Farage challenges Labour as ‘working class’ party
Nigel Farage has insisted that Reform has replaced Labour as “the party of the working class,” while introducing a litany of policies which he claims represent the interests of working people.
In a speech on Tuesday morning, the Reform leader goaded the Labour Party, accusing leaders of being “absolutely terrified” of him.
Farage lambasted Labour’s Chagos Islands deal as being of “absolutely no legal necessity,” and accused the party’s “net zero mania” policies of costing Brits £40bn a year.
He suggested that the current Cabinet is unfit for government as it is made up of “a bunch of lawyers” who have never “set up or run a private business”, and therefore lack “the economic competency to run a country.”
While “there are jobs being created in wind and solar, but for every job created in that sector,” he said, “there are three or four being lost in other parts of the economy.”
He described the fight between Reform UK and Labour as one sided; while the Labour government depicts him in weekly Prime Minister’s Questions as “a complete rotter” who “supports Putin and wants to abolish the NHS,” and has “no means of actually answering back or fighting back.”
Farage challenged the PM to go to “a working class club somewhere in the Red Wall” with him, to “test” which party best represents the working classes.
Reform UK has been making use of local clubs as settings for political events to illustrate exactly this point, even holding local meetings in an old Labour Club in Wigan.
‘Labour cannot be Reform’
Farage addressed the notion that Labour is chasing Reform votes by taking a more hardline approach to legal and illegal migration.
“Terrified of what Reform is doing to the Labour vote, he tries to ape us in policy. The problem is, what he does, nobody actually believes him, given his record,” Farage said.
On immigration – the issue Reform is best known for, and which attracts most of its voters – Farage implied that the government is disingenuous in its promise to lower net migration, pointing out the issue “wasn’t even mentioned” in the PM’s list of priorities for government.
Farage vs Labour ranks
Farage did not shy away from personal attacks on senior figures in the government, insisting “Labour have a problem with their personalities” and blasting the cabinet as “low grade.”
The Reform chief launched an attack on Starmer’s character, presenting him as “dismal”, “uninspiring,” disconnected from real life – not to mention, “unpatriotic”.
“This man doesn’t believe in anything,” said Farage, mocking the Prime Minister for being “scripted to the nth degree.”
He criticised Starmer for not understanding “what it’s like to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and go out, and work physically hard.”
Farage’s opponents have pointed out that the former MEP – the son of a stockbroker who attended a top London private school and then became a trader himself – has little experience toiling away at manual labour.
The Reform leader said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is “away with the fairies,” and that Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds is “not the qualified solicitor that he told everybody he was.”
Labour responds
Labour Party Chair Ellie Reeves responded to Farage’s offensive by addressing his policy announcements.
“There’s nothing new about what Nigel Farage said today: the tens of billions of pounds of fantasy promises he made this morning are exactly how Liz Truss crashed the economy, devastating the finances of families across the country.
“Those families don’t need to be told what the consequences would be of this nonsense. They live through it every month through the higher mortgages, higher rents, higher prices, and higher bills inflicted upon them by the last government.”