Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is a danger to us all
The party whips up racism and Islamophobia. It threatens everyone except the very rich elite.
Less than a month after they won five MPs at the general election we saw the far right riots and the fierce attacks on mosques and hotels where refugees were housed. The demonisation of migrants, Muslims and refugees by Farage and Reform UK MPs has given confidence to racists and fascists on the streets.
Reform UK looks with admiration at fascists in Europe. Their party chair Zia Yusuf pointed to Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) and to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France as inspiration for the future.
Their multi-millionaire leadership and pro-corporate policies show they are very much not an anti-establishment party. They have nothing to offer ordinary people – except scapegoating
The blame game
Reform UK pushes a politics that exploits ordinary people’s anger and blames the cost of living crisis on refugees, Muslims and migrants.
It is about trying to point the finger away from the bosses and the rich, who Reform UK promise to protect – and cut taxes for. Migrants helped to build our NHS. Reform UK wants to destroy it
Part of the establishment
Reform UK’s president, Nigel Farage, models himself as a ‘man of the people’ – and yet he is a stockbroker, like his father.
Farage went to Dulwich College, one of the most expensive private schools in Britain. He has since made his money working for European banks and currently has £1.3 million in assets, as well as being the majority shareholder of Reform UK.
Farage has previously been exposed for tax evasion by opening a trust fund in an offshore tax haven, in a bid to save thousands of pounds in tax.
Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice is a multi-millionaire CEO and ex-Tory donor. These are not exactly men of the people.
Cutting taxes for big business
Reform UK claims to be on the side of the ordinary people, but it has pledged to cut corporation tax for the largest corporations in Britain.
At a time when many corporations are making billions in profits, while public services are in desperate need of investment, they want to give a hand-out to big business.
A threat to the NHS
Nigel Farage said, “I think we are going to have to move to an insurance based system of healthcare”. Reform UK wants to give tax breaks for private health insurance and pledges to increase the use of private healthcare in Britain. This is a policy only for the rich who can afford it.
Reform UK wishes to savage public services to pay for tax cuts for private schools and private healthcare
Their election manifesto laid out £50 billion of cuts to the NHS, the education system and social care.
Riddled with racists
Farage has played with racism since his earliest days in politics. In 2008 he named Enoch Powell, whose 1969 “Rivers of Blood” speech has been a touchstone for racists and fascists ever since, as his political hero.
In 2014 at the Ukip party conference, he said that “parts of Britain are now unrecognisable and look like a foreign land” because of migration and that “having whole areas taken over is unacceptable”.
Farage also said in 2014, “Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.”
During the 2015 general election, Farage suggested Muslims in Britain “lack British values” and described them as wanting to form “a fifth column and kill us”.
In 2020, in response to Black Lives Matter protests in London, Farage said, “A new form of the Taliban was born in the UK today. Unless we get moral leadership quickly our cities won’t be worth living in.”
Reform UK is riddled with racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry.