Despite hype & bluster Reform did not win Hamilton, they came third
Much of the media expected Reform to win the Hamilton By-Election on 5th June. It fitted the narrative of the inexorable rise of Farage. In fact the voters ignored the hype and Reform came third.
That didn’t stop, for example, the BBC from writing that Reform had been one of the real winners. In fact elections have only one winner and on this occasion it was Labour
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj42gver2glo
What many polls and news media are doing is not to report opinion but to try and shape it. Currently that means promoting Farage because that gets them publicity.
As E P Thompson noted as far back as 1959
A psephologist is a man employed by the mass media to research into what people think the mass media has told them to think. An ephologist is a man employed by the ‘Observer’ or BBC to interpret the results of psephology and who makes an ephing good thing out of it
New Reasoner, Autumn 1959
That does not mean that the Reform vote is anything but one of concern. Farage and Co ran an openly racist campaign in Hamilton and still got thousands of votes. As commentators have pointed out far from all those votes would have been from racists. But they were from people who were not overly concerned about the racism.
There is work to do in opposing Reform, assuming it does not implode as UKIP did ten years ago. Incessant hyping of Farage’s political business vehicle needs to be challenged as part of that.
There is also work to do in challenging media narratives that Farage is on the way to win the next Election. That work needs to be done in workplaces, cafes, community hubs and pubs, the kind of places where the national media rarely ventures
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