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I have access via in-laws to the Reform-curious rural UK filter bubble, and there the reaction to happily married lesbians (two thirds of same-sex marriages in the UK are women) is "so what" and the reaction to flamboyantly gay men being flamboyantly gay in public is bemused eye-rolling as long as they remain fully clothed.
If Nigel Farage thought that gay-bashing would gain votes for Reform, he would do it. He doesn't.
Certainly gay-bashing would be a terrible move. I have a vague sense, however, that the very solidity of the 'so what' reaction is disguising less comfort than people are willing to let on. I have no proof for this, it's just based on myself and on a sense that people are...slightly too careful about the subject. The very speed with which even right-wingers tell you they don't give a shit kind of makes me feel like they do, actually, give a little bit of a shit.
Of course this is the loosest kind of vibes-based psychoanalysing, so feel free to discard it completely if you want to. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like the absolute closing of ranks that happened over gay marriage. In about a decade we went from a world in which a younger-me was mildly chastised for being too fervently pro gay marriage to a world where even the suggestion that gay marriage might not have been a great idea provokes universal condemnation. I think everyone remembers proto-cancelling incidents like the defenestration of Tim Fallon and everyone knows how dangerous is can be to be associated with even a whiff of homophobia.
I always feel that Britain is a lot like Japan in some ways. The social pressure and desire to conform can be so strong that there is very little gap between the consensus and people's conscious opinions. In the same way that I'm pretty sure liberal democratic Japan could turn into a Maoist communist state in a decade given a change of leadership, I think the same is true of Britain. Change the right few minds, let it cascade and I think a lot of people might suddenly 'discover' an entirely new set of opinions that would not necessarily be any more 'real' than the previous ones but would feel just as sincere to their owners.
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