The fight against Farage and the rise of Reform UK starts now

However, no sooner had he began ­patting himself on the back over his ­party’s five MPs and 14% of the vote than he was ­interrupted by an activist from the ­campaign group Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), who (with unarguable logic) ­denounced Farage as a racist bigot.

As soon as the burly skinheads of Reform UK’s security operation manhandled the SUTR campaigner out of the room, ­another activist stood up to berate Farage, then another, and another.

I notice, with some Glaswegian pride, that at least two of the anti-racist campaigners who took Farage on were SUTR activists from Glasgow. More power to them, I say!

READ MORE: The reasons why Nigel Farage and Reform UK have picked up political momentum

The Reform UK leader is rightly ­hated by vast swathes of the UK ­population.

Consequently, he is no stranger to ­anti-racist protesters. In 2013, for ­example, the then Ukip leader famously had to flee an ­Edinburgh pub into the arms of the local constabulary with the chants of ­campaigners for racial equality ringing in his ears.

Farage would be well-advised to brace himself for more of this. As increasing numbers of people become aware of the true nature of his brand of far-right ­politics, the protests against Reform UK are only going to get bigger.

However, for this anti-racist ­movement to be built, racial equality activists will have to understand why and how the far-right party achieved its electoral ­success on Thursday.

The Conservative Party – having ­descended into the chaos of Downing Street Covid parties under Boris ­Johnson and Liz Truss’s economy-crashing Thatcherism on steroids – tried to save their political skins by shifting even ­further to the right, not least on ­matters related to migration.

Hence Rishi Sunak’s (below) doubling down on the Rwanda scheme, which made about as much sense, economically and morally, as bungee jumping without a rope.    

The Tories’ election broadcast – which literally depicted Labour rolling out the red carpet for so-called “illegal migrants” on the beach at Dover – reached a new low. If one had not known it was a Tory Party ad, it could easily have passed as the work of Reform UK or, for that ­matter, the fascists of Britain First or some such outfit.

Not only was the broadcast vile in the extreme, its premise – that Keir ­Starmer’s Labour government is likely to replace the Tories’ appalling ­migration policy with something considerably less ­draconian and more humane – is ­ludicrous. ­Starmer’s Labour didn’t attract the ­endorsement of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing rag The Sun by promising real, progressive change in any policy area.

This is particularly true of migration policy, on which Starmer promises a ­Border Security Command (an idea he, presumably, stole from Darth Vader around the same time that the “rebel scum” Jeremy Corbyn was expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party).

It was only the outlandish, ­unworkable and (in the words of former Tory Home Secretary James Cleverly) “batshit ­crazy” Rwanda policy that allowed for a ­cigarette paper to be slid between the ­Conservatives and Labour on migration.

Both Starmer and his loyal Home ­Secretary Yvette Cooper are as dedicated to the rhetoric of “sky-high” ­immigration as both the Tories and the right-wing press. Their critique of the Tory ­governments of the past 14 years is not that their ­migration policies were inhumane, but that they allowed too many migrants into the country.

This is a shocking position for ­Labour to adopt, given the ­brutality of Tory migration ­policies. Lest we forget, these ­included: the ­incarceration in ­detention ­centres of innocent ­people (­including ­children) who were seeking ­asylum; Theresa May’s policy of ­creating a “hostile ­environment” for migrants (apart from the likes of ­Russian oligarchs who were happy to buy favour with the ­Conservative Party); and the forcing of people into desperate, dangerous (often deadly) crossings of the English Channel.

If we want to understand the ­worrying 14% vote for Reform UK, we need only look at the fact that – while millions looked for a way to punish the hated ­Tories at the polls – both the

READ MORE: Keir Starmer refuses to call Nigel Farage a racist

Conservative government and the so-called ­Labour ­“opposition” were pointing in the same racist, rightward direction on ­immigration as Farage.

This reminds me of the comment that Jean-Marie Le Pen (then leader of the fascist National Front in France) used to make whenever his opponents tacked right on matters of race or migration.

“Do you want the original”, Le Pen asked, “or do you want the copy?”

It’s a question that, in her general ­rhetoric, his daughter Marine, leader of the renamed (but equally fascist) ­National Rally, puts before the French electorate today, and which Farage put before UK voters on Thursday.

“Are you angry with the Tories and the Establishment?”, the Reform UK argument goes. “Then blame them – not for massive disparities in wealth, or for big business profiteering during a pandemic and the subsequent cost of living crisis – but for allowing too many migrants into the country.”

The anti-migrant policies and ­rhetoric of both recent Conservative ­governments and Starmer’s Labour Party did ­nothing to undermine the appeal of Farage.

­Rather, they played directly into his hands.

The argument that has to be won with many thousands of people who voted for Reform UK as a protest against the ­Establishment is that the enemies of ­working people across the UK do not ­arrive in small boats. Rather, they arrive in private jets and limousines.

Migrants are not responsible for zero-hours contracts, poverty wages, mass redundancies, outrageously high private rents and substandard housing.

Moreover, Farage – a private school-educated former trader in the City of ­London, who has advocated a US-style private healthcare system to replace the NHS – is no friend of working-class people.

The Reform UK leader is often ­represented by large sections of the UK mainstream media as a colourful ­celebrity, the “plain-speaking” bloke you might meet down the pub. In reality, he is far nastier and much more dangerous than this depiction suggests.

The truth is that Farage is an ­integral part of the “unite the right” axis ­envisioned by the far-right American ­political ­theorist Steve Bannon (who is currently doing time in a federal ­prison for refusing to appear before the US House Select Committee that ­investigated the far-right assault on the US capitol on January 6, 2021).

In other words, Reform UK are up to their neck in an international network of ­far-right and fascist forces that includes Farage’s old pal Donald Trump, ­Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and the far-right/neo-Nazi coalition that is the AfD (Alternative for Germany).

From the defeat of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, to beating the ­National Front in the 1970s and 1980s, and pushing back the British National Party and the English Defence League in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, anti-fascists and anti-racists across the UK have a good track record when it comes to taking on the far right. It is time to mobilise again, this time against the threat posed by Farage and Reform UK.