Nigel Farage has always fancied himself the voice of the “left behind”. In his latest piece for The Sun, he casts Reform UK as the last hope of the working class, lambasting Keir Starmer and Labour for abandoning their roots. His rallying cry, cheap petrol, lower taxes, deport migrants, the same cynical melody he has always played, louder now in the hope that repetition might finally turn noise into substance. But strip away the Union Jacks and the cheap lager patriotism, and what remains is not a politics of the people but a reactionary vision, cobbled together from tax cuts for the rich, climate denial, and xenophobic fearmongering.
Farage will now deliver a major campaign speech in a working men’s club. The irony is staggering. These clubs, born from collective struggle, funded by miners’ subs and steelworkers’ pay packets, were spaces of solidarity, not soapboxes for hedge-fund fascists. For Farage to co-opt them in service of a campaign built on division and deregulation is a grotesque parody of their purpose. He is no closer to the working class than Boris Johnson was when he played dress-up on a building site. His pint-waving bonhomie is just performance: class cosplay for the cameras.
Even more revealing is Farage’s sudden conversion to the cause of nationalising British Steel. For a man whose entire political brand is rooted in hostility to state intervention, Reform UK’s economic programme is a Thatcherite fever dream of slashed taxes, shredded regulation, and “freedom” from government—this volte-face is remarkable. Nationalisation is, after all, the ultimate form of state involvement: a public ownership model justified not by profit but by collective interest. Reform UK’s ideology is built on the opposite principle.
“Farage will now deliver a major campaign speech in a working men’s club. The irony is staggering. These clubs, born from collective struggle, funded by miners’ subs and steelworkers’ pay packets, were spaces of solidarity, not soapboxes for hedge-fund fascists.”
Why, then, this abrupt U-turn? The answer, likely, is electoral opportunism. With the steel industry in crisis and resentment deepening in industrial heartlands, Farage spies a populist wedge. But there is no coherent ideological framework behind the proposal. It is not a rediscovery of class politics, it is a gimmick, a nationalist wrapping for a neoliberal package. In truth, Farage’s plan to “save steel” has no more substance than his plan to save Britain: both are built on nostalgia, not policy.
Beneath the surface of Reform UK’s supposed common-sense agenda lies a series of dangerous falsehoods. Raising the tax-free threshold to £20,000 sounds appealing, until you remember it would gut the revenue base for the services working people rely on. Scrapping Net Zero might excite GB News, but it would leave Britain economically stranded as the world pivots to green industry. And tearing up human rights law to enable mass deportations is not only morally repugnant, it threatens the legal underpinnings of democratic accountability itself.
Faragism thrives on simplification. It tells people their problems are caused by migrants, by “woke elites,” by Brussels, by Net Zero. It pretends that the post-Thatcher hollowing-out of Britain can be reversed by swagger and spit. But it has no answers to the crises it exploits: wage stagnation, a crumbling NHS, the housing shortage. These are the legacies of neoliberalism, not immigration—and Farage, with his city-boy backers and tax-cutter instincts, is its spiritual heir.
The working class deserves better than this. It deserves real investment, workplace democracy, and a politics that listens rather than lectures. Faragism offers none of that. It is not a revolution but a rebrand of reaction, draped in the Union Jack and sold in the pages of The Sun. The sooner we stop mistaking it for authenticity, the sooner we can build something worth fighting for.
“Faragism offers none of that. It is not a revolution but a rebrand of reaction, draped in the Union Jack and sold in the pages of The Sun. The sooner we stop mistaking it for authenticity, the sooner we can build something worth fighting for.”
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