Farewell To Doncaster
What Reform’s Majority Shows Us About Votes For The Far-Right
When I go back home next weekend to visit my parents, I will for the first time be going back to a council where the majority of councillors stand for Reform – ffs. Doncaster has a history of dabbling with hard-right councillors – first the BNP, then UKIP. I’m disappointed, but not surprised.
I did my MA research on why people vote for far-right parties. The most respected theories all run along the lines of far-right votes being in economically deprived areas, with older blue-collar workers - notably in this book co-written by fan of the hard right Matt Goodwin. But when I studied this back in 2019, the ward level data did not add up – there was a very weak correlation between levels of education, the local economy and whether or not someone voted for a far-right party. It felt like broad generalisations across broad sweeps of data were being touted as hard facts.
Yet the key ideas in his book are still more or less copied as de facto truths – see this quote from the BBC’s reporting on the Reform wins –
The term ‘left-behind’ is vague and often undefined - but the Local Trust stated the following:
In Doncaster’s case – this just isn’t true. Doncaster voting record is a mixture of paradoxes that don’t immediately make its voting history easy to understand. Here are my main concerns regarding the whole ‘poor and uneducated’ theory when it comes to Donny…
#1 Income is lower, but so are costs
Low income is often given as a reason for far-right voting, and often to avoid any seeming class prejudice it’s phrased euphemistically as a ‘left-behind’ area. At first glance, the idea of low-income households seems to tally, as Doncaster’s salaries are below the national average. However, if we break down this data from Suffrago we can see that the pattern isn’t immediately obviously. Whilst income in Yorkshire is slightly below the UK average, house prices (and by extension housing costs) are significantly lower. To buy a home in Doncaster, you need to be able to pay 6.5 x your income – compare this to many London boroughs where this is fourteen or sixteen times higher, (I wrote an article on this here) and you can see that actually buying and renting is much more affordable. It’s hard to find constituency level data on disposable income, but you can find out median monthly rent is £647.
To illustrate income adjusted for housing costs:
Median rent in Doncaster £647 x12 = £7,764
Median Income in Doncaster central = £25,700
As a % of income = 30.2%
Compared to London….
Average rent is £2,121 x 12 = £25, 452
Average salary = £47,455
As a % of income = 53.6%
You could therefore make an educated guess that disposable income – which is usually what makes people feel wealthy or poor – is in fact greater in Doncaster than London. So, it weakens the argument that money is a primary motivating factor, when disposable income is proportionally greater in Doncaster than in left-wing strongholds like central London.
#2 Doncaster has perceptible deprivation
Doncaster does suffer from deprivation in certain areas. Of 194 areas in the survey – 68 were in the 20% most deprived in the country, and 13 in the 20% least deprived. However, even the well-off wards have also voted for Reform in the latest election. The ward of Hatfield is affluent, and yet now has a Reform councillor – so clearly the idea that personal economic situation and voting preference is linked is questionable.
Unlike other areas on this map of deprivation according to the ONS – Doncaster’s areas of privilege are unusually grouped – some of the most deprived areas are almost back-to-back with the least deprived. According to the ONS it also has quite a high internal disparity rate of 61/ 316 constituencies – which means it ranks quite high up in the UK for income differences within the constituency.
I wonder if the perception of wealth inequality in Doncaster is potentially a bigger factor than income alone – not only are there a significant proportion of people struggling financially, but those who are affluent are perhaps more likely to see poorer areas – and perhaps see this as a reflection of their own economic status. Simultaneously, those in poorer areas may see the appeal of a different government, with a sense of frustration over economic disparity.
Here is a Google Maps picture of the High Street (it looks like this most times of day - though the pictures were taken in August of last year) This is how Adwick-Le-Street looks. It’s the same for a lot of the other wards who now have a Reform councillor. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember – at least going back ten years.
In Nervous States, William Davies writes how important perception is over facts – this essential premise of the book is that you believe what you feel, and that statistics are meaningless in comparison to information you personally perceive. If Doncaster’s high streets look like this then it makes little difference that many people theoretically have a reasonable amount of disposable income – it looks poor, and so it’s hard to convey a feeling of personal wealth when this is what your hometown looks like.
#3 Doncaster was pro-Brexit, but to say it hasn’t benefitted from globalisation is to ignore the large role the EU has played in its recent history,
According to the electoral calculus website the vote leave intention was 67% against a national average of 52%. Doncaster has not profited less from globalisation – but it has suffered from an enormous shift away from mining. When I volunteered in the local Labour MP’s office, an entire wall of the office was posters of pits entitled ‘CLOSED BY THE TORIES’. It’s easy to consign this to a historical event if you’re writing about it – but the last mine only shut in 2015.
No major industry has really replaced it – except a smattering of Amazon warehouses along the A1. However, EU funding in 2017 spent £45 million per year on aiding farmers, and a further £13 million on creating jobs. Compare this to the amount it got in levelling up funding – the wards of Mexborough and Moorends finally received money in the third round of levelling-up funding in 2023, equating to £18 million – an investment it is still waiting to receive.
Although globalisation has been in part responsible for the removal of heavy industry, it’s the failure of successive governments to create employment which has had the more devastating impact on the area. Furthermore, when it has benefited from international initiatives, this has in no way changed local perceptions of international aid – and the frustrations of residents have been directed at the one institution which has provided significant financial support.
#4 Education isn’t what it was
The one contributing factor which has historically correlated with far-right voting is lower levels of education. However, the reason for this is given as a tendency to envy the higher graduate salaries that a university degree has traditionally conferred. But as shown by this article in the FT – this is no longer the case. The class of metropolitan elites that Goodwin is so keen to blame for this surge in far-right support, is now a diffuse and complex group of people .
Those with graduate jobs are more likely to land them in a major city – where expenses are higher – and less likely to have a significant wage increase. To still suggest that far-right voting is a reaction to the perceived privilege of those with degrees is to conflate Britain in 2025 with Britain in 1950. Those with degrees, especially in the age of AI, no longer hold significantly higher salaries than those with manual jobs. With the advent of student loans, this has also made education in theory more accessible for those from less financially privileged backgrounds. It’s unclear if other factors that education contributes to might instead be the reason - for example, there tends to be students from diverse backgrounds that may change perceptions around immigration in a way which remaining in your home town may not give you.
#5 Reform’s Local Comms
Reform’s comms machine has got slicker. There is no out-and-out racism in its manifesto, and so the party has a much more harmless appearance. Here’s the local election literature – no immigrant blaming in sight. It might be in Nigel Farage’s discourse, but they’re softening up the electorate by keeping their more vile opinions off the front pages. If you can face their YouTube video you can see how sanitised their comms machine has become -
If you’re someone with low stakes investment in politics, you might be mistaken for thinking Reform is a mildly conservative party. One of the biggest issues with Reform is that now it has thousands of paid members, it has much more money to spend on its publicity machine – something which really should not be discounted. As much as I despise their policies, their media machine is running incredibly effectively. It’s easy to dismiss Reform as a protest vote – but they are currently shaping up to be a more credible opponent than the Conservative party.
It only takes one man promising a vision of a better local council for his more unsavoury views to be overlooked, and Reform’s focus on taking control of borders to be seen as a panacea. The concept of ‘left behind voters’ seems to be used as a catch-all term for a variety of predominantly northern towns - and can absolve the last governments of failing to move the dial of political discourse around migration. The average voter has limited time and attention for political analysis - if one issue is dominating the headlines, that is the idea they’re likely to latch on to. There is a reason why Labour picked one word for its election campaign slogan. If Labour doesn’t think of a coherent, alternative narrative for its own party, Reform is going to begin to topple its lead with its clear anti-migration message.
I don’t have the answer to this – but I hope somebody can start investigating local data properly, and start to understand that the broad, sweeping statements about poor, blue-collar votes are outdated. We need to challenge these pre-conceived and out-of-date opinions on why people are voting for Reform, if we have any hope of preventing a far-right surge in the next election.