NIGEL FARAGE has invited trade union leaders to attend Reform UK’s annual conference and claims he will lay out routes for unions to affiliate to his party. Reform, he insists, is now “the party of the workers.”

How should trade unionists read this extraordinary claim? What does it really mean?
Farage’s party receives multimillion-pound donations from billionaires, both personally and to Reform itself. His top team includes leading figures from the last Conservative government. He remains a close political ally of Donald Trump. Are these people suddenly backing the working class? Have they undergone a Damascene conversion to the cause of labour?

Or are they still the hard Thatcherites they always were — whose real interests lie with the ultra-rich and the City of London?

Farage has built Reform as an insurgent political force rather than a conventional party with deep democratic roots.

His entire political life has been spent on the far right of the spectrum. He has shown himself more than willing to twist the truth in pursuit of power.

That willingness to lie makes it essential that we take on his arguments head-on: exposing both the reactionary content of his economic programme and the cynical way he conceals it.

In the last Stand Up To Racism election broadsheet I wrote that political parties’ policies are supposed to address the major problems facing the country — the housing crisis, the collapse of the NHS, the threat of job losses from AI, and the climate emergency.

Yet Reform’s top priorities were almost entirely about immigration and deportations: Stop the Boats, Secure Our Borders, Deport all Illegal Migrants, Scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, and Restore Britain’s Sovereignty (code for delivering the first four).

Since then Reform has adjusted its public list, inserting the NHS as the fifth priority and claiming it will remain “free at the point of use and funded by public taxation.”

This is a telling concession. Farage knows that openly attacking the NHS is electoral poison in Britain.

But his past record tells a different story. He has repeatedly praised aspects of the US insurance-based model and spoken warmly about private provision.

Once in power, an insurgent outfit like Reform could easily manufacture a crisis — through deliberate underfunding or chaos — that “requires” drastic solutions. We have seen exactly this pattern with Trump in the United States.

Farage’s disgraceful comments about rage being an appropriate response to the ethnicity of the perpetrator of a horrible knife crime shows just how much he is prepared to play along with the far-right street movement; this should give us all a warning about what a Farage government would be like.

What you will search for in vain in Reform’s programme is any serious attempt to tackle the grotesque inequality scarring our society.

There is nothing about taxing the super-rich who fund the party, nothing about restoring workers’ rights shredded by decades of Tory (and weak Labour) legislation, and nothing about defending tenants against rapacious landlords. Instead, Farage offers distraction through relentless focus on migrants.

This is deliberate. By promoting anti-immigrant policies as the answer to every problem, Reform seeks to attract working-class voters it believes are susceptible to racism while diverting attention from its hard-right, ultra-Thatcherite economic agenda.

Farage wants to wind back trade union rights, make strikes even harder, weaken employment protections, and roll back tenants’ rights. He flirts with NHS privatisation. He wants to scrap moves towards net zero, handing yet more profits to energy giants while robbing our grandchildren of a habitable planet.

The racism at the heart of this approach is not incidental. When your top five policies obsess over stopping boats, mass deportations and “sovereignty” defined entirely by immigration control — and when housing and the NHS barely register — it is no surprise that many people recognise the politics as racist.

Such policies do not solve the real problems working-class communities face. They divide workers — pitting “British” against migrant, white against black and brown — while the billionaires laugh all the way to the bank.

Wage suppression, housing shortages and NHS waiting lists stem far more from chronic underfunding, austerity, and profiteering than from migration. Farage’s rhetoric distracts from these root causes.

Trade unionists in particular should see through this charade. Our movement was built on solidarity — across borders, across sectors, and across communities.

Affiliating to or even engaging positively with Reform would be a betrayal of everything unions stand for.

Real worker representation means fighting for higher wages, safe conditions, public ownership of key services, and an end to the grotesque concentration of wealth at the top. It means defending migrant workers who are often the most exploited in our workplaces and communities, not scapegoating them.

Farage’s millionaire backers and retread Tories are not offering a new dawn for working people. They are offering a rebranded version of the same failed policies that have hollowed out communities, destroyed industries, and enriched the few.

Working-class people, through bitter experience, are well placed to see through the con.

The answer is not to tail Farage or accommodate his racism. It is to build a fighting alternative.

We need mass council house building on a scale to end the housing crisis. A fully funded NHS, free at the point of use, with proper staffing and no creeping privatisation. Strong trade union rights, including the right to strike and organise without Tory-style restrictions. Green new deal jobs that tackle the climate emergency while creating secure employment. And taxation of the rich to fund it all.

Stand Up To Racism will continue to expose the far right’s lies and build the broadest possible unity against racism and fascism.

Trade unions have a pivotal role: mobilising members, defending migrant workers, and championing the class politics that actually serves our interests.

Working-class people have seen through fake promises before. They will see through Reform’s too. The task now is to unite for genuine, positive change — not let Farage’s backers divide us.

Kevin Courtney is Stand Up to Racism trade union liaison officer and former joint general secretary of the National Education Union.