Staff writer Charlotte Galea pens a love letter to the people of her working-class hometown and considers why many are turning to Reform UK for help.
Just a train ride away from the city, the grey, the tall, and the hurried make way for the green, the open, and the leisurely, in just a single hour.
Home; neighbours ask for a spare egg, the shops are avoided during the school run, and people play pool at the working men’s club down the road. In the warmer months, everyone sits on their front gardens chatting and cooking meat on BBQs that have been gathering dust in the shed for a year, or pile up in fields to spend their pennies on knick-knacks at the weekly bootfair, eating stale burgers and drinking cans of fizzy drinks from a van.
They go to the schools their parents attended and leave them as quickly as they can. They worry about money, mould, and damp. They fret about their children, and they tut at the price of bread and milk. They go dancing, they wait for buses that never come.
And on the day of the local polls, most of them voted for Reform UK.
At my small, terraced house, we border the constituencies of Kent and Medway, the latter of which chose not to hold a local election last month. Here, Labour are still in power, but in Kent, the Conservatives have been ousted from the driver’s seat for the first time in almost thirty years.
Reform’s sweeping success, with 57 new councillors elected and an overwhelming majority, is not a surprise. On the day of the general election in July last year, they received 9,989 votes in Chatham and Aylesford, 9,316 in Maidstone and Malling. I do not believe it would be a stretch to suggest that Medway, had they also been able to vote, would have turned to Reform, as well. After all, across the country, the party received 31% of the vote share.
‘Britain is Broken’
I attended a Catholic school in Maidstone. The bus took an hour, and my school meals were paid for. Everytime I come home, I make sure to fit in a visit to the Wetherspoons there, to meet with my mates. Just yards away, Nigel Farage spoke at the Kent Showground there, addressing neighbours, school teachers, nurses, construction workers, acquaintances and shopkeepers and he told them that their country was broken. That he and his party are the only ones able to provide it with the help it needs.
The people where I live are struggling to afford the basic necessities, as are many of the working-class. They found it difficult to heat their homes in the winter, glad now for the warmth of the summer on the horizon. They barely think about holidays, and if they do, they look forward to a half-an-hour trip to the seaside, where they will spend a few days in a caravan. They cannot imagine a day when they are not calculating everything in their shopping baskets before paying, and removing a few items they think they can go without.
Chats with my family and my neighbours only touch the surface of what the people back home are worried about. A block of flats being made for DFL’s (Down-From-London), the demolishing of local woodland and countryside fields to make way for new, expensive houses, waiting times for the small, local GP, and boats crossing the Channel in Dover. Each leadership has not had their interests at heart, but Reform is spreading their arms wide to people in towns like mine.
When you are living from month to month, a new alternative is attractive, and the party puts itself across as the favourable option for working people like me.
‘Reform Will Fix It’
Speaking to the people of my constituency in Maidstone, Farage argued for the end of NHS waiting times, slashing of energy bills, beating the cost of living crisis, the abolition of interest for student loans and tax breaks for doctors and nurses. Essentially, a weekly-shop that doesn’t make you cringe, a warmer home and money left over to afford a pint in the pub round the corner. He called on working people as ‘the silent majority’, and argued that we ‘support [their] common-sense view of the world.’ He said:
“We know the silent majority out there supports our values and our belief that family, community and country matter to us more than anything else.“
Nigel Farage
But, he also claimed that the “reason the NHS doesn’t work is the population explosion,” and suggested that in the last ten years, 7.2 million foreign-born people have registered with GP practices. This figure concerns the 6.5 million migrant GP registrations in the last ten years which, in reality, may include double-registrations for anyone who has relocated and anyone who lived here impermanently. Regardless, Farage argued that the UK was becoming ‘unrecognisable’ and that it was most obvious in Kent, where we are on the edge of a ‘political earthquake’.
His fear-mongering continued as he suggested the country “is going down the drain” and that we have “ten years to turn this around.” Reform’s trademark ideology emerged, as well, as he stated, under the current administration “we must say we’re male, female, or one of the other sixty-nine genders.” Targeting the ‘people’s army’ he said, “We believe in Britain, we believe in the British people. We believe in the values that those who went before us fought for that made this country great.”
Under the guise of supporting working people, the party villainises and scrutinises members of society that they do not like or agree with. Their racist, nationalist and transphobic ideologies emerge as they suggest stopping the boats and halting immigration, as well as multiple instances of attacking Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives that support minorities of the country, not to mention their wish for Britain to leave the European Commission on Human Rights.
Farage has made himself into the ‘everyman’, crowned ‘common’ and elected as someone you could have a pint with. But while he says he has the common people’s best interests at heart, that he understands them, he does not really care about us.
Just like Donald Trump, who promised an affordable America, he is just as elite as the people he debates, and just as billionaires now swarm the White House like flies, and swathes of people are being deported in the USA, the weekly shop will not become cheaper with his British counterpart.
Globally, there is a similar shift, with Trump having gained back the White House in January the year, Alternative for Germany (AfD) a far-right party that emphasises reduced immigration, particularly of Muslims, and uses nationalist rhetoric, similarly gaining traction and though Italy, elected the first female Prime Minister in Giorgia Meloni, she managed to get there with her manifesto of ‘Dio, Patria, Famiglia’ (God, Fatherland, Family). These parties posit themselves as harbingers of change for ordinary, working people, and suggest an alternative to the current political circumstances that are causing the poorest to become only poorer.
‘We Want Our Country Back’
All of this is, of course, not to say that people in towns like mine are entirely blameless in their role. While I love where I come from, it has historically been a Conservative place to live, my FaceBook feed has never been free from concerning posts, and those same boot fairs where I collect my knick-knacks always feature a stand devoted entirely to Churchill memorabilia.
There, too the Reform UK party were stood last year, promoting themselves before the election amongst the childrens clothes and old crockery, and a few around me accepted their racism and transphobia too willingly. But they cannot all be grouped together, and for most, the desire for a better life for themselves, for survival, wins out against all, making them the perfect targets for an attractive propaganda that promises an easier life.
It is no wonder that the people of my home town rarely leave – it’s hopeful that we might be able to afford a car, or a beer once a week, let alone moving elsewhere. With the rate of student loans and university fees, the maintenance of classism that still exists in Russell Group universities and the lack of support for those that do eventually manage to make it further than the high street, there are very little incentives for those who do simply wish to leave schooling at sixteen. More than this, there is no guarantee that their lives will be better if they did manage to move, with graduate jobs increasingly hard to come by.
Britain Needs Reform?
Visiting Paddock Wood, Tunbridge Wells for its celebratory fireworks the day after the local election, Nigel Farage said, “Come the next election, […] Kent is at the top of our list.”
Farage and his people know exactly how working people feel and are using them to gain power and control. And while they assure us everything will get better if they are in charge, that reducing immigration and stopping children from even hearing the word ‘gender’, the reality is a tactical and logistical maneuver to gain power and control, using the common people as ladders, stepping on our shoulders and heads to get up. And when they get there, they will not extend a hand back down – and they will certainly not care a single jot about your weekly shop.
So, to the people of my home, where fields are abundant, where smiles are exchanged with strangers and where window-watching is fair game, I have a few words.
We cannot go back to a time when Reform UK was not in our council. The people around me have made their decision, but I believe strongly that, with Nigel Farage’s beady eyes on Downing Street, we ought to gravely reconsider. Take note of what happens under his party’s control. Read their manifesto and consider the ramifications of its contents. Think critically about who the real enemy is, because I promise you, it is not the poor, hungry people coming here for a better life.
Carry on with your dancing, your pool, and your BBQs. Sing your hearts out to Come on Eileen and pick your children happily up from school. Chat with the other parents outside the school gates, find your little joys in a life that can make you feel quite unsatisfied at times. But when you’re perusing the boot fair stalls again, skip past those Reform campaigners, and, for me, maybe tear down their banner, as you do so.
There are many problems in our area. And while Kent absolutely needs help and attention, I firmly believe that it does not need Reform.
