Kevin Maguire issues a warning to anyone in the working class community who are considering voting for Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party, saying they will “hammer you”
Shape-shifting Nigel Farage exposed his core Thatcherism when he suddenly espoused massive spending cuts and huge deregulation last week.
Any working class community considering voting for the privately educated City slicker, be warned: his Reform UK will hammer you. His latest policies would reset the alarm clock to the bitter, divided and painful 1980s.
He also found time to backtrack on a previous promise of £90billion tax cuts, proving Reform was a party of myth at the last election. At the next it will be Tories on steroids. I never believed free-market maniac Farage would, as he also promised, renationalise water or steel. Nor did he, it seems. He now insists he only ever wanted “short-term, partial” public ownership of failing industries.
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There’s a danger here for Farage. And for Kemi Badenoch, whose critique of Reform as “another Left-wing party” is buried now that her nasty party has competition for who can offer the cruelest benefit cuts.
Inciting hatred against asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and Britons with Brown and Black skins will only get Reform so far. Nostalgic older White voters in the North, Midlands and Wales, who understandably want improvements to their lives, do not want a rerun of uncaring Thatcherism.
All the flags in England cannot conceal the unpleasant, repulsive nastiness and lunacy at the core of Reform. As Reform’s tax hikes and mismanagement in councils from Kent to Durham confirm, the party couldn’t run a bath. Its few MPs are also a weakness.
Runcorn’s Sarah Pochin vanishing after she complained about too many Black faces in adverts will not mean we forget. Ashfield’s 30p Lee Anderson calling for the return of deathtrap three-wheeler invalid carriages took me back to 2010, when Farage’s party was called UKIP and its manifesto wanted to introduce a dress code for taxi drivers, regularly deploy armed forces on the street and repaint trains in traditional colours.
Farage, his property magnate deputy Richard Tice and all Reform’s top figures are Thatcherites. You want a return to the brutal days of Hillsborough and the Miners’ Strike, soaring unemployment and an end to mass council housing, when state pensions plummeted and the family silver was sold off cheaply? Farage is your man.
The real nasty Nigel is emerging. Many who decide to lend Reform their support for now will not like what they see. Game on.