Farage is winning votes from an unlikely source – and it tells a troubling truth about UK

Sneering lefties regularly damn Nigel Farage’s support as “gammon”. The slur is designed to bring to mind red-faced and angry old white men, raging against immigrants, the EU, Labour and trans activists, while sticking national flags onto lampposts at every opportunity. It’s cruel and condescending, and deliberately so. The aim is to shame them into silence, and punish them for backing Brexit. Yet not all those planning to vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party conform to this insulting stereotype. Quite the reverse.

Farage is picking up support from an unlikely segment of the population, one traditionally seen as liberal and left-wing by default. The type of people who might read The Guardian and vote Labour, Green or, if they were feeling a little bit right-wing that day, Lib Dem. Never those reactionary old Tories, and never, never Nigel Farage. But that’s no longer true.

I’m talking about the UK’s gay population, which is rallying to Reform. No longer militantly left-wing, they’re taking pride in Nigel. Not gammon, but gay. What’s going on?

Reform UK is now the most popular party amongst gay and bisexual British men, with 25% saying they’d vote for Farage, according to research from More in Common. That compares with 19% for Zack Polanski’s Green Party.

Now, Farage hasn’t suddenly gone woke. He’s not calling for greater rights for LGBTQ+. There’ll be no rainbow-flagged Reform float at the next Pride parade. Not with 10 Reform-led councils refusing to fly the Pride flag. Most gay voters still lean left, but a growing number don’t. It’s an interesting and unexpected trend. And it tells something troubling about the direction of UK politics today.

Few gay men feel genuinely threatened by the prospect of a Reform win (although trans campaigners do). They have a much bigger concern.

Online threads show that even gay men who swear they’d never vote Reform understand the appeal. Why? Because they’re worried about the rise of Islamic sectarianism, fuelled by mass immigration that Farage plans to reverse. As one gay man on a Reddit thread put it: “The average Muslim in the UK believes that LGBT people do not deserve human rights, and given the chance they would criminalise same sex relationships.”

Many are concerned by the likes of Green Party deputy leader Mothin Ali, a pro-Gaza religious conservative who celebrated his election as a Leeds councillor by shouting “Allahu Akbar“, and was accused of excusing murderous Hamas attacks against Jews on October 7. He later said that was a mistake.

Green leader Zack Polanski may be both Jewish and gay, but he’s happy to work with Ali. He’s hardly the first left-winger to cosy up to conservative Muslims with primitive views on women and gay rights. Labour has been doing it for decades.

It’s happened elsewhere too. In the 1979 Iranian revolution, left-wing activists and Islamists joined forces in a coalition to oust the Shah. After the Mullahs won, the leftists were left to hang. Literally.

We’re seeing a similar alignment today. And it’s triggered an unlikely alliance between Reform and gay men. They make strange political bedfellows, but we live in strange times. Farage certainly won’t mind if the gay vote helps him sweep up the votes in next month’s elections.