Apps, activists and an ‘air war’: Essex campaign is test of Reform UK’s professionalisation | Reform UK

NWhile igel Farage was in the middle of a stroll through Waltham Abbey, a hunting horn was blaring loudly on the pedestrianized main street of the Essex market town. “Oi oiii!” exclaimed Ouch Tattoos owner Rob Chillingworth, putting down the instrument and extending a welcoming hand to the approaching Reformed UK leader.

For Farage, it was the final stop on a midweek tour of half a dozen towns in Essex for more than 1 million county council votes. Without breakthroughs in Wales and Scotland, the move from having a single councilor to taking power there will be one of Reformation’s biggest achievements in Thursday’s polls.

While encounters such as the one between Chillingworth and Farage reflect the warmth towards Reform among many here, the campaign in Essex is also a demonstration and test of Reform’s proven professionalism in securing the party’s vote more widely.

Mobilizing passionate core supporters in traditionally low turnout polls, while also replicating its “blue ocean” strategy of casting a wider net for first-time voters and voters that other parties may have given up on, is where the party’s new machinery and organization comes into play.

Previous parties under Farage, such as Ukip, have often floundered, but Reform sees this series of elections as a showcase for a newer, sleeker approach that combines the energy of an army of activists with new technology and a clinical approach to processing voter data collected with an eye on the next general election.

This includes “air warfare”, a term for efforts to attract media attention and attention through advertising, which includes mailing images and leaflets as well as targeted Facebook ads, on which around £100,000 has been spent in the last 30 days, according to Meta. Ad Library.

The ReformGo app will help thousands of party activists knock on doors for the first time in a major election. While other established parties have long used their own versions of collecting data on voters, Reform is just catching up.

“It’s a very comprehensive app and we can see it improving week by week, the data improving, the ease of use,” said a branch representative in Essex. “People can see the doors they need to knock on, listing answers anywhere from ‘I’m voting for you’ to ‘get out of here’ to ‘I want a picket board, please.'”

Activists hope that data collected during local elections will be invaluable in shaping Reform’s campaign strategy for the next general election. “Capturing this voter intent data will help us move forward,” the branch official added.

Other Reform targets, such as Birmingham city council, will represent significant gains on Thursday, but few places will be as politically symbolic as Essex, until recently considered the heartland of the Conservative Party.

A win at council level would mean a takeover of the local authority, where the Conservatives have been essentially the ruling party since their formation in 1974. As well as controlling a council with a £1.2bn budget, this would give Reform another political foothold, allying with Farage’s Westminster seat of Clacton, in a part of the UK that received the highest votes for Brexit. Victory here would also set the stage for a possible general election run for leading Essex Tory candidates such as Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Alex Burghart and even Kemi Badenoch.

At Reform’s sparkling new office in Millbank Tower, volunteers from across Britain take turns to staff phone banks. The call sheets are informed by another app called ReformPro, which is used by senior activists on the streets of Essex, Birmingham and northern towns, and is more concerned with voter registration data.

“We have to expand our vote and the app is a big step towards doing that,” Farage said as he stood at Waltham Abbey before a meeting of 80 local candidates that night after visiting a pie and mash shop.

Reformation has previously been compared to Italy’s Five Star Movement, a pioneer of digital, anti-establishment populism, but Farage has recently pointed to an unlikely source for campaign inspiration: the Liberal Democrats.

“They’re really good at picking an area and saying ‘Yes, this is good for us’, and then they’re very ruthless about the data, how they manage it, how they protect it,” Farage said. “That’s Paddy Ashdown’s school of thought. Once you get significant local representation, you build on that and then target areas for the general election.”

Reform board member Gawain Towler said the party had learned from past mistakes. “If things go wrong, they recover much quicker. In a place I was at recently, the Labor Party’s letter was arriving to voters by post two days late. We were making that mistake, too,” he said.

But critics of the idea that Reform is professionalizing point to the elephant in the room: the failures of the party’s vetting process. There have been numerous allegations in the past that candidates made racist or offensive comments.

The final batch of Reform candidates chosen by Hope Not Hate included one from Gateshead who called for a “white Britain” and said Keir Starmer should be shot. “We were surprised by the amount we found,” said Joe Mulhall, the organization’s director of research. “It’s clear that despite what they say about professionalisation, they continue to have a systemic problem.”

Reform may be more informed about which voters to target, but gaps remain when it comes to the doorstep. Candidates can answer questions about immigration policy but know less about health policy, which isn’t helped by the lack of a front-line spokesperson on the issue.

“They have strengthened their press team and are good at attracting attention,” said a spin doctor from the rival party. “But it’s unclear what they’re doing when it comes to negative stories about candidates, for example. Sometimes they look like they want to debunk the allegations. Sometimes they get there eventually, or they try to pretend it didn’t happen.”