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.