Talk:Reform UK

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Reform is not far right. They are centre right to right wing. Oldfoxy33 (talk) 22:05, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

 Not done: Please see the discussion literally at the top of the page. Alpha Beta Delta Lambda (talk) 22:29, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

it clearly says on the wiki

Right wing - ar right

please do not gaslight me Oldfoxy33 (talk) 22:36, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

far* Oldfoxy33 (talk) 22:37, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Should there be a separate article for the Brexit Party as a party in the past tense. They may have a direct institutional link to Reform UK, but they were set up for a specific purpose, with a narrower focus and have their own story arc. JASpencer (talk) 06:01, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Calling it a direct institutional link seems to minimise the connection to me. It is the same party, just with a name change! Lots of other political parties have name changes and long histories during which they have focused on different things, but we include them in one article. Bondegezou (talk) 11:24, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

But it was a very different stage and different environment. Brexit was a hard Eurosceptic party first and the populism came afterwards. Reform it's about populism with Euroscepticism hardly getting a look in, with the no longer as hot exception of the ECHR. JASpencer (talk) 21:09, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

The Greens are pro-Europe now, but used to favour leaving the EU, but we don't split their article into two. The Conservative Party has very different views today compared to 1834, but we haven't split their article.

It's the same party. If their views have shifted, we can describe that in the article. That said, the claim that the populism came afterwards would need a citation. As far as I can see, they were always populist. Bondegezou (talk) 10:24, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

It would have made sense to have a separate entry for the Ecology Party, or the Labour Representation Comittee. JASpencer (talk) 11:04, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

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Still disgusting and bias how you guys still have reform as right wing to far right?!? especially when restore exists and u guys list them as the exact same thing. Even tho restore wants re migration and reform doesnt

Stop being Bias and remove the far right tag!!! Oldfoxy33 (talk) 09:54, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

 Not done for now: please establish a consensus for this alteration before posting an edit request. — Czello ^(music) 10:01, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

It is done. Im looking at the Reform UK wiki right now and it says

"Political position

Right-wing to far-right

So idk why you are lying Oldfoxy33 (talk) 10:07, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

You have misread what I said. I'm saying you need to get a consensus for your change. — Czello ^(music) 19:09, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree referring to Reform UK as “right wing to far right” is incorrect.. but a consensus has to be agreed on here, even if that consensus is wrong and biased. Now the “far right” label is in the lead I’m afraid that’s probably how it’s going to stay. ~2026-19602-0 (talk) 20:39, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

So, you think that just because a new political party called Restore Britain has been established, that Wikipedia needs to reassess Reform's political position?

Surely, both can occupy the same political space? Notably, Restore Britain's leader - Rupert Lowe, was previously an MP in Reform UK, but was suspended by the party in March 2025.

There does seem to be quite a lot of academic authors recently describing Reform UK as a 'Far-right' party, so I think Hitchens's Razor applies, when it comes to claims that they are a more moderate political party:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor A744774 (talk) 00:35, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I notice some protesting is still popping up on this talk page about the new-ish decision to describe Reform UK as "right-wing to far-right". I participated briefly in this RfC and I think the explanation given for this change in the consensus is pretty reasonable.

Anyway, I was on the page for La France Insoumise just earlier and I noticed that they have a CREF alongside their description of LFI as "left-wing to far-left", with various summaries later expanded on in the 'Ideology and political programme' section that briefly outlines the description, the party's official stance, the way the terms are used by the media and other political figures, and the stance of political scientists. Notably, I thought it was interesting that the clarification included "Political scientists prefer the label 'radical left' [for LFI].", which overlapped with quite a large part of the RfC - as well as scholars already listed on the Reform page, such as Tim Bale - and was nodded to in the eventual consensus, which stated that "The only sensible alternative [to describing Reform as 'far-right'] is 'radical right'."

Thus I wonder if it would be helpful to use the LFI example and integrate a CREF explaining the nuances of this characterisation in a few short lines, which should hopefully ward off future edit wars and/or talk page protestations. If this has already been discussed as part of the very long RfC then I apologise for missing it, but I'm curious what you all think of this! Howtomedia72 (talk) 17:19, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I think that "radical right", that as we've seen is the most used label among scholars (especially counting only the papers specifically about Reform's political position, see Talk:Reform_UK/Source_review#Synthesis), should absolutely find a place in the infobox. At least in a footnote (we would need a tertiary source that talks about the consensus among scholars on this matter though, I think I found one as I was researching but I don't remember anymore which it was), but I think that we could also write something as "right / radical right / far-right". I know that "right to far-right" is the standard here on en.wiki for this kind of parties, but I think that it's slightly misleading, since it could be read as if the party has both right-wing and far-right tendencies, whereas the different labels derive only from disagreements among RS. At the very least I'd add the most important sources for each label to the infobox in order to make it clear that it's a classification derived from sources and not made up by us. --Friniate ✉ 14:51, 22 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree the current en.wiki framework of "x to y" doesn't quite tell the full story, thus a footnote (which I unhelpfully referred to as a CREF for some reason rather than just a footnote, haha) seems best to not to disrupt the efforts of the RfC to achieve the "right-wing to far-right" consensus while also furthering helpful information to explain that classification, adding the political science element and potentially other nuance.

As for a source, I've done a quick scan of the synthesis table and the closest match that I think I've found is that of Turnbull-Dugarte et al. (2025), which states that their characterisation of Reform as radical right was "congruent" with consensuses already noted from both Rooduijn et al. (2024), and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey cited in Hooghe et al. (2024), with each of these four projects having a great handful of political scientist authors to their name. As Turnbull-Dugarte's citation was based on these existing databases, themselves based on existing evidence and research, I think this could be an example - albeit an unconventional one - of tertiary referencing. Also, Hayton (2025) - which is specifically about Reform's position - states that radical right is the "most sensibl[e] classifi[cation]" for Reform when writers are concerned with "using political science terminology"; this is in agreement with sources such as Bale (2024) who reflect that it's usually the media rather than political scientists who get caught up in the "boo-word"-ism of the term 'far-right' as well as the limitations of simply just 'right-wing'.

No clue how to smush any combination of those sources together or none, but leading from the LFI example perhaps a hypothetical footnote could read something like: The party has been described as right-wing as well as far-right.[source: Bale] Political scientists prefer the term "radical right" as a democratic subset of the far-right movement.[sources: Turnbull-Dugarte et al, Hayton]. That not only removes the nuance of what a "right-wing to far-right" movement actually means in Reform's case - as you pointed out, Friniate - but expands on the RfC by including information on the emerging 'radical right' definition as per scholarly material and leading from similar examples elsewhere on Wikipedia. Howtomedia72 (talk) 21:01, 22 March 2026 (UTC)