This is no single bloc marching under one ideology, or even a mass of ‘red-wall’ voters. What unites them is a desire for something different
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ho are Nigel Farage’s army, the voters who want him as our next prime minister? Few questions are as important in British politics. Were an election called tomorrow, the favourite for No 10 would be Farage, whose immigration policies are in some ways more extreme than those of the BNP were. His party’s role model for government would be Donald Trump’s US: Elon Musk-style cuts to our public services and masked agents snatching families off the streets.
A few months ago, many in Westminster and across the country would have considered this a cautionary nightmare, a catastrophe that would unfold if Keir Starmer failed. But in the week of another red-on-red assault and after 150 opinion polls in a row topped by Farage’s Reform UK, it’s no longer a scare story. It’s the most likely prospect.
And still the question of who actually supports Farage meets cliches and bluster. He is “a tribune of working-class rage against the elites”, claims Downing Street adviser Maurice Glasman, while the BBC’s Chris Mason catches an “insurgency vibe”. An ex-City trader turned Brussels politico is now Merrie Englande incarnate, the teller of inconvenient truths from our bombed-out post-industrial heartlands. See our Nigel go hard-hatted into a steelworks! Watch him sink pints with ex-miners, or gambol along an Essex pier!
