A 52-year-old church magazine has just been forced to rebrand because of Nigel Farage
Key Points
- Christian magazine Reform has changed its name to Reformed after 52 years in print
- The trigger was readers being mistaken for Reform UK supporters by visitors and hiding their copies
- A subscriber poll found 86% in favour of the rebrand
- Some new subscribers had paid for Reform thinking it was Nigel Farage's magazine, then cancelled when they realised it was "some religious thing"
- The United Reformed Church, the magazine's publisher, has taken policy positions at odds with Reform UK on migration and asylum
A 52-year-old Christian magazine called Reform has just rebranded as Reformed, because too many of its readers were hiding their own subscription from visitors who took one look at the cover and assumed they had quietly thrown in with Nigel Farage.
The magazine is the national publication of the United Reformed Church, a Christian denomination formed in 1972. It has run under the name Reform ever since.
Then in 2018 Nigel Farage launched the Brexit Party, which became Reform UK in 2021, and a publication that had spent half a century being mistaken for nothing more sinister than a slightly dry church newsletter started getting mistaken for the in-house bulletin of Britain’s most divisive political party.
One reader from Surrey put it on the record in a line the editorial team must have known would write the headline for them: “Much as I enjoy reading Reform, I make sure I hide the magazine when visitors come round, for obvious reasons.”
A subscriber poll came back with 86% in favour of a name change. From this month, the magazine is Reformed – a three-letter tweak intended to keep it recognisable while no longer cosplaying as the official organ of a party whose policies the United Reformed Church has, on several occasions, opposed.
“Some religious thing”
The confusion ran both ways, and the second direction is the funnier one. Several people, the URC says, paid for subscriptions to Reform on the assumption that they were buying Nigel Farage’s magazine.
When the first issue landed and turned out to contain sermons and reflections on Christian witness rather than fulminations against the European Court of Human Rights, the new subscribers cancelled.
One of them reportedly dismissed the whole publication as “some religious thing”.
That phrase alone is the kind of accidental editorial line no wanky London consultancy could have written.
It was our name first
Stephen Tomkins, Editor of the newly renamed Reformed, said the team had debated a change for years as Reform UK grew louder in the news cycle.
“At first, we took the view, ‘It was our name first!'” Tomkins said. “Then readers started telling us the name was causing confusion and consternation in local churches.”
Tomkins added that the URC is not aligned with any political party, and that its General Assembly has taken positions at odds with Reform UK on issues including migration and asylum – though as he points out, Reform UK is hardly the only party with which the church has policy disagreements.
The pivot from Reform to Reformed is small, three letters bolted on the end, but it carries a faint suggestion that the church was here first and has now passed through the experience and emerged on the other side, while the political party continues to argue with itself in public.
Whether the editorial team intended that reading is between them and their conscience (and God one supposes in this case).
There is a quieter point in here about how political brands now colonise public space. Reform UK did not have to sue, lobby, or even acknowledge the magazine existed. It simply became loud enough that a 52-year-old institution decided it would rather get out of the way.
The reader from Surrey, presumably, can now leave the new copies on the coffee table.
