“Farage doesn’t speak for the person cleaning trains at midnight. He speaks for capital.”
It’s easy to make a noise. Nigel Farage knows this. He’s made a career of it. But the sound coming from yesterday’s Reform UK relaunch—pitched as a homecoming, a second coming, a jolt to the so-called workers’ movement—wasn’t the voice of the working class. It was the bark of a former City trader playing dress-up as a dockworker. A man who wants your vote, not your conditions to improve.
Farage stood at a podium in London and declared: “We are now the real party of working people.” Hours later, Reform UK rolled out its centrepiece policy: a tax giveaway so regressive it would make George Osborne blush. Raising the income tax threshold to £20,000 might sound good. Until you realise who it actually helps. Not the poorest. They’re already below that line. Not people in part-time or insecure work. Not pensioners. Not carers. The winners are the comfortably off. Farage’s base. Not yours.
He’s also pledged to restore universal child benefit and winter fuel payments. Another soundbite that plays well. But what it really does is funnel public money indiscriminately, while avoiding the real task of rebuilding public services and redistributing wealth. This isn’t working-class politics. It’s reheated Thatcherism in populist drag, cheered on by the same hedge fund donors who backed austerity.
This is a man who voted against the minimum wage. Against equal pay. Against maternity rights. Against every attempt to give workers a say. There’s a reason he never mentions unions unless it’s for photo ops or to bash them. He talks about “getting Britain working again,” but he says nothing about wages, security, or dignity. He rails against asylum seekers and benefit claimants—not landlords, not bosses, not the tax-dodging rich.
“This isn’t working-class politics. It’s reheated Thatcherism in populist drag.”
This isn’t the voice of the working class. It’s the voice of class war. But from the other side. A war from above, waged with smiles and pints and that familiar whiff of cigarette ash and xenophobia.
As I have said many times before, Labour can’t beat Reform by chasing them to the right. All that does is legitimise the very narrative Farage is selling. That Britain’s problems are caused by migrants, benefit claimants, and bureaucrats, not by decades of capital flight, low wages, and crumbling public services. Starmer’s strategy of mimicking Reform’s rhetoric. Talking tough on immigration, promising to ‘get people into work’ without addressing pay or conditions—leaves Labour looking like Reform-lite. And if voters want the real thing, they’ll vote for it.
The answer isn’t to copy Reform. It’s to confront them. To make the case that the real theft in this country isn’t being committed by the poor. It’s by the powerful. Labour should be arguing for rent controls, public ownership, and a serious plan to rebuild the welfare state. The money is there, it’s just hoarded at the top. That’s the story Reform will never tell. And unless Labour does, Farage gets to pose as the outsider while protecting the same system that keeps working-class people struggling.
The Greens, at least, see through the pantomime. Adrian Ramsay called it what it is: absurd. Farage hasn’t lifted a finger for working people and he isn’t about to start now. He skipped the vote to scrap the two-child benefit cap—then turns up months later with a flat cap and a fistful of false promises. He isn’t interested in working families, he’s interested in fossil fuel donors. While the Greens talk about net zero as a path to jobs, lower bills, and economic resilience, Farage dismisses it all as “green crap”—because that’s what his backers want to hear. This isn’t just climate vandalism, it’s class war dressed as common sense. Farage isn’t taking on the establishment. He is the establishment, just in pub landlord drag.
Reform UK’s economic plan. If it can be called that—is a con. The funding? Pure fantasy. Billions allegedly saved by scrapping net zero, cutting “woke” programmes, and shutting asylum hotels. Even if that were possible—it isn’t—it wouldn’t come close. It’s the same trickle-down nonsense: slash taxes for the better-off, and hope crumbs fall. They won’t.
And that’s the point. Farage doesn’t build. He breaks. Institutions, facts, solidarity. He tears it all down and calls it freedom. His campaign is light on detail and heavy on feeling. Anger, betrayal, resentment. Feelings he’s been stoking for decades.
Labour’s failure to offer a class politics of its own gives him room to operate. Starmer offers competence. Farage offers fury. But only one is pretending to be on your side. Don’t confuse the man yelling in the pub with someone who can run a country.
If Reform UK are “the real party of workers,” then workers are in serious trouble. Because Farage doesn’t speak for the person cleaning trains at midnight. Or the nurse doing unpaid overtime. Or the mum or dad stretching one shop into the next week. He speaks for capital. Always has. Always will. And now he’s trying to do it in a donkey jacket.
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