It came to disrupt the system. To move fast and break things. To revolutionise the sector and leave the incumbents reeling. As long, that is, as it can keep the money rolling in, its support high and its inevitability, well, inevitable.
Reform UK is the hot new start-up on the Westminster scene. Like a Silicon Valley would-be unicorn, the party is planning on blazing through the lazy existing order. But that relies, just as in tech, on a confidence trick.
The UK’s electoral system is an effective incumbent protection device. Like Microsoft and Apple, we have a duopoly in the Conservatives and Labour that is remarkably hard to destabilise. Disrupting this system relies on a third party taking out one of the big incumbents. To do that from a standing start of eight MPs, as Reform currently has? That requires a leap of faith.
Witness the fate of previous disruption attempts. The Social Democratic Party (SDP), newly formed from the ashes of the Labour right, briefly led the polls in its alliance with the Liberals. In one 1981 poll the pair tipped over 50 per cent. And yet come the 1983 general election, they had dipped back to 25 per cent and worse, with only 23 MPs to show for their efforts. Can Nigel Farage’s Reform go where that other great Brexiteer, former SDP leader David Owen, failed?
Farage has taken enormous inspiration from the hard-right turn in US tech, first in its alliance with Donald Trump, but even more so in its lust for digital disruption. Reform is fascinated by cryptocurrency deregulation and the party’s chief donor is a crypto investor, resident in Thailand. It has created Elon Musk-inspired mini-Doge units in councils that Reform won last May. And its social media campaigns, particularly through short-form video, are far savvier than those of their rivals (witness Labour’s bizarre TikToks of Keir Starmer walking slowly around Downing Street).
So far, so techbro. But the parallels with Silicon Valley run even deeper, and perhaps less encouragingly, for Reform. Buoyed on seemingly endless venture capital money but with actual profits often years in the future, Californian tech firms must surf the elusive wave of market confidence.
Likewise, Farage is very reliant on the kindness of donors. Reform led the other British parties in donations in the last quarter of 2025. In return, the party has attracted a number of major, ambitious—albeit mildly soiled—Conservative politicians and it hopes to similarly entice Conservative donors. All that relies on Reform’s sense of inevitability.
This explains the slightly tawdry scene in recent weeks when Farage wrote an angry letter to the pollster YouGov to complain about its methodology. As a social scientist, I’d be delighted if Farage’s complaint was a piece of judicious peer review, but it seems likely that his motives were more base.
YouGov was reporting vote intention figures around four or five per cent lower for Reform than other pollsters. The reason is that they prompt people to say who they would vote for specifically in their constituency. As Farage now knows from Reform’s experience in Caerphilly and in Gorton and Denton, at the constituency level Reform can be curtailed by progressives voting tactically. Despite Reform’s declarations of impending national victory its recent electoral results have been disappointing.
Just as a tech CEO faced with mounting losses needs to explain them away to a venture capitalist who has invested billions, Farage must try to keep his donors, and potential defectors from rivals, onside. So, the polling must be wrong. Or the voters illegitimate and “sectarian”, as in Reform’s response to losing in Gorton and Denton.
Like our panicking techbro, Reform may learn the hard way that the customer is always right. To forestall that, the party has to keep inflating the confidence balloon. Reform needs to take out one of its rivals, most likely the Conservatives, if the party is to keep the money and polling scores humming along.
That explains why Reform is tempted by “loss leader” policies, taking a hit now to grab market share for later. You can see this in the grab bag of “30 per cent” policies— supporting Trump in Iran, removing indefinite leave to remain—that excite only that share of the electorate while turning off the rest. Or in Reform’s spending frenzy ahead of the May local election, which Farage described as “double or quits”. And, most baroquely, you can see it in Reform’s response to the ongoing energy crisis, which is to offer to pay the energy bills of everyone on the street of one lucky prize-draw winner.
Far from tech-inspired disruptive politics, this looks like the kind of old-school gambit Reform’s elderly electoral base rather likes. And that’s the irony in trying to be disruptive while representing voters suffused in nostalgia. For all Reform’s techbro rhetoric, the risk is the party will become just like the hated legacy parties—not least because Reform has absorbed so many ex-Conservative politicians.
For now, Reform needs to keep the confidence bubble afloat with shiny new policy ideas, endless press conferences and big-name captures. The problem is that it needs to do this for three more years until an actual general election. Many tech start-ups fizzle out before they can cash in with their IPO. Reform better hope that its funders don’t suddenly get cold feet, given its eye-watering burn rate.
