A guest blog from New Ways' Founder, Letesia Gibson.

This piece responds to nfpResearch’s recent blog (Should charities work with Reform UK?) on whether charities should engage with Reform UK. I shared concerns about how easily the debate becomes a simple ‘for or against’ question, without enough attention to the civic life consequences of unconsidered engagement. After a rich conversation, they offered me space to contribute a counter argument.

I start the response by inviting that the core issue is not whether or not charities “engage”. But rather whether they are governing engagement with political power in a way that protects mission integrity, staff trust and the marginalised communities they exist to support, especially when engagement risks legitimising exclusionary narratives.

The truth is many organisations are already dealing with Reform both as political power and as voter identity. This is happening through Reform councillors and candidates, and the growing influence of Reform-aligned narratives among local residents, volunteers, donors and campaigners. The issue is whether charities are walking into it passively, or intentionally with principles and guidelines that will support them to make decisions.

This question becomes more urgent when political power shifts in an authoritarian direction: scapegoating becomes more normal, rights and protections are narrowed, and those who name harm or challenge dominant narratives are treated as the problem.

When those dynamics begin to shape civic life and organisational culture, engagement risks sliding into complicity. What does responsible engagement look like when anti-racism and EDI commitments are being tested in real time?

I also want to be transparent about where I am coming from. As a woman of Jamaican descent with sharp memories of UK life in the 70s and 80s, I have a strong emotional response to this topic. But whilst fear can sharpen perception, it cannot be the strategy. This moment requires clarity, leadership discipline, and deliberate governance, not reactive drift.

Why the ‘for or against’ frame is not enough

A ‘for or against engagement’ frame invites charities to treat engagement as a single decision, made once, and mainly judged by intent. But that is not how this plays out in real life. When political power is shifting in this direction, engagement is not only a tool for influence, it is also part of the environment that shapes what becomes possible and acceptable in civic life.

In that context, the real questions are not simply ‘should we engage’ but:

• What kind of engagement are we talking about?
• What does this engagement produce beyond our intentions?
• If harm occurs, who bears the cost and who is insulated from it?

What is missing from much of the sector conversation is a willingness to name these dynamics clearly. ‘Caution’ is often treated as sufficient, without addressing how legitimacy is created or what it costs staff and communities.

Different kinds of engagement carry different risks

When leaders say ‘engage’, they often mean different things. The governance task is to separate low-risk preparation and necessary advocacy from high-risk proximity, and to notice the quieter drift that can begin long before any formal decision is made.
Monitoring and analysis

This is the ‘know what you are dealing with’ work. Tracking policy signals, rhetoric, voting patterns and local dynamics. It is essential preparation, it does not require proximity and feels important to ensure organisations really understand the landscape.

Advocacy and representation

This is where leaders need realism. Far-right agendas are often less open to influence than other political projects, and engagement can function less as dialogue and more as validation. The question is not simply whether to speak up, but what can genuinely be shifted, what must be defended publicly, and what cannot be conceded at all.

Proximity and legitimacy

This is where the risk changes most sharply. Shared platforms, informal relationship-building, roundtables and photo opportunities are not neutral gestures.
They allow political actors to borrow credibility. Even when the intention is challenge or dialogue, proximity can be repurposed as respectability, and this is where organisations are most at risk of becoming complicit in harm.
Drift through language and silence

This is the form of engagement most organisations miss, because they don’t name it as engagement. It appears through a softening of their language, avoiding naming racism, retreat into vague ‘neutrality’, or discouraging visibility, or delaying action or support. It is described as professionalism, pragmatism, or risk management, but it quietly reshapes what the organisation is willing to defend.

If leaders and trustees do not define what they mean by engagement, they cannot set boundaries. That ambiguity is exactly how drift begins, long before any formal decision is made.

Why leaders feel they have no choice

Leaders are not drifting into engagement because they are careless. They are doing it under pressure. For organisations working on housing, safeguarding, poverty, health, disability access or community safety, disengaging from decision-makers can feel irresponsible, because policy decisions shape real outcomes. At the same time, power shapes funding, regulation, commissioning and public narrative, so leaders know access can be withdrawn, scrutiny intensified, and organisations publicly targeted. And charities do not serve ideologically uniform communities. Some service users, volunteers, supporters and donors may vote Reform, and leaders worry refusal will be read as contempt or political bias, undermining trust or support.

These pressures are real. But together they create the conditions for default engagement: anxiety-led decisions, and proximity entered without clear governance. When leaders act in the name of mission under pressure, who carries the risk if those choices also legitimise harm, erode trust, or narrow the space for anti-racism and EDI work?

Supporting people is not the same as legitimising ideology

Charities must absolutely be able to support people who may vote Reform. People vote the way they do for many reasons. Serving people connected to your cause does not require agreement with their politics. But serving people is not the same thing as legitimising a political project. Reform is an organised political project with a narrative about who belongs, who is responsible for social problems, and which protections are treated as obstacles. When engagement treats Reform as ‘just another party’, without accounting for the function of that narrative, charities can end up granting legitimacy to ideas that undermine the safety and rights of the very communities charities exist to protect.

This is why the ‘represent all voices’ argument can become slippery. Representation does not automatically require proximity. It does not require shared platforms. It does not require softening language.

The real risk: engagement in a wider ecosystem

If this were only about influencing policy, the governance task would be familiar: understand the agenda, decide what you can shift, and defend what you cannot trade away. But far right projects operate on two tracks at once: a political agenda, and a cultural strategy that enters civic spaces and reshapes what feels legitimate and ‘sayable’. They embed narratives in coalitions, campaigns and community forums that do not present as partisan, and they use those spaces to borrow credibility, split alliances, and widen tolerance for exclusion.

We can see the politics and culture interplay already. Protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers have become flashpoints, with migration framed through threat and ‘protection’ narratives that travel fast into local civic life. At the same time, high-salience mobilisation around ‘sex is binary’ has intensified legal and institutional contention about how ‘sex’ is interpreted in the Equality Act. These dynamics shape the terrain in which parties gain permission, credibility and momentum.

This is why engagement is not only about what happens in a meeting. It is also about what your engagement might enable, directly or indirectly, in the surrounding ecosystem: who gets to claim legitimacy, which narratives are strengthened, and which communities absorb the consequences.

The consequences inside and outside organisations

This conversation about engagement is happening in a moment where hate crime is rising again, and some communities are already navigating a changed narrative that has reduced rights, real and perceived safety and belonging. In this context, solidarity is not a moral add-on. It is a leadership capability that is connected to how organisations identify and set their own red lines.

Inside organisations, staff who are most likely to be targeted by hostile narratives often read leadership choices as real-time indicators of what will be defended and what will be traded away under pressure. So the governance question is not only ‘can we engage’. It is: are we making decisions with the needs and safety of the people most impacted in view, or are we making decisions primarily around access, optics, and institutional risk?

This is where anti-racism and EDI commitments become practical. They should shape red lines, engagement strategy, and internal protections. How leaders talk about harm publicly, knowing what kinds of proximity are off-limits, being clear on what staff will be asked to absorb, and having thought through what support is in place for colleagues who may be required to work alongside Reform MPs, councillors, or Reform-aligned structures are all things to be considered...

Closing

If organisations want to govern this moment with integrity, the next step is a strategic conversation about red lines. At minimum, leadership should be able to answer:

• What is our strategic approach to engaging political power, and what are we accountable for while we do it?
• Which forms of engagement are necessary for mission delivery, and which are off-limits because they create proximity and legitimacy risk?
• What do our anti-racism and EDI commitments require of us in practice when we engage, and where are our red lines?

For people who want practical support to translate these questions into actions, New Ways are offering a micro class on actions and accountability, designed to help leadership teams set boundaries, strengthen decision-making under pressure, and put protections in place for staff and communities.