back rival party Reform UK, than the Tories themselves.
According to a new YouGov poll of 35,000 voters, 9.5 per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds supported Nigel Farage’s party compared to only eight per cent that voted Tory, reports The Telegraph.
Support for the youngest party on the UK political scene first skyrocketed in the run up to the election, with many young people having been swayed by the party’s pledges and campaign points on social media.
Their TikTok presence in particular was a huge draw of support, with the party picking up around 239.2k followers in a matter of weeks, compared to the much longer running and more widely established UK Labour Party account, which boasted just 238.5k followers.
Meanwhile, the UK Conservatives had just 78.5k followers, less than half that of their rivals, showing a clear disconnect from younger voters on the platform.
Outside of just follower numbers however, Reform UK videos also appeared to have higher levels of engagement and views out of all of the main parties, and according to the Guardian, Nigel Farage’s posts have “garnered more interactions per video than Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s Zarah Sultana and the Greens’ Carla Denyer put together.”
However, it isn’t all about social media status and slick video productions online, with much of Reform UK’s growing popularity among Gen Z voters, down to the realisation that a youth filled with austerity, unfulfilling jobs, crippling student debt and a diminishing pool of options needs to have someone to blame.
For many young people, the fault lies with the Tories, as 14 years of questionable policy decisions and unappealing progress having steered them away from the core values of the party.
Yet many others have been quick to seek blame elsewhere, and instead been taken in by Reform’s rhetoric that immigration is the cause of many problems, suggests Dazed.
“People have very legitimate anxieties about the state of their communities,” says Dr Dan Evans, a sociologist at Swansea University.
“So when Farage says there’s going to be less immigration, chances are people will think ‘well, that means more frontline services are going to be freed up and I might get higher wages’.”
Nigel Farage’s role in courting public favour isn’t to be discounted either, with the political having risen in popularity and relatability following his stint on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here last year.
Straddling the line of both politician and celebrity, Farage has been able to command attention in the public eye. With both visibility and recognition a clear component of his own personal popularity, this too has then extended to his politics, with more people inclined to listen to a personality than another unknown face in the crowd.
Yet despite the growing number of young people turning to Reform UK, it isn’t the whole picture of the political scene, with the Green Party, Lib Dems and Labour still receiving the largest portion of votes in the 18 – 30 age bracket.
In fact, the Green Party saw a huge boost in support this year, with almost 18 per cent of voters aged 30 and under backing the party, up from six percent in 2015.
The Lib Dems saw support of 16 per cent, with Labour leading the pack with 43 percent of voters choosing the party.
