Reform UK’s manifesto last summer was clear: a Nigel Farage-led government would “make it easier to hire and fire” workers. Eight months on, Farage was at pains to praise trade unions, saying his party had “a good partnership” with them. So which one is it?
There are two broad answers. The first is that, as with most politicians but particularly Farage, there is an element of saying two contradictory things at once. But also, in the era of British Steel returning to state control and Reform pursuing votes in Labour heartlands, the political landscape has changed.
It was the latter that led Farage to choose a working men’s club in County Durham as the location for a speech on Tuesday in which he talked up Reform as the successor to Labour as the voice of the ordinary working man and woman.
In a lengthy post-speech Q&A, Farage did lash out at the National Education Union after it formally labelled Reform as “far-right and racist”, but he was at pains to stress his desire for a “sensible relationship” with unions and company managers. Asked about the bin workers’ strike in Birmingham, he avoided condemnation of Unite, the union involved, focusing his fire on the Labour-run council.
This incarnation of Farage-the-comrade was not entirely new. A week earlier, he visited the stricken British Steel plant in Scunthorpe – some days before the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, made the same trip – to call for the company to be nationalised.
It is fair to note that this is not your everyday industrial crisis. Aside from steel’s totemic status in the British political consciousness, the fact the Scunthorpe site needed rescuing from seemingly neglectful Chinese owners made this a political no-brainer for all parties.
But for Farage and his party there is a broader path to tread – as next month’s local elections approach – with the message that Reform’s tanks are on Labour’s lawn in post-industrial heartlands in the north of England and Midlands, bringing into play a new pool of potential voters with interests beyond immigration, culture wars and metric measurements.
In February, a poll led by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that about two-thirds of Reform voters support key measures in the government’s employment rights bill such as banning zero-hours contracts and giving staff the right to sick pay from the start of employment.
This is where the saying-two-things-at-once idea comes in: as pointed out repeatedly by Labour, every single one of Reform’s MPs voted against the employment rights bill at its second reading, while Farage was the only party representative to turn up to oppose the third reading.
Whatever the warm words for unions, this is still where Reform largely faces trouble. When asked after Tuesday’s speech how Reform planned to finance many billions of pounds of tax cuts, Farage gave a vague answer but one heavily focused on cutting business regulation, a move that has not traditionally been helpful for workers’ rights.
It is fair to say that most unions are wary of Farage. “We’ve got a job to do pointing out his hypocrisy on all this,” one union source said. “He’s not on the side of workers but on the side of exploitative bosses.”
An official was more blunt: “Reform are part of this wider rise of populist, extreme-right groups across Europe, and anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.”
There is, however, an extent to which this is all less contradictory than it may seem. Gawain Towler, who was Farage’s longtime press officer, said his former boss had always been supportive of union members – just not necessarily their leaders.
He said: “We are fully in favour of things like collective bargaining and the right of unions to fight their corner. That’s what unions should be about, not the middle-class capture of union management that we now see.”
Towler said a more explicit shift towards things like steel began under Richard Tice, Reform’s former leader who is now the party’s deputy leader, who held the party’s 2024 Welsh conference in Port Talbot, the site of another threatened – and now defunct – steelworks.
Members may not even agree with union condemnations of Reform, Towler added. “I remember a survey of Unison members back in 2015 which said that 30% supported Ukip. I wrote a letter to the leaders suggesting they might want to move their political donations from Labour to us. I didn’t get a reply.”
