Reform Don't Know Working Class Britain

...And their Miscalculations Might (Fingers Crossed) Prevent Farage from Entering No10.

In the run-up to the 2014 local and European elections, Farage’s previous outfit UKIP, created the #WhyImVotingUKIP hashtag. And because Twitter used to be a place to have some irreverent fun (as opposed to the sewer of far-right bots, trolls and pornography that it has, I am told, become), it was immediately ceased upon by people taking the piss.

My favourite sarcastic retort was from a user who wrote ‘#WhyImVotingUKIP I’m mixed race and I want to see which half of me they’ll kick out of the country first’. I have thought about that tweet, periodically, ever since. It so brilliantly and succinctly encapsulated the problem with the hard right’s attitude towards Britain’s ethnic minorities.

Following the Green Party’s decisive victory in Gorton and Denton, many of the newspapers unquestioningly regurgitated Farage’s sore loser hissy fit. He claimed, apparently as a result of concerns raised by an organisation called Democracy Volunteers, that there had been several instances of ‘family voting’ in the constituency. This excellent Substack details why these claims are largely unsubstantiated and likely to be absolute gubbins.

The failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin said his loss was due to a ‘coalition of Islamists and woke progressives’. It was a curious assertion to make, being as the word ‘Islamist’ is really only used in one context – to describe extreme, fringe religious beliefs which centre around a violent hatred of the West and are highly misogynistic, antisemitic and homophobic. Quite why ‘Islamists’ would vote for Hannah Spencer, an outspoken working class white woman whose party is led by a proudly gay Jewish man and has unwaveringly progressive policies, is something of a mystery.

Meanwhile, calling their twelve-zillionth press conference so far this year, a furious Farage demanded changes be made to the voting system because, he claimed, the current one is open to ‘fraud’. This is straight out of the Trump playbook: Election results or polling which go their way are considered legitimate, whilst those that don’t are ‘fake news’ or somehow counterfeit.

Similarly, the first publicly available poll of Reform members published earlier this week found 54% of them believe non-white British citizens should be encouraged to leave the country or be forcibly deported. When questioned about this by a Channel 4 journalist, Farage was shirtily dismissive and blamed Hope Not Hate, who published the research. He declined to acknowledge that it was conducted by Survation, who are a respected polling company.

It’s quite obvious what’s going on, here. Farage’s career has been forged by courting those who are openly hostile to anyone who isn’t white and British. He is trying to walk the extremely fine line between keeping them on side and not alienating the majority of the British public who, whilst generally sceptical about immigration after 30 years of relentlessly being told to be by huge swathes of the British media, aren’t white supremacists.

But Reform have made a big miscalculation. Their world view seems to be predicated on the idea that there are three groups of voters: ‘Islamists’, ‘wokes’ and ‘patriots’. In their reading, ‘foreigners’ are somehow trying to hijack British values, ‘wokies’ are helping them and everyone else, the ‘silent majority’, are just watching all of this helplessly. This is how the perpetually online radicalised right want us to see things, but it’s about as far from the realities of British working-class society as it’s possible to be.

Here on the ground, where grass can be touched, we aren’t divided in this way. Non-white and non-British born people are our friends, partners, families, neighbours, colleagues. That’s the thing about normal people – we talk to each other, we depend on one another, we forge bonds, sometimes we fall in love and make babies with people from different backgrounds and cultures to our own. The forced deportation more than half of Reform voters apparently support would cause absolute devastation, tearing apart families and communities. Not to mention it would leave many dual-heritage children without parents and grandparents.

That’s why restricting who can vote, whilst a fairly transparent and antidemocratic attempt to rig elections in Reform’s favour, wouldn’t, I believe, have that effect. It’s also what made the #ImVotingUKIP tweet so memorable. You can’t simply remove black and brownness, Muslimness or foreignness from Britain, in the way racists would prefer. Human beings don’t work like that. In the words of my LBC colleague James O’Brien ‘it’d be like trying to remove the eggs from a baked cake’.