Why the trade unions fear Reform

It is now several weeks since Nigel Farage’s fledgling Reform UK party dominated the local elections, a phenomenon the media have dubbed a ‘Reformquake’. They aren’t wrong. Off the back of support from a wide spectrum of the electorate, Reform gained control of nine councils and two mayoralties. It also picked up a fifth parliamentary seat, beating Labour in the Runcorn by-election.

While the major parties’ response to Reform’s rise has been predictably bland, the response from trade unions has been fearful – jittery, even. The unions are clearly worried about just how far Reform has penetrated former working-class heartlands across the country.

Speaking to the Guardian in the week before the elections, Paul Nowak, leader of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), went on the offensive. He felt the need to call Farage a ‘fraud and a hypocrite’ and accused him of ‘cosplaying’ as a defender of the working class. After the elections, Novak launched another pointed attack, describing Farage’s support for Britain’s working class as a ‘pose’.

Nowak’s comments should be seen as part of a larger, fear-mongering campaign by the TUC, aimed at immunising Reform-curious members from the allure of Farage. In February, TUC activists travelled to Clacton, Farage’s constituency in Essex, where they told residents that the Reform leader wants companies to be allowed to dismiss employees who fail to agree to ‘worse pay and worse conditions’. The following month, the TUC warned voters in Ashfield – another seat Reform won in last year’s General Election – that Farage wants to make healthcare more difficult to access for poorer people.

The unions have endorsed the Labour Party since its inception and are still largely affiliated with it. But while the unions might be tied to Labour, their own members are moving towards Reform. This poses an existential dilemma: how can they justify their political links to Labour, when their members are increasingly supporting another political party?

That working-class people are now looking towards Reform rather than Labour is hardly a surprise. Too many have seen their lives, families and communities ravaged by decades of deindustrialisation. And yet rather than fight on their behalf, Labour has consistently ignored and demeaned working-class communities, while unions have frequently done far too little to defend their members’ interests.

Labour, marching hand in hand with the unions, has taken working-class voters for granted for far too long. Former Labour MP Peter Hain once tried to warn New Labourite Peter Mandelson about the dangers of this. To which Mandelson infamously replied: ‘Your preoccupation with the working-class vote is wrong. They’ve got nowhere to go.’

But now they have got somewhere to go, as Labour and the unions are now finding out. Farage’s promise to ‘reindustrialise Britain’ resonates in a way that very little of what Labour says does.

Just look at two of the county councils where Reform has taken control, Nottinghamshire and Durham. Both regions were destroyed by deindustrialisation. From the 1980s onwards, they experienced shrinking economic growth and rising social-care bills. An increasingly impoverished population were left to fight over fewer, lower-paid jobs. Rather than confront these problems head-on, the unions have wasted time embracing the concerns of the bourgeois left, such as ‘fighting for trans rights’.

Meanwhile, their members have been looking elsewhere. They have been watching Farage attack the latest woke fads on GB News. They have seen him backing bin workers in Birmingham or turning up at British Steel in Scunthorpe. Even Reform’s deputy leader – Richard Tice, a man who made millions in real estate – has been showing off his solidarity with the working class, wearing a ‘Save Our Steel’ badge in parliament.

Much of the media’s reaction to Farage’s seismic victory has been hysterical and patronising, painting Reform supporters as provincial and ignorant. But this couldn’t be further from the truth, as the views of the many young men I recently interviewed for an upcoming book on Britain’s working class attest. Their experience of life in the modern UK is one of hard work for low pay, expensive and poor-quality housing, and a sense of deep and widespread unfairness.

Of all the people I interviewed, one man in particular stood out. He was a mixed-race man in his thirties, who works on the bins in Nottingham and boxes in the gym. He is a union member, although he gets his politics from his experience at work and on the council estate where he lives. In a story now familiar across the country, he pays over the odds to a private landlord to live in an ex-council house with his partner and daughters. Once, he would have been a loyal Labour supporter. Now, along with all of the other men I spoke to, he votes Reform. In short, he is exactly the kind of person Nowak and the TUC fear.

The unions are right to worry about Reform’s rise. But while they remain saddled to Labour, their quest to reconnect with the working class will continue to elude them. It’s time they picked a side: the Labour Party or the people?

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.