There are rumblings of a whole cohort of young British men turning toward Reform UK. It’s being called – and I am typing this at arm’s length from my keyboard – the “bro vote”. First Donald Trump was said to have captured the bros; now the wave is breaking here.
You can see the bros online too, looking a bit like the teens who dressed up in suits to go and see Minions: The Rise of Gru a couple of years ago, all three-piece suits and slicked-back Jack Grealish hair.
Nigel Farage knows it. “Young blokes are young blokes, and they feel like the world is telling them not to be young blokes,” he told Sky.
The logic runs that Reform is part of the same right-wing revolt as Trump’s Maga Republicanism. In capturing the “bro vote”, it took an amorphous collection of grievances, which young men supposedly hold against a post-feminist world that wants to tell them off all the time, and turned it into electoral success. Reform, which regularly rails at “wokery” and has a leader who last had an unphotographed pub pint at some point in 1995, feels like a natural place for politically homeless dudes to congregate.
At first glance, the numbers point that way. According to YouGov, in this summer’s election, 18 to 24-year-old men were twice as likely to vote Reform as women in the same age group (12 per cent to 6 per cent); and 18 to 24-year-old women were almost twice as likely to vote Green as men in the same age group (23 per cent to 12 per cent). Everything else was roughly the same, though men were more likely to vote Conservative (10 per cent to 6 per cent) and for smaller parties.
Among 16 and 17-year-olds, the divide was even more pronounced: 35 per cent of young men said they would vote Reform against 17 per cent of young women. And there is the TikTok boom too. The Guardian’s analysis suggested that Reform posts during the election outperformed Labour’s by about 30 per cent per post.
Young people across Europe voted that way in other elections this year: in Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing coalition won votes from 32.9 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds; in France, 33 per cent of that age group voted for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally; the Netherlands and Sweden saw a youth surge to the right too.
Some context. The YouGov poll says Labour were, by far, the most popular party among men and women of that age group. Labour’s 41 per cent outstripped the next two most popular parties, the Lib Dems and Greens, put together. The median age of a Reform voter was 56, the second-oldest average after the Conservatives at 63.
And the online activity needs a health warning too. BBC’s disinformation specialist Marianna Spring has pointed out that some pro-Reform accounts are pretty funky-looking: it’s extremely difficult to say exactly how much of the TikTok activity is organic, and how much is being pushed by bots from overseas.
Nigel Farage is watching hungrily as the far right sweeps to power across Europe
Read MoreAll that said, there is something bubbling there. This is a particularly male thing. Stats suggest 71 per cent of young women dislike Farage, versus 9 per cent who do like him. It feels like a new and strange kind of masculine flexing.
But the thing it reminds me of most is the halcyon summer of 2017. I was there, man. I saw the best minds of my generation chanting “Ohhh, Jeremy Corbyn”. I did not buy a Nike shirt with “CORBYN” above the swoosh, but a fair few people did.
I don’t know how many of my mates thought Corbyn’s charge from 12 or 13 points underwater, to denying Theresa May a majority, was a genuine political awakening after seven years of Tory prime ministers, and how many just felt like it was a good summer vibe with some decent merch. Either way, the Oxford English Dictionary named “youthquake” its word of the year. But the whole youthquake thing was a mirage. There was no discernible uplift.
Yet there is something in the Corbyn-Farage comparison. Despite being, respectively, a Parliamentarian of 34 years’ standing, and a former City commodities trader with a wardrobe of trousers that even Mr Toad would baulk at, both have made inroads from a basically iconoclastic position.
That’s what animates quite a few young people. One Reform influencer, Nicholas Lissack, wrote on X that he “woke up politically for the first time on 16 June 2015, when Donald Trump descended the escalator and announced his presidential campaign”.
Lissack found Trump’s total disregard for niceties exciting: “For the first time in my life, I heard a politician who spoke candidly, didn’t mince words, and expressed a profound patriotism for his country. That moment was incredibly inspiring to my adolescent mind.”
But as fun as it is to kick the Establishment, I doubt that the “bro vote” is going to upturn British politics. TikTok matters, but every time that social media noise has hit the cold, hard reality of the ballot box it’s turned to mist.
Youth turnout in July was a paltry 40 per cent. Having been an 18 to-24-year-old man, I can attest that cohort is quite well known for talking a big game and then not actually doing any of the things they said they would. And on top of that, it’s not clear what Reform actually offers young people. Young people are not nostalgic for a time before “woke policing”. Young people are very worried about climate change. Young people aren’t getting more anxious about immigration – in the last 15 years they’ve got way, way more relaxed.
Yet none of this is the point. Just because young men aren’t likely to deliver Farage the keys to No 10, that doesn’t mean this can be dismissed. There are clearly many young men who feel disaffected and disillusioned. Online, disparate statistics – the numbers of men who kill themselves, who are killed at work, who sleep rough, who end up in prison, who are addicted to alcohol and drugs – are weaponised, used not as proof that work needs to be done on, for instance, mental healthcare provision and dismantling the prison of masculinity which still stops men expressing their feelings, but proof that the world has stopped caring about men.
If you’re aged between 18 and 24, you have only known the NHS in crisis, university becoming far less carefree as inflation eats maintenance loans, home-owning becoming something you resent your better off friends for, and everyone older than you shrieking that the places you talk to your friends online are cesspits which you must be removed from for your own good. Then the pandemic nicked a good chunk of the time you’d have spent developing into the young adult you meant to be. There’s a sense of unfairness that still rankles.
Add to that the kinds of messages that people like Andrew Tate – someone Farage said in February was “a very important voice” for young men, before walking that back a touch – are sluicing into the teen boy ecosystem, and there’s a readymade worldview that will tell men and boys who want to make sense of the world that there is a very simple answer: it’s everybody else’s fault.
What will be of interest is what these young voters do with that sense of unfairness. There are far more sensitive, empathetic young men out there than the manosphere would have you believe.
There are lots of committed young activists too; people who are already changing the world around them, people who might even end up near Parliament in the future. The difference is that bragging about it is inherently not bro culture. You may not have met them yet, but you’ll know them long after this “youthquake” is gone.
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