Boston, Skegness, Grantham. These are not just names on a map. They are frontline zones in the long war against working-class life in Britain. And now, they’re the testing ground for Nigel Farage’s latest grift. Reform UK is on the march, and Lincolnshire is being sold as the first conquest. They claim to speak for the people. What they actually represent is a perfected model of extraction: of your wages, your services, your land, and your very anger.
Let’s start with the obvious. Farage is not one of you. He never has been. Educated at Dulwich College, trained in the City, frontman for a series of political shell companies. He has made a career not by helping working people, but by distracting them while his friends in finance plunder the nation. Reform UK, like its predecessors UKIP and the Brexit Party, is a vehicle for his ambitions and a shield for his class. They have almost no infrastructure, zero accountability, and no real democratic involvement for members. This is not a political movement. It is a direct line from the frustration of ordinary people to the bank accounts of the top table.
In Lincolnshire, the betrayal of the working class has been carried out in slow motion. First the docks—Grimsby and Immingham—once thriving hubs of working-class solidarity, now shells of their former selves. Then the railways, slashed under privatisation and left to decay. Buses vanished. Small manufacturers disappeared. Agricultural labour has been stripped of dignity, mechanised and casualised, reduced to seasonal precarity. Scunthorpe’s steelworks. Once a symbol of industrial muscle. Now back under government operation teeters on the edge of extinction with every new ownership shuffle. Thatcher’s scorched-earth monetarism gutted the region’s infrastructure, and the Tories’ decades of neglect only deepened the wound. Labour, meanwhile, abandoned any connection to class, preferring PR campaigns in the Home Counties to community organising in Gainsborough or Louth. Into this vacuum walks Farage, pint in hand, promising change. But his version of change means the same as ever: cuts, scapegoats, and deregulation for the rich.
Reform UK loves to talk about “efficiency” in local government. But anyone who has lived through the last twenty years of austerity knows what that really means: more cuts. Local government has been run like a business for too long already. Council chambers have been turned into procurement departments. Leisure centres sold. Bin collections outsourced. When Richard Tice talks about bringing in more business people, what he really means is more feathering of nests, more contracts for mates, more consultants, more money siphoned off by the same people who brought us Carillion and Capita. The privatisation of local government has been a race to the bottom, and Reform UK want to step on the accelerator.
Farage does not care about Lincolnshire’s fields or factories. His donors don’t live in Cleethorpes or Spalding—they live in tax havens and West London. His rhetoric about “common sense” is a smokescreen for the usual agenda: smash the state, liberalise the market, and demonise the poor. Every broken hospital, every closed high street, every underpaid care worker is part of the same design: to make collective solutions impossible, and individual despair the only future.
Reform UK’s opposition to net-zero is a perfect example. In Lincolnshire, where agriculture is already threatened by soil degradation and water scarcity, the only future is a sustainable one. But Farage wants to scrap climate protections to keep energy barons happy and the culture war burning. He says wind turbines ruin the view. What ruins the view is the boarded-up farm shop, the empty train station, the coastline eroding year by year. If Farage wins here, the floods will too.
And let’s not forget the fascism lurking beneath the surface. Reform UK claims to stand for freedom, but their version of freedom means cracking down on protest, silencing dissent, and redrawing the borders of belonging. They traffic in dog whistles and loudhailers, stirring up fear about migrants and trans people. While the real culprits. energy giants, landlords, and monopolists. Rake in record profits. Farage doesn’t want you to fight the system. He wants you to fight your neighbour.
Migrants are not your enemy. They didn’t cut your bus route, close your GP surgery, or sell off your housing stock. That was Westminster, Tory governments, Labour councils, austerity by design. Migrants didn’t crash the economy or write the tax code. They pick the crops, staff the care homes, clean the hospitals. They are exploited by the same system that exploits you. Farage wants you to punch down because he knows if you ever punch up, he and his mates are finished. Solidarity isn’t just moral. It’s strategic. Division keeps the dominant class in power. Unity is how we break it.
This is a political project designed not to fix the future, but to burn it down. And it is gaining ground precisely because the traditional parties. Especially Labour, have abandoned the language of class and struggle. Starmer will not fight Farage, because on the things that matter. Privatisation, immigration raids, fossil fuel subsidies, they are not so different. The centrists and the hard right are two sides of the same collapsing order. One sells you false hope. The other sells you the rope.
The people of Lincolnshire are angry, and they are right to be. But Farage is not your ally. He is your ventriloquist. He speaks your pain in a voice borrowed from the hedge fund office and the op-ed page. And when the applause fades, you’ll be left with nothing.
No jobs.
No services.
No solidarity.
Farage is a merchant of misery who dines out on your despair.
What Lincolnshire needs is not more Farage. It needs socialism. It needs investment, owned by and accountable to the people. It needs public ownership of energy, housing, transport, and land. It needs local councils with real funding, trade unions with real power, and a politics that names the class enemy and fights it without apology.
Farage will not make your life better. But you can. If you organise, if you fight, if you refuse to be divided. The time for being fooled is over. The grift has gone on long enough.
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