Has Mumsnet fallen for Farage? Labour is losing Middle England

What is Nigel Farage’s favourite biscuit? When Gordon Brown was asked this in a Mumsnet Q&A in 2009, he didn’t answer, despite being asked at least 12 times, prompting mockery for his awkward handling of a playful encounter. “Biscuitgate” became one of only three memorable Gordon Brown communications moments: the other two being 2000’s “Boom and bust is at an end” (ahahaha), and the still-resonant “Bigotgate” in 2010, when Brown dismissed the immigration-related query of voter Gillian Duffy, on a hot mic, as “just some bigoted woman”. 

Biscuits, bigots, and boom and bust also provide the backdrop for the latest politics-related Mumsnet storm in a teacup: news that a voting intention poll on the site revealed, for the first time ever, a higher share of Mumsnetters intending to vote Reform than Labour. The poll itself is un-weighted, but it’s culturally significant: ever since 2010 was billed as the “Mumsnet Election”, the site has served journalists as a barometer for political sentiment among the nation’s mothers. With good reason, too: for example the Times reports that analysis of Mumsnet discussions correctly predicted that Britain would vote to leave the EU in 2016. 

So are the nation’s mums really swinging behind Reform? No: it’s more that they have declared a pox on Keir Starmer. There is a story here, but it’s more about three fractures captured all those years ago, in Brown’s three utterances: cracks that ran through all of British politics, and that have only widened since. It is not about Reform’s triumph, but the collapse of the entire mainstream political consensus, in both “centre-Left” and centre-Right” flavours.  

Founded in 2000, Mumsnet is a classic online forum, aimed (as the name suggests) at mothers. It has millions of users, mostly British, predominantly between 24 and 45 and with (according to The Times) around a third living in London and the South-East. Over the years, I’ve spent many happy hours scrolling and debating there: the culture mixes lively, often very funny mum-chat with a piquant Middle England undertone of bourgeois one-upmanship. Whether in the rivalry with the “huns” (ie more working-class mums) who supposedly prefer Netmums, or the long-running forum joke about “nice ham” (you probably had to be there), the site captures both a genuine concern for the welfare of children and the wider social fabric, with a supportive space for sharing that mild feeling of satisfaction that comes with not needing, in every shopping decision, to choose the very cheapest. 

None of this describes your classic keyboard warrior type. The only reason someone might imagine this particular community to be a hotbed of Right-wing sentiment is that Mumsnet is a key platform for gender-critical feminism. Several of the campaign groups that successfully opposed the Tories’ daft “gender-self-ID” legislation in the 2010s spun out of forum debates there, aided by the founders’ commitment to civil, open debate. 

But unless one becomes “far Right” merely by knowing biology is real, that tells us little about Mumsnetters’ overall politics. And in all the time I’ve spent there, this has always been broadly social-democratic, pro-welfare, and pro-family. As you might expect from ordinary people who are not politics junkies, the issues that exercise Mumsnetters tend to be retail: healthcare, tax and benefit policy, schools, and the cost of living — plus, latterly, a preference for politicians who acknowledge that sex dimorphism exists. 

This makes it all the more notable that Labour are now trailing Reform here, of all places. Should we take this to mean that even the normie mums of Britain are now hanging flags from motorway bridges? I don’t think so. What evidence there is of a tilt to the Right is ambivalent at best: discussion threads on Reform over the last year don’t appear to skew very strongly in Farage’s favour, even on his strongest topic, immigration. The normie mums of Middle England haven’t suddenly discovered a deep love for Nigel Farage. Many still hate and blame him for Brexit. A number of posters believe he wants to ban abortion. And while I couldn’t find a single post expressing faith in Farage’s theoretical ability to form a competent national government, I found several expressing practical disappointment at the performance of their existing Reform-led council.

The Mumsnet Reform surge isn’t even all that much of a surge, comparatively speaking: from 14% in 2024, to 20% recently. By far the largest category of respondents were the “Don’t know/Wouldn’t vote” group, at 29%. In other words: there are far more politically homeless Mumsnetters than Faragist ones. 

The more significant story, though, is the fall in support for the Labour Party. Labour’s share of the poll fell from 41% in 2024 to 18%. Among a demographic staunchly supportive of social welfare, this is damning. Presumably a few have broken for Reform, bumping that 14% up to 20%; but the biggest beneficiary is “Don’t know”, rising by 20%. In other words, a proportion greater than Farage’s entire poll share has abandoned Labour, mostly for political homelessness. 

Why? It’s never one thing, but you could sum this up in terms of Gordon Brown’s: boom and bust, bigots, and biscuits. Or, more prosaically: it’s partly the economy, partly immigration and the related politics of scarcity, and partly how the internet has shredded politics.

The first two issues, migration and the economy, are of course connected, a fact reflected in Mumsnet debate. It’s also linked to the New Labour of Blair and Brown, who, for ideological reasons, were committed to mass migration from the get-go. But these issues only began to grow really fraught after Brown’s “end to boom and bust” climaxed with the biggest bust of all, then a colossal bail-out to the bankers who caused it and a decade of austerity courtesy of the other half of the “sensible centrist” consensus. 

Since then, Britain spent 15 years enjoying the Tory version of that approach: strangling infrastructure investment, while juicing asset owners and big employers with financial and human quantitative easing. For everyone else, the result has been frozen or downgraded living-standards, crumbling facilities, salami-sliced services. At the same time, and relatedly, social cohesion is faltering. Against this backdrop, the still-high migration levels we’re told are required to keep the engine running has ceased to feel like the exciting Blair-era experiment in openness, and more like a bitter one in resource competition.

Mumsnetters are, in general, socially-minded and comparatively reluctant to blame migrants for this unhappy state of affairs. This is compounded by the fact that (in part, again, thanks to Blair and Brown), in modern Britain, hostility to outsiders is strongly and negatively class-coded. It is, implicitly, vulgar to be anything but maximally cosmopolitan. But if there’s a class-inflected taboo against coming across as nasty and “gammon”, chances are that Mumsnetters are also the ones doing the weekly shop. And I doubt I’m the only one to have noticed the price of “nice ham” rising, along with the price of pretty much everything else. 

For millions, the election of the Labour Party after 14 years of “Tory austerity” brought a surge of hope that things, at this very practical level, would begin to look up. That surge is already over. As hope dies, even those who prefer to style themselves as “open” are beginning to shift from wanting to protect everybody to focusing on protecting their own. 

And here we run up against the second Brownite snafu: the issue of “bigotry”, or more neutrally of who is included in “our own”. The original 2010 “Bigotgate” was less about racism than a disagreement over the scope of taxpayer generosity. In their exchange, Duffy told Brown that state welfare was for “looking after the people who are vulnerable”, which is to say looking after our own. She then expressed a concern that outsiders were taking goods that weren’t for them. Brown dismissed this as “bigotry”, but really it’s a question about resource allocation.

When resources are abundant, this question doesn’t arise so often. But resources are no longer abundant, and the hope that Labour would change this is dead. As costs rise, a growing segment of the once-comfortable middle class is glumly foregoing nice ham, not to mention worrying about bills and their children’s futures. With each pack of sweaty processed ham that goes into the trolley, and each bad headline about youth unemployment, the longing for radical change grows. Meanwhile, the fear of being re-classified as “gammon”  (ie working class) begins to feel less cultural than ominously, immediately material.

 

In turn this is amplified by the third Brownite snafu: the biscuit. Biscuitgate itself reportedly happened because, due to his partial sight impairment, Brown had pre-prepared copy-and-paste answers to the anticipated questions and largely ignored any spontaneous ones. In this sense, it stands for just how hopelessly ill-equipped he was for the immediacy, volatility and occasional surrealism of digital communications. With the possible exception of Farage, most contemporary politicians are similarly ill-equipped, Starmer more painfully than most. 

And this isn’t just about personality types; it’s about whole political systems. From arguments over “misinformation” and foreign interference, to networked diaspora communities resisting integration, the digital revolution is changing the face, reach, means, and subjects of politics faster than politicians or political systems can adapt. 

Some on the Labour side seem to believe that their problem is only one of communications, and if only they could be more charismatic/censor opposing content/otherwise control the message then everything would be fine. This is wrong. The problem is also that when nice ham is so expensive, people resent being taxed so hard — especially when you start hearing whispers that it’s being spent on housing Afghans in seaside hotels. But communication is also part of the problem: Starmer is awful at it. And the breakneck pace of digital change really doesn’t help.  

None of this is, properly speaking, about Nigel Farage. I don’t know that the mums of Middle England will ever like him. He, or perhaps the character he plays, is a type that regular English women often meet in real life, and often view (with some justification) as a slippery customer. But when the culmination of 14 hapless Tory years turned out to be a Labour Government still more useless and hateful than the one it displaced, seemingly unable to do anything but tinker as Britain circles the drain, we’re at an impasse. 

What to do? The Don’t Knows don’t know. But if Farage manages to convince enough of them that making common cause with the dreaded “gammon” is the route back to nice ham, perhaps a decisive share of Middle England’s mums will quietly take the risk.

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