Broken Systems, Angry Voters: How the Welfare State’s Failures Fuel Reform UK’s Rise

The recent surge of Reform UK in local elections has raised alarms across the political spectrum. Once dismissed as a fringe movement, Reform is now winning council seats and polling competitively against both major parties in working-class areas. Their appeal, however, is not grounded in detailed policy proposals, but in emotional clarity: a sense of grievance, betrayal, and promise of restoration. While commentators focus on immigration rhetoric or anti-establishment anger, one of the deeper, under-examined causes of Reform’s rise is the systemic failure of the UK welfare state. This article argues that a welfare model built on mistrust, stigma, and surveillance has not only failed its users—it has created the conditions in which populist, racially-coded politics can thrive.

Dependency by Design: How the System Manufactures Mistrust

The UK welfare system has long moralised poverty. From the Poor Laws to the Beveridge Report, assistance has been tethered to notions of deservingness and shame. This logic intensified under New Labour, whose emphasis on workfare and conditionality was extended further by austerity governments post-2010. Services like Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and Jobcentre Plus are structured around assessments, sanctions, and digital surveillance. They treat claimants not as citizens, but as risks to be managed. The bureaucratic burden—long forms, digital portals, rigid appointments—functions as a barrier to support, not a bridge.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) helps us understand this process as one of symbolic violence: structural inequality becomes internalised, and service users come to believe they are the problem. Welfare systems don’t just provide material support; they communicate who is valued and who is not. In the UK, users are taught to mask agency, perform dysfunction, and plead for credibility. Social workers are often caught in the middle—tasked with building empowering relationships inside systems fundamentally structured around suspicion.

Even the language of the welfare state reinforces these hierarchies. The term “service user”, a widely approved term in social care and support sectors, formalises the idea that those who rely on public assistance are passive consumers, rather than active citizens or rights-holders. It subtly implies transactional dependency, as though help is something extracted from a reluctant provider. This terminology distances professionals from the people they support, recasting individuals not as participants in a shared social contract, but as burdens upon it. In doing so, it legitimises bureaucratic gatekeeping and reinforces the very mistrust that fuels disconnection between state and society.

The narrative of the "scrounger" has embedded itself so deeply in political discourse that even progressive policies are couched in cautionary language about misuse or dependency. Austerity-era politics have normalised this outlook: every claim becomes suspect, every claimant must be surveilled. As a result, the welfare state has shifted from being a vehicle of redistribution to an apparatus of conditionality, moral judgment, and emotional policing.

Populist Fuel: From Disillusionment to Mobilisation

It is within this ideological terrain that Reform UK has flourished. They do not offer detailed alternatives to Universal Credit or PIP. Instead, they name the rot: broken systems, abandoned communities, and the empty promises of centrist politics. This emotional clarity—regardless of its factual content—resonates. It speaks to people who have stood in queues, been rejected for support, or waited months for appeals. Where Labour is cautious and the Conservatives contradictory, Reform is blunt.

The genius of populism lies in its ability to translate systemic failure into cultural grievance. Reform tells a story of betrayal: of hard-working Britons left behind, of systems gamed by others, of a country in decline. These narratives strike deepest in places where the impact of austerity is most visible—coastal towns like Blackpool, where one in three children live in poverty, or in ex-industrial towns like Hartlepool, where job centre closures and long-term unemployment have hollowed out economic opportunity.

According to IPPR North, public spending per person is still over £1,000 higher in London than in the North East, despite consistent pledges of ‘levelling up.’ In such communities, the language of abandonment isn’t just emotional—it’s statistical. Local bus routes vanish, councils close libraries and youth centres, and services become harder to access. These material absences accumulate into a cultural one: people feel unheard, overlooked, and increasingly sceptical that established parties understand, let alone represent, their reality.

And while mainstream parties wring their hands about tone or timing, Reform speaks with conviction. In doing so, they fill the void left by years of disillusionment and political inertia. Their presence in these forgotten geographies is a form of recognition—however crude or dangerous their solutions may be.

This is not just about policies. It is about presence. In a democracy increasingly mediated through emotion, being seen and heard can be more powerful than being helped.

Racial Scapegoating: When Class Rage Has No Language

But naming what is broken is not the same as curing it. Reform UK has capitalised on welfare disillusionment by offering a racialised explanation for decline. In communities long abandoned by investment or services, the absence of structural narratives breeds resentment. When politicians fail to explain inequality as a product of policy, people turn to cultural blame.

This is not a new dynamic. As Stuart Hall (1978) warned in "Policing the Crisis," moments of economic strain are often accompanied by moral panics that scapegoat migrants, youth, or the poor. Similarly, Imogen Tyler (2020) argues that welfare stigma is racialised and gendered, constructing moral hierarchies of deservingness. Reform reproduces this logic with precision: they translate class grievance into racial anxiety, offering migrants and minorities as the reason public services are strained.

It is no coincidence that Reform’s talking points regularly invoke immigration, multiculturalism, and national identity. By reframing economic insecurity as cultural dispossession, they obscure the real culprits: austerity, deregulation, and decades of policy failure. That some of Reform’s supporters are themselves welfare claimants is not a contradiction. It is a feature of systems that offer no structural language for justice. When class is erased from political discourse, race steps in to fill the explanatory gap.

This form of racial scapegoating is particularly insidious because it offers false clarity. It transforms abstract, technocratic failures into visible enemies. And it allows political actors to profit from pain without offering solutions. In this sense, the rise of Reform is not an anomaly—it is a symptom of political systems that have outsourced their responsibilities while retaining their power.

A Global Drift: Populism and the Politics of Abandonment

The rise of Reform UK cannot be viewed in isolation. Across Europe and beyond, populist movements have surged by exploiting the failures of the state to offer protection, dignity, or responsiveness. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has translated economic insecurity and disillusionment with mainstream parties into a nationalist, anti-immigrant platform. Despite fierce resistance, her support continues to grow, particularly among younger voters and those in regions hardest hit by deindustrialisation.

Germany has seen the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party that initially gained traction on Euro-scepticism but has increasingly appealed to voters in former East German states where public services are underfunded and unemployment remains high. In both contexts, the political establishment has struggled to respond not only because of policy failure, but because of an unwillingness to name the emotional and structural abandonment that underpins voter alienation.

For many young people, disillusionment with politics is not apathy—it’s the exhaustion of hope.

In the United States, Donald Trump’s ascent was similarly rooted in a promise to restore dignity and visibility to voters who felt forgotten. What makes the U.S. case distinct is how Trump personality has gained strong support both from the most economically marginalised and the ultra-wealthy. Rural communities, veterans, and working-class white voters gravitated to his anti-elite messaging, particularly in regions hollowed out by automation and drug epidemics. While race and religion play a stronger cultural role in U.S. populism, the core dynamic remains consistent: a state that speaks of opportunity while delivering austerity creates space for populists who trade in grievance, identity, and simplified solutions.

These global parallels show that the UK is not unique in its vulnerability to reactionary politics. What differs is the form that these movements take, shaped by local histories and institutional legacies. But the lesson is clear: where systems fail to meet basic expectations of support, people will seek not only change—but retribution.

Institutional Paralysis: Reform Is Feared, Not Faced

It is also worth acknowledging how both the Conservative and Labour parties have responded to Reform's rise—not by addressing its structural causes, but by emulating elements of its platform. In recent years, both parties have hardened their rhetoric on immigration, echoed scepticism about health system reform, and framed benefit claimants as a problem to manage rather than people to support. This is not coincidence—it is strategy. Rather than take on the mammoth task of reforming broken departments or redistributing resources to the most deprived regions, both major parties have chosen to fight populism on its own terrain. The result is that Reform remains in the spotlight, dictating the conversation, while the real drivers of its support—poor housing, unresponsive services, generational neglect—go unaddressed.

Rather than challenge the populist narrative, the major parties are echoing it—allowing Reform to set the terms of debate.

This is not about sympathising with populism. It is about acknowledging the pain that enables it. Unless mainstream parties confront the conditions that drive disillusionment they will continue to play catch-up, chasing a narrative set by those they claim to oppose.

These systemic cracks have also fuelled a profound sense of generational disillusionment. For younger people in economically deprived regions—many of whom have grown up during a decade of austerity—deteriorating services, unaffordable housing, and precarious work are not anomalies but the norm. According to the Resolution Foundation, millennials in the UK are the first generation to earn less than their parents, adjusting for inflation. Many under-30s have never known a time when services like youth centres, libraries, or affordable bus routes were stable parts of daily life. Their disengagement from traditional politics is not rooted in apathy, but in the exhaustion of hope.

Even within urban centres, inequality has become increasingly hyper-local. The traditional idea of a “postcode lottery” no longer holds as securely. Instead, we see extreme disparities within cities: London boroughs like Kensington and Chelsea contain both some of the wealthiest and most deprived neighbourhoods in the country. In Manchester, high-rise luxury developments stand in stark contrast to struggling estates within walking distance. This proximity intensifies resentment. When inequality is visible on your doorstep, the failure of systems is no longer abstract—it’s undeniable.

This political moment has not emerged simply "out of the blue." The fractures in the UK’s welfare state, justice system, education infrastructure, and NHS have long been documented, debated, and decried. And yet, even as the evidence mounts and the anger intensifies, little changes. Ministers spar across the floor of Parliament over abstract ideas of reform, while civil servants murmur in Whitehall corridors about the lack of coherent vision. What unites them—often quietly—is an unwillingness to radically transform the departments most in need: the Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Department of Health and Social Care, the NHS, the Department for Education, and the criminal justice system. These are the engines of state legitimacy, and the areas where reform, if done properly, could change the course of the country.

But reform does not come easy. Politicians fear public backlash—media hysteria, accusations of overspending, union resistance, or electoral punishment. The irony, of course, is that the protests outside Parliament and the interviews with voters almost always centre around these very departments. People are not afraid of change. They are afraid of being left to rot in systems that no longer work.

We do not lack evidence. We lack political courage. And unless that courage is found—unless someone is willing to say that the system itself is the problem—the gap Reform has filled will only widen. If parties are serious about challenging populism, they must confront the institutions most in need of reinvention.

And the longer these institutions continue to break families, erode trust, and degrade everyday life, the stronger parties like Reform become. They have already begun to shape the national conversation. Nigel Farage has already done this before—UKIP dragged the entire political centre toward Brexit. Reform threatens to do the same on welfare, identity, and belonging.

Deliver, Don’t Dismiss

Reform UK’s rise is not an aberration—it is a consequence. It reflects the failure of political parties to deliver material dignity to those left behind. It reveals the limits of branding politics, where moral superiority replaces substantive change. And it shows the cost of abandoning structural analysis in favour of emotional narratives.

The task ahead is not to simply fact-check Reform voters, nor to mimic Reform’s bluntness. It is to build a political alternative rooted in delivery. That means transforming welfare systems into platforms of empowerment, not punishment. It means improving local quality of life by allocating proper funding to public services. It means changing the way we tackle crime to one of intervention and effective rehabilitation. And it means calling out racial scapegoating not just as prejudice, but as political cowardice.

Unless someone is willing to say the system itself is the problem, the gap Reform has filled will only widen.

To stop the populist drift, we need more than reassurance. We need delivery. That means rebuilding welfare systems around trust and dignity, rejecting racial scapegoating, and naming the structural causes of economic and social pain. Because if mainstream politics cannot speak to that pain, someone else will.