A Swift Half

By Dyala Janselme

In the run up to the 2024 General Election, I found myself sharing pints with Reform members.

Having emailed the head of my local branch with a feigned interest in joining the party, I was warmly invited to attend their local pub meetings. Sauntering in with a secretly-recording phone in my pocket, I saw myself as an intrepid investigator going undercover. I relished in the drama of it all; look at me, a French, Irish, Lebanese Londoner raised on the progressive ideals of open borders and cultural melange, fraternising with those entirely opposed to such notions. I was immediately accepted into the fold and added to their Whatsapp groupchat—the party supporters were delighted by my youth and interest, though I wondered if they would be as eager if I looked less white. To this day, the chat regularly inundates my phone with hundreds of messages, ranging from organising meetings, passionately debating identity and culture, and discussing party policy and vision.

When, in November 2025, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage came under fire following allegations of racism and antisemitism in his schoolboy days, I felt it fitting to re-open my 2024 investigation. As Reform’s popularity soars and polls predict they will form the next government, it seems imperative to understand who the people behind this party are.

The groupchat provided a solid foundation from which to launch the investigation, and though legal constraints prevent me from relaying the exact messages, I will endeavour to accurately convey the kinds of comments made regardless.

Complaints and criticisms are relentless; whether directed toward the Labour government, mainstream media, or anything they deem ‘woke’ (such as trans rights and contemporary academia). Mostly, however, they are consumed by immigration and Islam: muslim citizens are consistently cast as invaders threatening Britain, with the government complicit in a supposed plot to erase this country’s culture. Any news of crime or terrorism sparks wild speculation on the groupchat, with supporters quick to wrongly blame religious and ethnic minorities—sometimes citing cultural difference, other times racial inferiority.

Their texts are sensationalist and theatrical, raising the stakes of every challenge faced and painting politics as a battlefield. Liberals are demonised, and vicious rumours and accusations fly across the chat. Using their words as weapons, members stoke the embers of discontent into a wildfire of hatred—entirely uncontrollable, entirely all-consuming. Observing the types of comments made, my view of the group formed and solidified: the Reformers were not only ridiculous but hateful. I pictured wrinkled hands frantically tapping on keyboards, pursed lips and narrowed eyes looking for opportunities to spew their venom.

Letting their desire for drama and political spectacle fuel my own, I sought to truly nail them by getting them to repeat their comments live, or even goad them into saying something more controversial. So, posing as a neutral figure, I messaged the most vocal people on the groupchatasking for interviews. All bar one refused; it seems the facade of a screen gives a degree of protection that the directness of a call does not.

The outlier was Peter. Admittedly, he was initially wary: as a self-proclaimed ‘committed community worker’ who grew up ‘dirt poor’, he didn’t need ‘some privileged kids telling me I’m a shit’. He just wanted honesty—that I wouldn’t present him unfairly or write a diatribe against people like him—and he would be honest in return.

As we started the call, I steeled myself for the man I imagined I was set to face; old white and angry, teeth-gnashing and St George’s flags flying. Instead, I was met with a voice deep and soft, almost calming in its constant sighing and pausing. It immediately rocked my initial pretensions. He sounded tired, and his earlier concern over being misrepresented came across now less like confrontation and more like fear.

I started with what I thought to be a reasonable question: ‘why are you voting for Reform?’.

I was immediately shut down.

I was told I’m being assumptive: though he may well vote Reform, he also may not—it depends on if they ‘turn out to be a party of right-wing nutters’. I stayed silent, surprised at his candor. With another sigh, he declared that ‘the failure of the Conservative party has truly broken me’ and that ‘the Reform party are filling the void left by Conservatism’. As a working-class Northerner whose upbringing taught him the value of hard work and self-reliance, he longs for Thatcher’s golden age because, for him, she ‘spoke in terms of fairness, and fairness was, and is, probably the most important thing in my life’.

He expressed his frustration at the ‘bloody virtue-signalling’ of the ‘well-to-do middle class’, who pretend to understand the needs of the working class. All the working class actually want, he told me, is ‘fair opportunity’: ‘We don’t want people throwing bloody bananas at us, we’re not monkeys’. Hence his interest in Reform—according to him, they’re the only ones speaking up for the workers of this country.

Above all, Peter fears chaos. He’s reminded of it everyday by a bucket: it was on his grandfather’s fire engine when he put out the fires of the Coventry Blitz during the Second World War. ‘That bucket looks at me and I look at it everyday’—it is a bleak and constant call-back to uncertain and dangerous times, which he believes we are entering once again.

As he seamlessly transitioned from topic to topic, he accurately predicted I would want to ask him about immigration. ‘There’s a fairness to immigration’, he admitted, and he’s ‘met very few migrants… who are unpleasant. Of course, most people are just nice and normal’. His concern is simply that the UK is only so big and can only house so many people. Take his tight-knit village community in Hampshire for example—a proposal to build 12,000 houses has everyone concerned and frightened. To Peter, mass immigration threatens the country his grandfather and that bucket had struggled to build. In his voice I don’t hear the teeth-gnashing of an angry xenophobe, but the disheartened lament of a hopeless man, nostalgic for a past age.

As he spoke, I realised something incredibly important: Peter sounded reasonable. He’s tired and disappointed in politics— aren’t we all—and he just wants things to change. Sighing yet again, he tells me that he loves Britain and is immensely proud of it, but ‘this country is broken, and I don’t know what to do about it’.

‘This is a bigger conversation, it’s not about Reform, it’s not about the Tory party… unless we rediscover community and our families, we are going to break. We are all going to break’. To him, fixing this country starts with one another. He implored me: ‘let’s go back to doing that great thing called community. Let’s talk to one another, let’s eat together… Let's share our day's stories…I am a Christian, let’s go to Church, let’s sing songs together, let’s have coffee afterwards… let’s do what we can to help people’.

True to his word, he gave me the name of his goddaughter, a journalist he said he could put me in contact with, and his godson, a second year at my university. A few days later, he messaged me with a reminder that if I ‘ever want to chat to somebody further down the road of life, you know where to find me.’

At this point, my resolve to expose Reform’s evil had crumbled. I was deflated and shaken to the core; Peter’s soft-spoken demeanor, patience and friendliness had overturned every expectation I had had. The voice that had travelled clearly across the phone was a far cry from the man I had been imagining. Worse, as I heard my own voice in conversation with his—my posh Kensington drawl jarring with his Blackpool accent—I wasn’t hearing a brave and intrepid investigator, but a privileged and presumptuous know-it-all; exactly the kind of person Peter had feared.

Looking back on the groupchat after our conversation, I realised I had been reading it through a filtered lens. Though impossible to look past the bigotry of some, it would be dishonest to paint it all as racist rants and dramatic discourse. Some of the conversations were positive as well as problematic: events organised, selfies with one another shared, love of country and culture expressed. Moreover, new members are regularly added and fresh perspectives constantly introduced: one woman even challenged what she deemed to be the racism of certain messages. Whilst she was quickly shut down by other members, it was nonetheless a sign that debate and decency are still present within the group.

Though I had wanted to, I found that I couldn’t hate these people. Life would perhaps be easier if I could—if I could dismiss every Reformer as uneducated and bigoted and stay firm and safe in my convictions. But life isn’t so simple; there is no clear right and wrong we can fall back on for comfort and security. I’m not ashamed to admit I cried after talking to Peter: it is difficult to have our fundamental beliefs shaken, and it is even harder to put ourselves in a position for this to happen. But it is far more dangerous to refuse to at all, and stubbornly cling to our echo-chambers and ideologies. Driven by the desire for drama and salacious scandal, I had become like the latter and set out on this investigation with dishonest intentions. Much like some of the Reformers, I had been ready to wield my words as a weapon.

As my chat with Peter showed me, community may very well be the remedy to this desire for drama that leads us to look for the worst in people. Communities foster discussion, and in an increasingly polarised world, the importance of discussion (especially across political divides) cannot be overstated. If our values and convictions are to hold any meaning, they need to be challenged, and to do that we need to talk to each other—not with the intention of harm, but with the intention of listening.

As I write this, Peter’s last words to me ring in my head. With an instruction to ‘write thoughtful stuff’, he reminded me that ‘words are so important. Do you remember what it said in the Bible?’ I’m an ardent atheist, but I hazarded a guess anyway: ‘In the beginning was the Word?’ He finished for me: ‘And the Word was God, and the Word was with you. You are dealing with the most powerful bullets ever made. Use them wisely. Bless you, have a good day.’

DYALA JANSELME  is overusing the em dash—again.

Art by Fatima Butt