Stop Trump, Stop Farage

As local election results in England trickle in, and after the result of yesterday’s Runcorn byelection, it is a bad day for all who oppose the politics of Donald Trump.

Of course, Trump doesn’t stand in UK local elections. But he has some close friends who do: Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Let’s be clear: Reform are the British wing of Trumpism. Reform UK means Trump UK.

Firstly, they are politically connected, as part of the global far right. But the links go deeper than that.

Big money is going into Reform UK now, including from donors linked to Trump. Farage spends weeks at a time in the US, being treated as part of Trump’s clique.

At his Birmingham rally, a conscious attempt to copy Trump’s rallies, Farage said Trump should “serve as an inspiration”. He has even defended importing US chlorine chicken as part of a trade deal.

But we don’t want Trumpism anywhere near our politics here. That is another reason to make the connection more explicit: while Farage wants to represent himself as anti-establishment, he is instead a puppet of a different set of elites across the Atlantic.

He represents the interests of the same big money politics, he wants low taxes for the rich, and cuts to public services. His rhetoric of scapegoating migrants and refugees for decades of failed economic policies is straight out of Trump’s playbook.

It is an open goal, and yet this Labour government is nowhere to be seen. Instead they continue to focus on pandering to Reform voters, with terrible consequences for the rest of us, while the Tories prepare to defect or merge into Farage’s party. There is a dangerous vacuum of an alternative to bring people and communities together and to tackle poverty, the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis and so much more.

Every time Reform advance politically, it emboldens racists in Britain and those scapegoating minorities to gain power and it brings us another step closer to what the US is currently experiencing with Trump. We must fight back before Reform is allowed to grow further, and we must demand better from a Labour government too.