When imagining a member of Reform UK, we might conjure up a middle-aged man from the shires wearing mustard-coloured chinos and a tweed jacket.
However, a small, determined – and they claim growing – number of British Jews are throwing their lot in with Nigel Farage’s new and surging right-wing party in the effort to break Labour and the Conservatives’ domination of mainstream politics.
The upstarts won a whopping four million votes – just over 14 per cent of the total number cast – at the general election but owing to the UK’s first past-the-post electoral system, that only translated into five MPs.
Recent opinion polls have suggested that around one in five Brits now back Reform UK. Their presence in Westminster is proving both a challenge – and a headache – for the established parties.
Rael Braverman, husband of Britain's former Home Secretary Suella Braverman (Credit: JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Rael Braverman, husband of former home secretary Suella, grabbed headlines when he announced he was ditching the Conservatives to join Farage. “Incompetence and failure to deliver have betrayed the trust of the British people”, he said of the Tories.
Other Jewish members of Reform UK joined him in attacking the Board of Deputies’ impartiality, claiming that the leadership is “affiliated with the Jewish Labour Movement, casting doubt on the objectivity of their critique” of their party.
One person who certainly doesn’t fit most peoples’ ideas about a Reform UK typecast is Joshua Pearl, a 25-year-old Orthodox Jew, trainee solicitor and part-time teacher at Kisharon special needs school, who stood for the party in Hendon at the last general election.
Joshua Pearl (Image: X)
“I’m a young person and I’m extremely demoralised by the fact that I’m not going to be able to afford a house. It’s because we have too many people for the housing supply that exists, and this is almost entirely due to mass immigration. Reform UK’s policy is to end mass immigration”, he says.
Given the tight margins on election day in Hendon, won by Labour’s David Pinto-Duschinsky from the Conservatives by just 15 votes, it is likely that Pearl helped contribute to the Tory defeat.
He is unapologetic about this: “You can’t destroy both parties in one go. You have to you have to do it incrementally, step by step. You first have to destroy the party that is pretending to be the right-wing party”.
Barnet councillor Mark Shooter is Reform UK’s first London councillor and their first Jewish one.
Mark Shooter (right) with Reform UK member of the London Assembly at a Christmas party (Image: Mark Shooter).
The 53-year-old former mayor of the north London borough, and former Hasmonean student, boasts that they will aim to field 63 candidates in Barnet for next year’s council elections.
“There is opportunity in every electoral ward,” Shooter claims, saying that the party was also “winning over support from Labour voters” because of the government’s decision to means test the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and the Labour Party’s record in charge of Barnet council.
A Tory member for 15 years, Shooter campaigned against Pearl and only joined Reform UK in December last year.
Defecting was a difficult decision for him, but not something he regrets. “There are a lot of voters who want change, and we can tap into their desires in a way the other parties can’t do. The Conservatives had 14 years in power and people feel their lives haven’t improved and Labour have started on the wrong foot.”
At the general election, Reform UK refused to withdraw support for candidates who claimed that the UK should have stayed neutral during the Second World War and who compared Covid lockdowns with the Holocaust.
Shooter says that since he joined Reform vetting procedures had toughened and that at the party’s Christmas party the largest cheer in the room went to the party’s sole London Assembly member, Alex Wilson “when he spoke out against antisemitism in the capital”.
Pearl is more flippant about the reported comments. “I don’t care about that at all… the point of political party is not to agree on every ideological point.”
Challenged that had both candidates been successful and he had been elected, he could have ended up sitting in parliament alongside someone who minimised the Holocaust, he says: “I don’t think anyone minimised the Holocaust.
"I think what they may have done is over-exaggerate the Covid lockdowns, that there’s a difference between the two.”
The disciplinary record of another party was a contributing factor to Gary Mond, chairman of the National Jewish Assembly, joining Reform UK.
Gary Mond (Photo: JNA)
The Conservative Party’s failure to discipline former minister Alan Duncan following claims that he used antisemitic tropes in a radio interview was “the final straw” for him resigning after 47 years of membership – including standing as a parliamentary candidate in 1987 and 1992.
Although he accepts that the reports about Reform’s candidates were “off-putting”, Mond, a former Board of Deputies Senior Vice President says “all parties have similar problems, other parties had problems of different nature.”
“At the time the general election [Reform UK was] a new party. It was bound to have a few problem issues” but said he was a “big fan” of the party’s new chairman Zia Yusuf, who has spoken about professionalising the party, “I think that you’ll find that in future elections this, these problems will not recur”, Mond claims.
Will the right-wing party succeed in winning over Jewish voters?
“A lot of our strongest supporters were Jewish people”, says Darren Selkus, a 54-year-old former soldier and businessman, who stood for the party in Hertsmere at the general election, but acknowledges that overall “it was a real mixed bunch”.
Part of the struggle has been getting recognition.
“Most people didn’t know who we were”, he says, “when I was at the count of the May 2023 council elections [in Hertsmere], and a rabbi came up to me and he saw my Reform badge and said, ‘Oh, Reform, which synagogue are you?’ And I’m like, no, no, it’s a political party.”
He only managed two per cent of the vote in that election – 53 votes – something he admitted was “demoralising”.
But in 2024, when he stood for Parliament against then deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and Labour’s Gogglebox star Josh Tapper, he was able to secure 6,584 votes – just shy of 14 per cent.
What he believes helped win some communal support was his strong opposition to pro-Palestine marches in the capital: “I was campaigning on stopping the antisemitic marches going on in London. I just thought, what was happening on our streets was terrible”.
Pearl also believes increased antisemitism could see support for Reform UK rise among visibly Orthodox Jews: “In Stamford Hill, I’ve got friends who live over there, and who feel quite uncomfortable a lot of the time when there’s anti-Jewish incidents that take place from certain groups, and it can be quite scary.
He continues: “If you’ve got a party that says we’re going to reduce this problem, going to reduce the numbers coming in from all places, then that’s obviously going to appeal to them.”
Headlines early this week were dominated with the high-profile fall out between Elon Musk and Nigel Farage.
Farage said he would not welcome Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, into his party. Musk later called for Farage to be replaced as leader.
Mond says that Farage’s decision to continue to refuse Robinson membership showed that “he’s a man of principle”.
He adds: “He’s made it very, very clear he doesn’t want anything to do with Tommy Robinson, and I think he’s absolutely right”.
Selkus shares this view: “I 100 per cent agree with Nigel standing up and saying we don’t want any Tommy Robinson anywhere near our party. I’m a bit amazed that Elon Musk has taken this different stance.”
