There are a few things we can safely predict will happen at next month’s local elections. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey will dig even deeper into the vault of 1970s children’s TV stunts involving props and horseplay to disguise the fact he has few decent policies.
The Tories will fall off the electoral map as 99% of people can’t recall who the leader is and what she thinks, and the same number can remember who the past ones were and what they did. Labour will get its backside handed to it as a result of nine, mostly dismal, months in office and consequently a veteran opportunist with more faces than Big Ben will reap a whirlwind of votes.
Pollsters predict the elections will be a big success for Nigel Farage ’s Reform UK, but for anyone thinking of jumping on this desperado’s latest populist bandwagon, here are a few things to bear in mind.
The multimillionaire, ex-public schoolboy claims to be “parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn” as he rebrands himself a closet socialist. Yet the former stockbroker has openly spoken about shrinking the state and cutting taxes for the rich which would benefit his own elite. He says he wants “a good partnership” with trade unions yet in last summer’s election manifesto, Reform vowed to “make it easier to hire and fire” workers.
More recently, every Reform MP voted against Labour’s employment rights bill which would ban zero-hours contracts and give all staff the right to sick pay. When Margaret Thatcher died, he claimed he was the only British politician “keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive”, yet he now wants us to believe he was against privatisation and mine closures as he advocates nationalisation and the “reindustrialising of Britain”.
He’s no Comrade Nigel, but a dyed-in-the-wool free-marketeer, on record repeatedly for saying he would sell off the NHS, who would stick it up the workers not stick by them. The dog-whistler peddled the whopper that there were 26million unemployed Europeans eyeing up every British job vacancy, while giving his taxpayer-funded secretary’s job to his German wife. He has fawned over Vladimir Putin and openly backed the likes of Marine Le Pen and the far right German AfD party.
He now has 10 outside jobs that some analysts say could earn him £900,000 on top of his MP’s salary. How little must he think of his Clacton constituents when all he grafts for is himself? He’s suddenly distancing himself from Donald Trump, yet a year ago he was so in thrall to him he initially claimed that helping to make him president was more important than standing to be an MP.
He says Britain is Broken but gives no mention of the Brexit he orchestrated that has shrunk our economy and cost us billions in tax revenues. You might be justified in believing this country is broken. But you would be wrong to believe Farage can mend it.
He only has gaga-land fantasies about cutting immigration to zero, smashing all things woke, slashing taxes, blaming every problem on foreigners and enriching himself as he stays at the centre of the national conversation. Like the Big Orange Grifter across the Pond whom he so adores, Farage is only in it for himself. Unless you’re into snake oil, don’t buy a word he says.
Get UK politics insight with our free daily email briefing straight to your inbox