LONDON — What do you do when Nigel Farage steals your name? Pick a new one.
The long-established Reform think tank, which has been offering ideas to Westminster policymakers for almost 25 years, will now be known as Re:State, it announced Monday.
The Westminster-based policy outfit lost its battle to get Britain’s elections watchdog to stop Farage’s Brexit Party from renaming itself Reform UK in 2021.
Charlotte Pickles, its director, has been mulling a name change for some time, but the return of Farage as Reform UK leader last year, and the party’s recent electoral success put a rocket under the name-changing project.
“As a very strictly cross-party, independent, charitable think tank we can’t have confusion with a political party, of which there obviously is now one called Reform UK,” Pickles told POLITICO.
While the think tank is well-known in Westminster’s political circles, its old name has caused confusion with the wider general public.
“We have had people sending us emails with their thoughts that they want to share with Nigel Farage,” Pickles said. “We’ve had some letters sent to our office building.”
Reform UK supporters even mistakenly posted checks donating money, now destroyed, to the think tank.
The newly named Re:State is using its rebrand as an opportunity to reset and talk about its work on reforming the British government machine.
It is also keen to talk up the work it has done to influence policy in the new Labour government. It was the first to call for the abolition of the quango NHS England, something Keir Starmer announced the government would be doing in March.
“The re-name both ends the confusion, and the annoying part, which is that a political party took our name, but also gives us a platform to talk about what we’re doing,” Pickles adds.
“I think our new name captures that,” she said.
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