We’re all just making plans for Nigel. It’s all Farage, all the time as the UK election winds on, at the beginning of a British summer which reports say is like winter, i.e. like a British summer. The Farage-led Reform UK party has launched a “contract” — not a manifesto — that it proposes for the British people, not in the shires, but in the Labour heartland of Merthyr Tydfil, old mining country of south Wales, and now, like the rest of the place, a blast zone of benefits, illness and teashops.
“So this is not something with which we’re going to govern the country,” Farage said, to no-one’s surprise. But they will be forming government after 2029, he has claimed, to everyone’s surprise, except those who’ve kept a watching brief on Nige these past decades. The party is polling equal to the Tories, and calling itself the real opposition. Whether one likes it or not, this tweedy, barking toby-jug of a man is the Lenin of the British right. Could he take Reform and charge through the middle of the 2024 chaos, to pick up the unwithered garland of the Conservative Party like a feather in the street?
Probably, no. The Reform UK contract is a verrrrrry interesting document, of which more below. But like it or not the Conservative Party pretty much is Britain, and its capacity to remodel itself substantially several times over has been its success. Farage and Reform UK founder Richard Tice are right-wing insurgents who share the same motivating fantasy as left-wing insurgents: that this time something will change. But things do change, and you have to be ready for it when they do. So expecting nine of the next revolutions is the insurgents’ curse.
The Reform UK contract is, in policy terms, almost entirely right wing, and classic Thatcherite in economic terms, with growth to be revived by corporation tax cuts, VAT (sales tax) threshold lift, a two million quid limit on inheritance tax (the Brits never abolished it), and, for the workers, lifting the income tax threshold to £20,000 per year. Net zero plans would be abandoned to allegedly reduce energy costs. And so on. It’s one “left” economic measure is to claw back £35 billion in interest currently paid by the Bank of England to commercial banks for the QE deposits they hold, and will not lend out.
But its major policy is immigration, in which it — look, it’s basically us. Stop the boats, reduce numbers heavily, torque the unemployment benefits system to compel people into jobs etc etc. It relies on the betrayal felt by both middle and working-class people as to the Tories’ failure to limit immigration numbers in the wake of Brexit, which is all Brexit was ever about. As soon as that was done, the business Tories simply switched sourcing of cheap labour, from the EU to the South (global, not Bournemouth), building the wicker man. The nihilism of Boris Johnson (remember him?) et al, was the match that lit it from the inside.
There’s some interesting policies which I’d be drawn to, if I were in the Old Dart — abolishing the House of Lords, new build on brownfield sites, subsidise small farms, supermarket price controls, abolishing gender affirmation ideology in teaching, proportional representation voting in the Commons, and a few others. But overall, Reform’s leaders are either unwilling or unable to make a clean break with right politics, and make a genuine left-right mix which could draw substantial sections of the working and middle class.
Most significantly, there is no real answer to the budget gap that will result from all these tax breaks everywhere, even with the (debatable) £35 billion gain from the QE interest boondoggle. The sure sign that Reform UK is a little shonky comes with their promise to preserve the NHS’ free service principle, but to supplement it with… vouchers, for private care, when the NHS lacks local capacity to provide. Yes, sooner or later there’s always a voucher.
That obvious invite to undermine the universal public health service/provision pool is complemented by a commitment to… efficiency savings! Yeah, so that fantasy of a maverick left/right crossover didn’t last long. Efficiency savings! Five pounds in every hundred by government departments! Efficiency savings! The magical teapot every opposition party rubs to produce English breakfast, only to pour forth British Railways lukewarm regular.
They were going so well, too. But that sort of guff shows a populism in the restricted sense — a program composed of things people want to hear, that doesn’t begin to add up, or talk about tough choices. It has a very British middle class taint of taking the working class for mugs, who can be marched off to Ypres afresh (XTC’s classic quoted at the start is a document of British class mistrust. It is not coincidental that the future Lord Farage of Dulwich shares its subject’s name). But Labour voters in the “red wall” seats ensured a 40% vote for the Corbyn-led pro-Brexit (or pro-respect the result) Labour Party, even though they had little time for its perpetual grad-student leader. And they deserted him when Labour went to them with some convoluted second referendum bollocks.
For Reform UK, their chances of picking up the working class votes they need to turn this millionaires’ party into something of a movement are dimmed simply by the NHS malarkey. I suspect. I hope. That said, many were able to be sold on Brexit by the nonsense promise that £350 million a week would be returned to the NHS by leaving the EU. What the Great British Public want is for the NHS to be restored, as it was, by proper funding. Hopefully, all this efficiency and voucher stuff will allow them to see Reform UK as latter-day Arthur Daleys, and Reform will miss out on the honours. And we continue to wait for a left party to represent people as they are, not as some would like them to be. Early though the laurel grows/it withers quicker than the rose. And we’re still making plans for Nigel.
How do you think Reform UK and Nigel Farage will perform in the UK election? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
