Liberal Democrats will not stop Reform by warning people about it. To understand why people listen, we must understand what Reform offers that too many feel they no longer get from us.
We have spent years failing young men — and by the time many reached adulthood, they had already spent years being failed as boys, especially when they were white and poor. Reform has noticed. It is turning our blindness into political support.
Education shows how early that failure begins. Boys fall behind from the start, are heavily overrepresented in special educational needs, more likely to be suspended or excluded, and less likely to enter higher education. A 2026 study by George Leckie and Konstantina Maragkou found teachers systematically predicted lower grades for boys than comparable girls, even after controlling for later achievement. An Ofqual review found bias favouring girls or against boys more often than the opposite.
If this evidence concerned girls, we would call it a gender-equality problem. When it affects boys, we hesitate. DfE data make that hesitation impossible to justify: 44% of White British boys on free school meals are identified as having SEN; boys account for 70.7% of pupils with Education, Health and Care plans; among White British pupils on free school meals, only 13% of young men enter higher education by 19, compared with 21% of young women.
These figures cannot be explained by lower ability. Boys perform slightly better in maths and substantially better at the highest KS2 standard. Different groups get very different results from the same system. Yet when a boy struggles, the explanation too often stops with the boy: SEN, low aspiration, behaviour. Those things may be true, but they do not settle the institutional question. If we stop there, we turn the child’s difficulty into the explanation for institutional failure.
That is where Reform gets its opening. They say you are the problem. We say you have a problem. Reform often diagnoses badly, but politically that matters less if it is the only force willing to say the problem exists. It only has to say: We see you.
Suella Braverman is already campaigning around white working-class boys, arguing they have been abandoned. If our first response is to explain why they are wrong to feel abandoned, we lose before reaching solutions. And the effect does not stop with the boys themselves. People experience politics through people they love. Parents watch boys struggle. Partners, sisters, friends and families watch the young men they become lose confidence, status or opportunity.
Historical injustice matters where its consequences remain, but historical guilt is not hereditary. A struggling seventeen-year-old is not privileged because men held more power a century ago.
The answer to Reform is not to imitate Reform. It is to remove the conditions that make Reform persuasive by applying liberal principles consistently. If girls are underrepresented in physics, we ask what barriers discourage them. If boys fall behind, we must bring the same curiosity, empathy and determination.
But education is only one part of the problem. The same failure appears in our political strategy. Liberal Democrat campaigning has been ruthlessly selective. We invest where we can win, delivering impressive parliamentary results. But poorer, post-industrial and working-class communities receive little sustained attention when they are not currently winnable. Reform arrives, tells them Westminster has forgotten them, and finds an audience ready to believe it.
We have to stop treating communities where Reform is growing as electorally disposable simply because we cannot win them next Thursday. That does not mean copying Reform’s rhetoric, accepting its diagnosis or outbidding it on anger. It means becoming visible, useful and credible again in lives we have allowed ourselves to stop seeing.
Boys are victims of gender inequality too. The boys we fail become young men who are structurally disadvantaged in parts of British society. Their fear, failure and anger do not become illegitimate because of history. Liberal Democrats have to say that clearly and act as though we mean it. Otherwise Reform keeps one of its strongest weapons: the claim that only it sees people whom the political mainstream ignores.
Every time we refuse to see them, we hand Nigel Farage a key to Number 10.
* Michal Simon is a Liberal Democrat member in Southampton and an independent researcher working on political systems, social trust and institutional design.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
David Goodhart, arithmetic and our Quotation of the Day
How Home Secretaries change immigration rules without telling Parliament
The wrong bridge - lost Reform UK in blunder
Christine Jardine "will not be Lib Dem candidate" at next election
Big Tall Tim
James Brough
Amanda Clark
Julian Brookes
Institute of Urban T
22 Comments
Very good article education and skills training used to be one of our strong points .time to start listening and delivering for those left behind by the other parties .
Reform is winning because too much of British politics has spent years telling people not to trust their own eyes.
That has to stop.
Our advantage as liberals is brutally simple: we do not have to lie to protect a doctrine. If a policy stops working, we can change it. If the facts change, we can change our answer. Our values survive.
So stop treating public anger as a communications problem. Start treating it as evidence.
Listen. Check. Admit when people are right. Change what is failing.
And then go after those who feed on that anger with lies.
Reform should not own public fury. We should.
@ Michal Simon
“ Reform should not own public fury. We should”
Really? Surely it depends on what is causing the fury, does it not?
For example, the sight of hundreds of young men disembarking in Portsmouth having paid criminal gangs thousands of pound to get them to the UK causes fury. We do not own this fury because our policy would not stop them coming – it would just allow them to travel to the UK using safer and less expensive means. Reform has a plan that would return them to France so they are gaining the support of those who object to illegal immigration into the UK. We can’t compete with that.
Very good points
@Jana
“the sight of hundreds of young men disembarking in Portsmouth having paid criminal gangs thousands of pound to get them to the UK causes fury. We do not own this fury because our policy would not stop them coming – it would just allow them to travel to the UK using safer and less expensive means.”
So shouldn’t the policy be to go after the criminal gangs?
@Jana
I think you are confusing the symptom with the cause.
Refugees are victims of anger that should be directed at those who govern us. In Portsmouth, 4.9% of 18–24-year-olds are currently on the claimant count, and the city itself reports around 6% of young people as NEET. In a Youth Cabinet survey, 67% of young people who wanted part-time work said they had been unable to find it.
Then those same people look at a state that has failed for well over a decade to build an asylum system that actually works. Neither the right nor the left has fixed it.
The system should protect those who need protection. It should decide quickly who has the right to stay and who does not. And it should not allow people to stroll out of prison when they are exactly the people the state is supposed to protect the public from.
Of course people are furious.
But the problem is not the refugee stepping off the boat. The problem is a state that cannot give its young people prospects, cannot control its asylum system, and sometimes cannot even control its own prisons.
That is what I meant: own the anger, not Reform’s rhetoric.
Racism — no. State responsibility — yes.
Reform are not winning & have not been winning for nearly a Year.
11 Months ago Reform were Polling in a range of 29% to 36%, currently they Poll between 20% & 27%, a Fall of 9% .
If we look at Council By-elections, where Reform has stood before their Vote share has mostly gone down.
The scenes in Dover & Portsmouth are a sign of The Far Rights weakness, as they lose hope of winning via The Ballot Box they revert to their traditional methods of Violence & Intimidation.
@Poul Barker
Four months ago Reform won the English local elections: 26% projected national vote share against 16% for the Lib Dems, and 1,453 councillors against 844. And according to Ipsos, since September Reform has fallen from 34% to 25% — but the Lib Dems have fallen too, from 12% to 9%. So how much of Reform’s nine-point loss have we gained? Zero.
At the party conference in Brighton, there will be a fringe meeting about the problems of men and boys. 1345 on Monday 21 September.
There is a brief report about the fringe in Bournemouth last year on this subject on my website page at the link https://www.mohammedamin.com/Politics/Men-and-Boys-2025-09-23.html
Isn’t it interesting that when many are trying to improve the position of women and girls, we suddenly have a problem for men and boys? Forgive the cynic in me but could it just be the patriarchy trying to reassert itself? Focussing on men and boys will necessarily reduce the focus on women and girls.
Many of us brought up in the fifties have had to adjust our thinking to incorporate equality between men and women and have done so willingly.
Isn’t that exactly what Andrew Tate and his ilk want? To put women back in their box and to make men and boys top dog again?
“The problem is a state that cannot give its young people prospects”…..
The state doesn’t owe anybody a living.
If a Nigerian care worker in her early 20’s can travel 4000 miles and reside in a HMO in a UK town – what’s wrong with a neet doing it ..
We all can’t be poets & artists…Working in the care sector or hospitality sector is a start – an opportunity….Millions don’t have the luxury in picking or choosing what they want to do.
Apparently, a “stupid lower-class man” isn’t quite deserving of the empathy of an enlightened liberals. A Nigerian girl simply makes a much better poster.
My apologies. I still haven’t fully mastered the class system — or the approved distribution of compassion and contempt.
For me, everyone is equal. It’s a shame that, for you, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
What you have mastered is some pseudo 60s sociology BS. We’ve had far too many schools, colleges, universities, churning out youngsters totally unfit for the world of work.
@Chloe
I absolutely love agreeing with you on this. And this is explicitly part of the argument in my first article.
The education system has failed a huge part of society. The “boys from Portsmouth” have not been taught properly. They have not been given the competencies they need for work and, more broadly, to face the demands of reality.
If we want to do politics, the state has to accept responsibility for that. On exactly the same principle that we do not say to a victim of domestic abuse, “then why don’t you just leave?”. Educational neglect is, after all, a form of harm to a child.
Excellent article. Totally captures how Reform have been winning because progressives haven’t been listening to ordinary people.
One point; @Michal you say, But the problem is not the refugee stepping off the boat. The problem is a state that cannot give its young people prospects I’d argue the problem is both. It’s perfectly obvious that people crossing in small boats are trying to enter the UK illegally from a safe country (France) and are therefore no longer directly fleeing persecution (even if some of them were doing so at an earlier point in their journeys), and liberals’ failure to acknowledge that is one of the factors that drives ordinary voters to Reform. But equally you’re correct that our failure to provide opportunities for work and to make a decent living to UK citizens is also a big factor. It’s not a one-or-the-other thing.
@Chloe. I think you’re right to say that the state doesn’t owe anyone a living. However, if society is to function effectively, then we do need to make sure that as a society, we offer everyone the chance to earn a living, if they are willing to do so. And the state has to be the final guarantor that we do that.
Excellent thought provoking article
This is an excellent article. Thanks.
‘Men held more power a century ago.’ Sorry, men still hold more power. This can still be the case whilst we also see the less bright boys as a problem which we don’t tackle it properly.
I’m not seeing many solutions here…….
When I went to university about 5-6% of the population did so. I studied economics. After 4 years at 2 universities, I found there was little or no work in my field. I had, however, developed the ability to think and, eventually I went into secondary teaching for 13 years. I could have complained that the government wasn’t providing for me, but instead I found an alternative to my original plan.
Now, almost 50% go to university. That has necessitated a huge expansion in the university sector and the development of lots of new courses. I know, from 10 years as a university teacher, that many students don’t turn up for lectures and seminars and that at least some of them are not suited to an academic environment. The myth has been cultivated that possession of a degree will ensure a good job in your chosen field. It is no more true now than in 1972. I had 3 or 4 distinct careers and a period of totally insecure employment, but I persisted and got through to retirement with very little unemployment.
Two things are needed. The first is a willingness amongst graduates to take a job, even if it isn’t what they originally wanted and to seek an alternative career path.
Secondly, the government’s role is to ensure that a wider variety of choice exists so that 16 or 18 year olds can choose between practical skills, like apprenticeships or university and that both are equally valued.
Over the last 40 years we have sold off almost everything that is not nailed down including most of our manufacturing industries.
As a result young men unqualified to work in the professions or the public sector have little or no stake in society.
There is an article of mine on this website “The UK’s takeover laws and short-termism” of 26 August 2014.
Excellent article, totally agree with your observations, and for once disagree with Mick Taylor, when he states that “Focussing on men and boys will necessarily reduce the focus on women and girls.”
I don’t believe this is a zero sum game. The OP is asking that we address a clear problem of inequality, that applies not to all boys, but a subset who need help.
We also need to find our way back into the communities that we have abandoned. Easier said than done of course.
Completely agree with this article and comments from Simon, John and Nigel. Some years ago we decided that as a progressive party of the left we should focus on those groups deserving of our compassion and empathy. White working class boys and men were not among those groups. As liberals we should remember that the individual is the building block of society and all individuals are equally important. And now we see gangs of white working class men on our streets and we wring our hands in horror. Go figure, as they say.