Reform has painted Connolly as a political prisoner of Keir Starmer’s government, with Farage even flying to Washington this week to slam Britain’s online safety rules and likening the UK to North Korea on free speech.
Cabinet ministers blasted Farage’s U.S. trip as a “Talk Britain Down” tour. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds called it “as anti-British as you can get.
More in Common polling shows that while voters are split on whether Connolly’s sentence was too harsh or too lenient, 51 percent want politicians to distance themselves from her, including more than a quarter of Reform voters.
“The transnational neoconservative right is a massive danger to the British right, not an opportunity,” argued IPPR’s Morris.
More in Common polling shows that many of Reform’s newer supporters view U.S.-style populist figures, such as Donald Trump, negatively. Social attitudes are also shifting, with six in ten voters supporting same-sex marriages, and 46 percent thinking the legal abortion limit should stay at 24 weeks.
Policy pitfalls
While Reform is confidently ahead in national voting intention polls, there is evidence of some unease about its specific policy pledges. A proposal to work with the Taliban to return Afghan asylum seekers got a mixed reception. Some 45 percent of Britons said that giving money to the regime to take returns would be “completely unacceptable,” according to a YouGov poll.