A new poll has broken down voting intention by education level, and the numbers are… telling. It says 42% of people whose top qualification is GCSE or lower would vote Reform, while only 13% of people educated to degree level would back Reform.
That stat is already being waved around online like a trophy. Proof, apparently, that Reform are the party of the “ordinary working bloke”, while the educated lot are too busy sipping flat whites and reading The Guardian to notice Britain collapsing.
So I made a slightly snide comment about that 13% being millionaires and hedge fund managers. Which, in fairness, was more sarcasm than sociology. Still, it landed because it pokes at something real: Reform’s loudest cheerleaders tend to be the ones with the least to lose, while the people who actually benefit from the agenda are often the ones you never see in the comments.
Then someone popped up and said, “I’ve got a degree and I’m voting Reform, and I’m not a millionaire.”
Fair enough. Degrees are not magical talismans that repel nonsense. Plenty of clever people believe daft things, especially when the daft thing comes wrapped in identity, anger, and a promise to punish the right targets.
But here’s the bit that matters. I started questioning the 13% figure because it felt a bit high. Surely anyone educated to degree level can see Reform’s policies are mostly theatre: big promises, thin numbers, and the usual magical thinking about deportations, tax cuts and instant NHS miracles. Then I realised the more interesting question isn’t who votes Reform, it’s who Reform actually benefits if they ever got near power.
Because when you strip away the pub chat, the Union Flag waving, and the endless talk about boats, what sits underneath is not a working class rescue plan. It’s the same old right wing offer, just louder. Tax cuts dressed up as patriotism, deregulation sold as “freedom”, and the state shrunk until it can no longer do anything except police the poor and subsidise the rich.
And this is where the graduate vote starts to make grim sense. If you’re educated enough to read the policies properly, you can also work out who wins. Some of those 13% won’t be voting Reform despite the economics, but because of them. If you’re already wealthy, or you expect to become wealthy, you can look at the direction of travel and think: lower taxes, fewer rules, less redistribution, more room to keep what you’ve got. You don’t have to love Farage’s pantomime to see the personal upside.
That’s why you’ll always find a slice of graduates voting Reform. Not because they’re all millionaires, but because a portion of them are comfortable enough to treat politics like a culture war hobby, and secure enough to see the economic angle as a bonus. They like the idea of a smaller state, lower taxes, and fewer constraints, and they’re far enough from the sharp end to think it will only hurt “someone else”.
Meanwhile, the people most likely to get clobbered by that agenda are the very voters Reform courts hardest. The ones who rely on the NHS, on social care, on local services that have already been hollowed out. The ones who have seen wages stagnate, housing disappear, and public services buckle. The ones who are then told, relentlessly, that the real enemy is a bloke in a dinghy.
It’s a brilliant con, if you think about it. Convince people who need a functioning state to vote for a party that wants to dismantle it, and distract them with immigration while you do it. It’s political pickpocketing. Keep them looking at the noise at the top of the screen while you quietly lift the wallet.
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