Reform UK launched its local elections campaign in the Birmingham Arena last Friday, with plenty of Trumpian pomp and circumstance.
Reform’s leader Nigel Farage rode in to deliver his speech on the side of a JCB digger, rolling through a mock-up of a run-down Birmingham, featuring a boarded-up pub, a betting shop called ‘Labourbrokes’, and streets littered with rubbish as a result of the ongoing strike.
“Your council is broken, Reform UK will fix it” read giant screens, echoing “Trump will fix it”. Alongside was a scrolling ticker that displayed council CEO salaries, potholes per borough, and council debt interest.
Britain is Broken. Britain needs Reform. pic.twitter.com/7C3YbVu1Nv
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) March 31, 2025
Beneath all the flashy theatrics, the message was simple and clear: Britain is in serious disrepair, and the establishment is to blame.
As with Trump across the Atlantic, it is precisely this message that has allowed Farage and Reform to tap into a growing anti-establishment anger amongst layers of the working class.
The cost of living crisis has not abated, our education and welfare institutions are still crumbling, and average living conditions have not improved one iota for the majority.
Everywhere you look, there are scars from decades of austerity. Starmer and Reeves are waging a war on the poor, most recently with their attacks on the disabled through slashing the welfare budget.
It is no wonder that people are desperately seeking a way out.
Many party members at the rally in Birmingham said they were ‘disillusioned’ with establishment parties like the Conservatives and Labour, and had turned to Reform as they felt that it spoke for ‘the people’.
The scene is then set for Farage who, on the side of a heavy digger, tells ordinary people that the establishment has betrayed them, and that “Reform will fix it”.
In the absence of any viable left-wing alternative, it makes sense that Farge’s populist rhetoric has gained an echo.
Political vacuum
There has naturally been a mood of revulsion amongst young people at Farage’s divisive rhetoric, demonstrated by the protests that flanked the event.
Unfortunately, however, most of the left is failing to explain what is underlying the rise of Reform, and instead focuses solely on Farage’s racist and anti-immigration policies. In some cases, this has included implicitly calling for a vote for Starmer’s Labour.
Such a view cannot explain why the most emphatic responses were to his calls to cut bloated bureaucracies, eradicate tax for those earning under £20,000 a year, and to “reindustrialise” Britain.
It is true that Farage delivered his usual anti-immigrant rhetoric, promising to deport all illegal immigrants, but is this truly any further right than our current Labour government? Tied as they are to big business, proud as they are of their 24,000 deportations?
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People are looking for answers, and a failure of the left to provide them leaves the door open for people like Farage to win the ear of a layer of the working class.
A major political vacuum exists, and if the left won’t fill it then figures like Farage – in a distorted and demagogic form – will do so instead, giving voice to the millions of workers who are angry at the establishment. This is what Reform is expressing.
The way to cut across this is not to outflank Reform to the right – as Labour is doing – nor to give in to liberal hysteria about the ‘rise of fascism’ – as some on the left are doing.
The only thing that can cut across the rise in Reform is a fighting left alternative, based upon a revolutionary working-class programme aimed at our real enemies: the bosses, the billionaires, and their decrepit system.
