They held it in a working men’s club, of course. Where else? Newton Aycliffe, County Durham: beer mats and St George bunting, the symbolic remainders of a world Farage neither understands nor respects. That’s where Nigel Farage, personally, unmistakably, delivered his great proclamation. “Reform is parking its tanks on Labour’s lawn,” he said, stood behind a podium proclaiming “Britain is broken. Reform will fix it.” But it’s less invasion than pantomime, and the only thing he’s parking is the wreckage of Thatcherism, slaped in a bit of ‘common sense’ war paint, on what’s left of the red wall.
Nigel Farage, heir to a commodities broking firm and the political chaos of Brexit, wants the country to believe he is now the tribune of the downtrodden. “We are the party of working people,” he declared with all the conviction of a man who’s never queued at a Jobcentre nor bled a day for wages. It’s the latest rebrand of reaction: reheated Trumpism in a Northern working men’s Club.
The rhetoric was loud and the detail sparse. Reform’s local election pitch is all bluster and no plan—unless, of course, you count the proposals to gut public services, slash taxes for the rich, and scrap regulators to unleash the “enterprise” of capital. In that sense, it’s the same old right-wing project: austerity for the many, growth for the few.
Farage promises a return to industry, but his vision of “reindustrialisation” hinges on steel and fossil fuels, as if the clock might be turned back to 1956. No climate transition, no green jobs, no coherent investment strategy. Just vague assurances that cutting quangos will magically summon “tens of thousands” of well-paid jobs. It’s not policy, it’s time-travel populism. And it’s dangerous precisely because it flatters rather than addresses working-class despair.
When not fantasising about gasworks, Farage railed against the “madness” of diversity, equity and inclusion. He claimed, falsely and absurdly, that NHS and police recruitment schemes favour ethnic minorities at the expense of whites with “more history in this country”. Here, the veil slips. The real substance of Reform is a racialised culture war, one that pits worker against worker, deflecting class rage into nationalist grievance.
And so we get the greatest hits: anti-immigrant scaremongering, disdain for “north London human rights lawyers”, and a pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Not content with punching down at migrants, minorities and teachers, Farage wants to bulldoze the very legal architecture that protects the weak from state overreach. All in the name of freedom, naturally.
The teaching unions, those treasonous radicals, come in for special contempt. The NEU, he claims, is “poisoning” children against Britain’s noble past. This, in a week when Ofsted stood accused of fuelling a culture of fear in schools. Reform isn’t the voice of workers; it’s the boss at the back of the staffroom with a pink slip in one hand and the Daily Mail in the other.
Farage offers no solutions to the cost of living, no answers to Britain’s housing crisis, no vision for public ownership. Reform has no time for trade unions (except perhaps those it can co-opt) and no interest in democratising the economy. And when pressed on how his lavish tax cuts and public spending slashes add up, he shrugs. “Growth will fix it.” This is economics as cargo cult. Thatcherism with fewer footnotes.
Let’s not pretend this is new. Farage has spent his career projecting elite reaction through the ventriloquist dummy of the ordinary bloke. What’s new is the theatre. Standing in Blair’s old constituency, flanked by St George’s crosses and grinning yes-men, Farage performed working-class authenticity like a man doing karaoke with a broken mic. The song? “Land of Hope and Glory” in the style of Steve Bannon.
That the Labour Party, under Starmer’s technocratic triangulation, has allowed such a figure to pose as the champion of Sedgefield’s working men is a tragedy of its own. But the answer isn’t to retreat into culture war cosplay or Trump-lite posturing. It’s to rebuild class power from below, not through nostalgic flag-waving, but by confronting capital head-on.
Farage wants to bring back steel, oil and empire. What we need is housing, decent pay, and democratic control of our industries. His “revolution” is a con: a front for the same forces that hollowed out Britain’s industrial heartlands in the first place. He is not the people’s insurgent. He’s their bailiff in a Union Jack tie.
From Farage to Tice, the Reform brand isn’t about fixing Britain for us, it’s about making it better for people like them. Men who’ve never missed a mortgage payment, never had to worry about a prepay meter running out. Their politics isn’t born of struggle but of spite. It’s Thatcherism with a pint in hand and a camera rolling. A country club coup dressed up as working-class revolt.
Oh, and those tanks they claim to be “parking” on Labour’s lawn? They’re not new, either. They’re the tanks of the 1970s, conspiracy-soaked, steered by mad Generals, aimed not at the political class but at the picket line. Their target has always been working-class power. Farage just slaps a different badge on the side and calls it reform.
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