Why would voters trust Nigel Farage’s claims?

The more I see of Nigel Farage, the more I start to warm to Reform voters. You’d have to be at least a little kinky to keep believing Farage’s promises while the man repeatedly tells you to your face that he’s effectively lying to you.

No one vanilla would ever sign up for that kind of treatment. Farage has already admitted that he will just make stuff up to do well in elections. Now he claims he would bring back the winter fuel payments for pensioners and scrap the two-child limit on welfare support. The latest episode of “Fifty Shades of Grey Vote” is starting!

In January, Farage was grilled by Bloomberg about Reform’s 2024 election promises. The Institute for Fiscal Studies had found that Reform’s economic plans were off by “tens of billions of pounds”.

He responded to the accusation by saying, “I fully accept the point you’re making”, but “we weren’t going to win the last election”, so the promises made in the election were just “to set out our vision broadly of where we want to go”. Translation: we were never going to be in charge anyway, so it didn’t matter that we were telling people we could do the impossible.

Trusting a politician who overtly admits to lying can surely only be explained by a desire for punishment. We’ve been here before with Nigel Farage. This week, he’s telling pensioners, and parents with more than two children, that he’s going to fight for them. But Farage is like a date who doesn’t want you talking to their exes. His exes, in this case, being a long list of farmers, fishing workers, small business owners, people who rely on the NHS, and the entirety of the working class — all the people that he promised Brexit would help.

Sixty-nine per cent of UK farmers believe Brexit has hurt them. The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations says Brexit will have cost them £300m by next year. The Federation of Small Businesses is screaming for relief from the damage of Brexit. Every medical body, from the British Medical Association to the Nuffield Trust, says that Brexit is damaging our national health. Reform’s own candidates have admitted that Brexit has made us poorer and even said that, if elected, their no-deal Brexit policy would damage our food supply for the next 20 years. Can you imagine dating someone whom you’ve previously seen cheat on every partner they’ve ever had? I’m not judging. However, if it’s not about getting a frisson from humiliation, I must ask why anyone would believe Reform’s new claims regarding pensioners and child poverty. It can’t be about helping the country. The only thing Reform is offering them is these policies and their rhetoric around minority groups. And, as a black person traumatised by the sight of gangs of far-right thugs attacking black and brown people last summer, and the fear that created — well, I really hope that, for Reform voters, it’s a craving for humiliation. It simply wouldn’t make sense to take these policies seriously.

Farage has always said he believes “in a small state and individual responsibility”. Translation: it’s not the government’s job to look after you. The former Tory turned Reform MP Lee Anderson has blamed food poverty in the UK on people not being able to budget or cook properly because, according to him, meals can be made for just 30p. This is from a party whose founding policy as Ukip — Brexit — has taken £1,000 from the average UK household. And we’re expected to believe that Reform now wants to spend billions on poor parents and pensioners? Of course, nobody sensible is saying Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has been smashing it. Its strategy of being the political equivalent of white bread, to avoid offending anyone before last year’s election, may have got the party into power but left it without a clear vision. Starmer literally said, “We are the party of the centre ground.” Parties may win elections from the centre, under this effectively two-party voting system, but delivering change for people in poverty means pushing in a specific direction. And that direction is, by definition, left, because it involves shifting the benefits of society towards the most vulnerable people to address social injustice. That’s virtually the definition of woke. Farage and Reform UK know this. That’s why they’re now adopting policies that are more left-wing than the leader of the Labour Party. As prime minister, Starmer is stuck with difficult choices to make. In opposition, it doesn’t matter to Farage how realistic his promises are, and he can afford to oppose unpopular policies.