Within a minute of arriving on Reform Road, the very first person I meet suggests that what started as a bit of a joke might have some substance to it.
‘Reform! Absolutely Reform!’ says Natalija Vasiluna, 24, when I ask how she would vote if there was an election tomorrow. ‘I know I sound hypocritical saying this being an immigrant but the only way to make this country safe is to get immigration under control.’
Following this month’s conclusion of the party conference season and last week’s proper start of the parliamentary year, it seems like a good idea to test the national mood to see if all those gatherings of the party faithful have made the slightest difference.
With the polls showing Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems all flatlining, is Reform still maintaining that Spring surge which saw it run riot in the last local elections? And where best to look?
There are three streets called Reform Road in Britain. One is an industrial estate in Berkshire, while another is a back alley in Derbyshire. Reform Road in Chatham, Kent, however, is a perfect test case.
It is traditional street of back-to-back houses, built for Victorian workers, in a town that, for many years, has reflected the national political picture. Chatham has gone back and forth between Tories and Labour in modern times and currently has a Labour MP sitting on a narrow sub-2,000 majority after Reform split the Tory vote at the last election in a three-way fight.
It sits in a county where Reform pulled off a spectacular coup at this year’s local elections, seizing control of Kent County Council (though Chatham itself sits inside the Labour-run unitary authority of Medway).
In other words, this is precisely the sort of place that Nigel Farage – himself a man of Kent who previously stood for Parliament just up the road in Thanet South – needs to win if he is going to form a government. And I find that Reform Road turns out to be a pretty accurate appear mirror of the national trend.
Pictured: Robert Hardman at Reform Road in Chatham, Kent
There are three streets called Reform Road in Britain. One is an industrial estate in Berkshire, while another is a back alley in Derbyshire. Reform Road in Chatham, however, is a perfect test case
After knocking on every door and talking to dozens of people, I find a combination of disillusioned Tories, weary Labour, a sprinkling of Libs and Greens and a lot of those who say: ‘They’re all a bunch of crooks”https://www.dailymail.co.uk/”Don’t know’.
No one party commands anything like an overall majority but, significantly, the one with the highest support is Reform. And that is not what one might expect in a street where white working class Brits seem to be a minority.
Natalija Vasiluna is certainly not a political animal. In fact, she didn’t even bother to vote at the last local election out of ‘laziness’.
Having arrived in Britain from Lithuania in her teens to study science at university, she then went on to work in hotel management all over the London area.
‘Then the hotels started filling up with migrants sent to us by the council,’ she says. ‘Some people were nice but other people would just trash the rooms and we had to spend hours cleaning them up with no extra pay.’
The worst of the lot, she says, was a hotel in Croydon. ‘The staff just had to sit there and watch the place falling apart.’
She is walking down Reform Road pushing the one-year-old child she has with her Portugese-born partner Mario, 28, a plumber. ‘Just get him on the subject of politics and he won’t stop,’ she laughs. ‘He is absolutely for Reform.’
As someone with ‘settled status’ but not UK citizenship, is she not worried about Reform’s plans for a new visa regime and zero benefits for non-UK citizens?
The street sits in a county where Reform pulled off a spectacular coup at this year’s local elections, seizing control of Kent County Council (though Chatham itself sits inside the Labour-run unitary authority of Medway)
Pictured: Reform Road, Chatham. Nigel Farage himself is a man of Kent who previously stood for Parliament just up the road in Thanet South
Natalija Vasiluna, 24, told him: ‘I know I sound hypocritical saying this being an immigrant but the only way to make this country safe is to get immigration under control’
‘That’s okay. We are going to apply for British citizenship and we don’t want benefits,’ she says. ‘The UK has got to start putting British people first.’
It is a bracing start to my day on Reform Road. Working my way down each side (almost every home, I find, has a Ring security camera (the legacy of a mini crime wave earlier in the year apparently), I meet carer and charity worker, Michala Bell, 42.
‘We always talk about politics with the children and we’re leaning to Reform,’ she says, adding that she has been a Labour voter in the past. ‘It’s time to put the British first for a bit. Immigration is the number one thing for us. Not the ones who come here legally – this is a very diverse street and we have neighbours from all over the world and their kids are in and out with my kids – but the ones who are coming illegally and having everything handed to them for free as soon as they come in.
‘I’m not racist in any way but I notice now that when I have to go to the doctors to pick up prescriptions, there are just more and more foreign people in there. We can’t go on taking in everyone.’
That, I have to say, is the prevailing sentiment, even among those who say that they would not vote Reform in a month of Sundays.
Agata Suleyman came to Britain 25 years ago from Poland, is married to a market trader of Turkish Cypriot heritage and has two children.
‘Reform do have some good ideas and Nigel Farage has fought hard but they take these ideas to the extreme,’ she says. Working in the accounts department of a big company with a self-employed husband, she understands economics and says that none of the big parties can afford the promises they make. And she feels Britain is too generous with its benefits.
‘Where I come from, if you don’t work, you get an allowance for six months and then that’s it. You get cut off. And we need to be more tough here. It’s the same with parental responsibility.’
She explains how a child from a (non-British) family threw a stone that cracked the windscreen of her husband’s van. The police said they could not get involved because the boy was underage. ‘Why can’t the police arrest the parents?’
A few doors further on, I meet Philip Josephs, whose father was part of the Windrush generation, arriving from Jamaica in the 1950s, while his mother’s family were pre-war European refugees.
He is a disappointed but unwavering Labour voter who is fervently anti-Reform. ‘They are a bunch of opportunists with dog whistles and seem to be full of defectors from the Tory party who defected when they quite rightly lost power,’ he says. ‘They’re a serious threat to the country.’
Agata Suleyman came to Britain 25 years ago from Poland, is married to a market trader of Turkish Cypriot heritage and has two children
She said: ‘Reform do have some good ideas and Nigel Farage has fought hard but they take these ideas to the extreme’
He acknowledges that immigration is a serious issue but says that small boats are scapegoats and not the problem. ‘It’s the hundreds of thousands who came in legally under the Tories after Brexit and who don’t share our British values,’ he says. ‘They just buy up properties for subletting and they’re not actually integrating fully. Just look at all the flytipping round here.’
While he worries ‘a lot of racists jumping on the bandwagon’ he accepts that Britain ‘just can’t go on being as benevolent as we used to be’.
There is certainly a lot of rubbish piled up in alleyways and parking lots. People tell me that it’s usually a lot worse. ‘You’ve come on a good day,’ says Jo, a Chatham-born former healthcare receptionist who gave up a year ago ‘because I just got fed up with the abuse’.
‘There’s just been a clean-up. This place is usually a dumping ground. But then Chatham’s always been a bit of a dumping ground.’
She says she will probably vote Reform next time around, although she prefers dissident ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe to the party leader. ‘Nigel Farage is just too much of a politician.’
Carer Michelle Swift, 45, with her dog Gismo, and mother, Pauline Wells, 68, says that she ‘used to be Labour but now it’s time to look after the English instead of giving it all to the rest of the world’. The family will be voting Reform.
Retired wine merchant, Mike Russell, will not – ‘too Trumpian’ – and wishes that the Tories would get their act together. ‘But the migration issue needs sorting. I’m going go a cruise soon and I wonder if I even need a passport as no one else seems to bother with one.’
I meet a trio of men working on a car, all of them off-duty cleaners and originally from Slovakia. They all say they would never vote Reform because of the party’s plans to make non-British citizens who have lived here for years apply for a visa. ‘It makes us feel unwelcome,’ says one, called Roman.
I ask them about the proliferation of English and British flags on the streetlights along the main road just round the corner. ‘That’s good,’ says another, Peter. ‘You should fly your flag. This is England, innit. I don’t want to see Palestinian or Pakistani flags.’
When Hardman spoke to residents of all backgrounds on Reform Road, noone seemed to have problems with St George’s Flags being flown
No one I talk to has any problem with the flags, just as everyone tells me that immigration is a problem. ‘We can’t keep on taking in people who do not come here by the right paths,’ says a young mother and part-time science teacher who, appropriately enough, gives me her name as Miss Ahmed. British-born of Bangladeshi heritage, she says she understands why Reform is gaining ground, though she would not vote for it herself.
This road really could be a snapshot of modern Britain. Just like Coronation Street, it is named after an historic landmark, in this case the Reform Acts of the 19th Century.
Just round the corner at one end is the ‘Four Continents African Caribbean’ food store and just beyond the other end of the road is a Bangladeshi-run supermarket.
I meet multiple nationalities and find a decent community spirit rooted in a shared belief in hard graft, a sense that things are just getting more expensive and a wish that someone would do something about the litter. Yet, on present form, it represents a bleak prospect for the two main parties but a promising one for the insurgency.
Mr Farage’s rivals may cling to one factor, though. Thanks to a set of steel bollards at the junction with Grove Road – erected to prevent cars using this as a rat run – it now has a ‘T’ sign indicating a no-through route for traffic. In other words, Reform Road is actually a dead end.
