Reform’s Perfect Crime
What Your Party Still Refuses to Understand About Reform UK and Working-Class Women
TL;DR. Reform UK votes against domestic violence funding, cuts women's services through its councils, and takes money from American anti-abortion groups. It is also the fastest-growing party among working-class women in post-industrial England. This is not a paradox. Reform benefits from the misery it creates: the withdrawal of Sure Start, domestic violence services, and integrated family support produces the grievance that Reform then harvests. The left's response has been to explain why Reform's explanation is wrong, from a distance, in communities where the left no longer has a physical presence. This article argues that Your Party needs to do what People Before Profit did in Ireland and what the Maison des Femmes does in Saint-Denis: show up, stay, and build the infrastructure of survival in the spaces where working-class women actually live. The mining communities did this. It was called the miners' welfare. It was not feminist populism. It was the class building its own institutions in the spaces the state would not reach.There is a paradox at the heart of Reform UK’s advance, and the left has largely declined to state it plainly. Reform and its parliamentary predecessors voted against the Domestic Abuse Act’s statutory funding provisions. Reform-aligned councils have led the decimation of local authority budgets for women’s services. Nigel Farage has taken significant financial support from American anti-abortion campaign groups, a fact documented and then largely forgotten by a media that prefers to cover his pub performances. And yet Reform UK is now the party of choice for a growing proportion of working-class women in post-industrial England: women in the 50-64 age cohort who formed the historic backbone of Labour’s coalition, women in precarious service-sector employment, women in coastal and former mining constituencies where the state has been visibly retreating for fifteen years.
This is not a paradox if you think about it structurally. Reform benefits from the misery it helps create. The withdrawal of Sure Start, domestic violence services, welfare rights advice, and integrated family support does not produce political passivity. It produces a specific kind of grievance: the sense that the established parties of government are indifferent to survival. Reform offers an explanation for that indifference. The explanation is wrong. But it is present, consistent, and addressed to people who have been given no better account of why their lives have become harder. The left’s response, in the main, has been to explain why Reform’s explanation is wrong. This is not nothing. But it is not enough, and the French evidence now available suggests it may actively be making things worse.
THE NUMBERS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO JOIN UP
Since 2010, approximately 1,340 Sure Start Children’s Centres have closed or been significantly reduced. IPPR calculates that spending on early intervention fell by 46% between 2010 and 2022.
In May 2025, Reform UK won 677 council seats and took executive control of 10 local authorities. It now controls budgets that include — or more precisely, exclude — the very services whose withdrawal drove women toward it in the first place.
The Sutton Trust’s opportunity index maps the constituencies with the lowest social mobility and highest educational segregation. They are Reform’s strongest territory. The North East — where Reform is now a major force — has the lowest voluntary sector density in England: 1.7 organisations per 1,000 people, against the South West’s 3.0.
The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s mapping data shows that fewer than half of victims in the East Midlands and East of England — home to Ashfield, Clacton, Boston and Skegness — can access community-based support. Women in the lowest income decile have lost an average of £3,348 per year from benefit cuts since 2010. Lone parents have lost nearly £7,000.
These are not separate statistics. They are one story.
Part 1 of “The Terrain of Survival”
The far right is winning working-class women across Europe and Britain — not by deceiving them, but by being present on the terrain of daily survival while the left speaks about it from a distance. This series examines how that advance works, what the left’s strategic failures have in common, and what the organisations that are actually contesting the terrain are doing differently. From the French municipal elections to Reform UK’s advance in former mining towns, from the Iranian uprising to the Gen Z gender gap: the same question runs through all of it. Who builds the infrastructure of survival when the state withdraws — and who gets the politics that follows?
The Smoking Gun
Sure Start Children’s Centres were, in their original conception, the closest thing post-war British social policy produced to the integrated community hub model. Universal, non-stigmatising, genuinely one-roof: health visiting, speech therapy, childcare, parenting support, debt advice, domestic violence referral, employment support. At peak in 2009-10, there were around 3,500 of them. By 2023, following thirteen years of Conservative cuts, approximately 1,340 had closed entirely or been significantly reduced in function. IPPR calculates that spending on early intervention fell by 46% between 2010 and 2022. The remainder have been largely absorbed into the ‘Family Hub’ model, which is residual, means-tested, and operates without the universal health visiting service that made Sure Start accessible to women who would never self-identify as requiring social care support.
Map the closures against the electoral data. Reform UK now polls above 35% in constituencies characterised by high indices of multiple deprivation and severe public service withdrawal. This is not a coincidence. It is a mechanism. The same political project that dismantled the infrastructure of working-class women’s daily lives then offered those women an explanation for why their lives had deteriorated. The explanation named the wrong culprit. But the left named no culprit at all, because the left was not where those women were.
Here is the further twist of the knife. In May 2025, Reform won 677 council seats and took executive control of 10 local authorities. It now controls the budgets that include — or more precisely, exclude — the very services whose withdrawal drove women toward it in the first place. A party that campaigns on the indifference of the state is now in a position to deepen that indifference while attributing the consequences to someone else. The cycle is self-reinforcing. The left has not yet found a way to break it.
This should be a national campaign. Not a policy recommendation issued by a think tank, not a parliamentary question filed and forgotten. A campaign. Your Party has the organisational reach, at least in aspiration, to put the restoration of Sure Start — with genuine universalism and the domestic violence referral pathway restored — at the centre of a demand on the Labour government. The Labour government’s own record here is indefensible: it has maintained the Family Hub model, continued the funding squeeze on specialist violence against women and girls services, and presided over a postcode lottery of provision so severe that fewer than half of victims in the East Midlands and East of England can access community-based support. If Starmer will not fund the services, make the funding gap his political problem. Make him own it. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s data provides the evidence; the constituency polling on Reform’s advance provides the political argument; and the tradition of miners’ welfare and working-class mutual aid provides the historical grounding that makes the demand impossible to dismiss as metropolitan identity politics.
The False Dichotomy and Its Consequences
Within Your Party, a significant tendency argues for working-class socialist politics explicitly counterposed to what it calls feminist populism. The strongest version of this argument is not contemptible. It holds that feminist framing is legible primarily to already-politicised urban constituencies; that in post-industrial towns with socially conservative cultures it alienates the voters Your Party needs; and that universal economic demands on wages, housing, and public services will address the material basis of women’s oppression without requiring a feminist political identity that many working-class women do not hold.
This argument has a name in the French tradition. The NPA-Révolutionnaires, the most rigorous cadre-building tendency in the post-2022 NPA split, makes essentially the same case. Its analysis of the 2023 pension reform’s impact on women is technically impeccable: broken careers, part-time work penalties, the 40% pension gap, the government’s own impact assessment showing women would work seven months longer than men on average. NPA-R understands the feminist dimensions of the class question at the level of theory. Then it returns to the factory. It organises the workplace as a space of production, addressing the worker as producer, and has no organisational answer for the reproductive economy where working-class women actually spend most of their political and social energy.
The consequence in France is visible. The Rassemblement National has closed and then reversed the historic gender gap in its support between 2002 and 2024. Women who had previously avoided the party in significant numbers now vote for it at rates matching or exceeding men, particularly in the service sector, in peri-urban zones, and in deindustrialised constituencies. This did not happen because the French radical left failed to analyse the problem correctly. NPA-R’s analysis is correct. La France Insoumise’s programme on childcare, equal pay, and domestic violence is not empty. It happened because correct analysis without organisational presence in the spaces where women live is not a counter-strategy. It is a seminar.
Any ‘socialist not feminist’ tendency in Your Party would be making the same error as NPA-R, and doing so in a British context where the terrain is already being actively contested by a well-resourced opponent. Reform UK launched Reform Women in 2024. It is not a women’s rights organisation. It is a neighbourhood presence strategy: community events, local networks, the deliberate cultivation of relationships in exactly the post-industrial and coastal communities where the left’s organisational infrastructure has atrophied. Reform Women is not winning because it offers women a coherent political analysis. It is winning because it turns up.
The Tradition They Forgot
Here is the argument the ‘socialist not feminist’ tendency cannot answer on its own terrain. The infrastructure of the mining communities was not a welfare state initiative. It was the working class building its own institutions in the spaces the state would not reach: miners’ institutes, welfare funds, the healthcare provision built into NUM structures, the network of women’s groups that sustained communities through strikes and redundancies. These were integrated community institutions. They provided health, education, legal advice, leisure, and political education under the same roof, in the same building, to the same working-class community. They were not identity politics. They were the class building its own survival infrastructure.
The Maison des Femmes in Saint-Denis is this logic applied to the care economy. Directly connected to hospital provision, integrating clinical services, psychological support, legal aid, and economic empowerment in a single physical space, it operates on the premise that working-class women’s survival needs are complex, interconnected, and not adequately served by statutory provision or single-issue advocacy. It does not ask the women who use it to identify as feminists. It provides services. A study of the Tower Hamlets Women’s Health Hub — the nearest British equivalent of the clinical integration model — found a 60% reduction in secondary care referrals, as 35% of cases were managed directly within the hub setting. The service delivery model is not a nice supplement to political organising. It is, in these communities, the condition for political organising.
The WomenCentre model in Halifax, Huddersfield, and Bradford is the nearest British equivalent at scale. Receiving over 5,540 referrals in the financial year ending March 2025, with income approaching £2 million, operating its own housing pathway from emergency refuge to long-term stability through its sister company WomenCentre Homes, it has built something that looks, from the outside, like a third-sector organisation and functions, in practice, as a node of working-class women’s political life. The Coventry Women’s Partnership offers a different version: a formal alliance of five specialist organisations, jointly governed, which engaged 655 women against an initial pilot target of 300, with 83% reporting their needs were met and statistically significant improvements in mental health and financial stability.
The Collectif Rosa Bonheur’s concept of centralité populaire names what is happening in both cases. Deindustrialised communities are not peripheral to working-class life. They are central to it, because they contain the informal networks, the subsistence work, the mutual aid that allows families to survive outside the formal economy. The woman who minds her neighbour’s children while she works the early shift, the woman who navigates the benefits system for her street, the woman who runs the informal credit circle that prevents evictions: this is the working class, in its contemporary form, doing what it has always done. An integrated hub that serves this woman is not importing metropolitan feminism into the working class. It is recognising where the class already is.
Three Places, One Argument
Our research identifies three constituencies where this argument can be made concrete, and where the political conditions for a community-anchored feminist intervention are most favourable.
Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, where Lee Anderson won 42.8% of the vote in 2024, is the flagship demonstration of the mechanism. The constituency recorded a 30-point collapse in Conservative support among skilled manual workers, with the Reform vote consolidating on a base of C2 voters who feel abandoned by every party that has held power. Juno Women’s Aid reports a 17% increase in demand against static capacity. The Sure Start to Family Hub transition is incomplete and experienced locally as a withdrawal of universal provision. The residual culture of industrial solidarity — the mineworkers’ pensions campaigns, the history of NUM mutual aid — provides exactly the re-foundational logic that makes a new integrated service legible to communities that have been told, repeatedly, that solidarity is something the left does in cities. The Nottinghamshire trade union councils and regional UNISON women’s committees are the natural partners.
Great Yarmouth, where Reform recorded 35.3% and where the 50-64 female cohort is heavily over-represented in Reform’s support base, presents a different version of the same problem. Leeway, the primary specialist domestic violence provider in Norfolk, runs 12 safe houses and has warned that lifesaving services will disappear without a statutory funding mandate. The voluntary sector in Norfolk is dense but fragmented: multiple organisations with less than £10,000 in annual income, unable to provide the integrated service that a single hub with consolidated funding could deliver. The TUC’s London, East and South East Women’s Rights Committee operates in the region. The trade union connection is there; the political anchor is not.
Stockton-on-Tees is the most immediately actionable. ‘A Way Out,’ a trauma-informed integrated hub operating from its centre The Gate, already provides the work the French evidence identifies as decisive: its Horizon team works with women in the criminal justice system; its Unity team provides community and family support; its Blossom Project offers an employment programme for girls aged 13-16 not in education or training. It exists. It functions. It lacks a political anchor that would translate its service relationships into a broader movement capable of contesting the territory Reform is occupying. This is not a founding problem. It is a showing-up problem. Your Party members in Teesside do not need to build an institution. They need to be present in one that already exists.
What People Before Profit Actually Did
People Before Profit in Ireland provides the proof of concept — but it is worth being specific about what the model actually involves, because ‘service-adjacent organising’ is easily misunderstood as a form of social work with political branding. It is not. It is the systematic insertion of a revolutionary organisation into the daily survival struggles of a working-class community, building authority through being useful before asking for anything in return.
PBP’s origins are instructive. The party did not begin with a programme and recruit to it. It grew from the Bin Tax campaign in Ballyfermot, a working-class Dublin suburb, in the early 2000s. The campaign was simple: refuse to pay an unjust local charge, build neighbourhood resistance, and be present every week in the community rather than only at elections. Socialist Workers Network members — the Irish co-thinkers of the IS tradition — were central to the campaign, but they built it as a broad community mobilisation rather than a factional project. The habit of showing up, consistently, in a specific place, with a specific community, for a sustained period: this is what created the social base PBP later converted into votes.
The same pattern repeated during the bank bailout crisis after 2008. In Ballyhea, County Cork, local activists began marching every Sunday through the town centre against the imposition of private bank debt on the Irish public. Every Sunday, week after week, for years. The marches were small. They were consistent. They built the kind of community trust that no national campaign launch or election leaflet can manufacture. PBP members were present in this and dozens of similar local struggles, not directing them but being useful inside them.
The advice clinic model that followed from this is not a party service for party members. It is a constituency advice operation, open to anyone, addressing whatever is in front of them: a benefits sanction, a housing authority decision, a workplace rights question, a debt problem. The grievance that begins at the advice table is, through patient political work over time, connected to the analysis that makes its systemic character visible. The woman who comes in because Universal Credit has sanctioned her childcare element and left her unable to cover the deposit on her next flat: she is not a reform voter being converted. She is a working-class woman with a concrete problem. The party that solves the problem, or tries to, and is honest about why the problem keeps recurring, is the party that earns the right to ask her what she thinks should be done about the system producing it.
PBP’s credibility in industrial disputes followed from this territorial presence. When the Debenhams workers occupied their stores in 2020 after the company used administration to strip redundancy rights, PBP TDs were on the picket lines from the beginning. Not as visiting solidarity, but as part of a network that already had working relationships with the workers involved. The party’s national voice in the Dáil derived its authority from being seen to support workers in the communities where PBP was already active. This is the sequence the British left consistently inverts: it tries to build electoral credibility first and community presence second, which is why neither tends to materialise.
The implication for Your Party is not that it should found advice clinics in three constituencies by the end of Q2. The implication is that the party needs to understand organisational presence as a precondition for political credibility rather than a product of it. In Stockton, ‘A Way Out’ is already the Ballyfermot Bin Tax campaign. It is the institution where working-class women’s daily survival is being organised, where trust is being built through years of concrete work, where the relationship between individual crisis and systemic failure is already, in embryo, being made visible. Your Party’s task is not to replicate that work but to be present inside it: to show up, be useful, and stay.
What This Demands of Your Party
The national demand is clear. Your Party should make the restoration of universal Sure Start provision — the statutory funding of specialist violence against women and girls services as a non-negotiable baseline, and the establishment of integrated women’s hubs in the constituencies most severely affected by service withdrawal — its central ask of the Labour government. Not one among twenty asks. The central one. The one it organises around, the one it challenges Labour to block, the one it uses to demonstrate that the distinction between Your Party and Labour is not rhetorical but organisational and material.
The local demand is equally clear. In Ashfield, Great Yarmouth, and Stockton: be present. Show up to the spaces where working-class women’s survival is already being organised. Support the organisations doing this work. Connect their users, over time, to the political analysis that makes the systematic nature of their abandonment visible. Do not arrive with a leaflet and a candidate’s name. Arrive with time, capacity, and the willingness to be useful for longer than an electoral cycle.
This is not feminist populism. It is the recognition that the working class, in its contemporary form, cannot be organised as if it were 1974, cannot be reached through institutions that no longer exist, and cannot be won by a party that offers the correct analysis from a distance. Reform UK has understood something the left has refused to acknowledge: the politics of a post-industrial constituency is made in its surviving community institutions, and the party that is present in those institutions, consistently and materially, is the party that wins.
Reform’s theory of change requires the misery to continue. Ours requires it to end. The difference between those two positions should be visible in what we build, not only in what we say.