REFORM’S pledge to crack down on employers for hiring people without legal residence in Britain is a bid to get back on the front foot.

The scandal over Nigel Farage’s wealthy sponsors refuses to go away, and together with a fresh face at Number 10 has cost Reform its top spot in opinion polls.

Plan A, to reassert his greater popularity with the public than the mainstream parties via a staged showdown in Clacton, has gone badly wrong. Since nobody at Westminster would play ball he can triumph only over various unknowns and joke candidates, which will prove nothing.

So Zia Yusuf has been deployed to announce Plan B. It too is meant to showcase Reform’s anti-Establishment credentials. Prison sentences for corporate bosses who hire illegal labour. Crippling fines, up to 10 per cent of global turnover.

This is a sinister policy. But it isn’t stupid. The impunity of a boss class who routinely break the law is a source of genuine resentment.

It is why contracts-for-cronies and Covid lockdown breaches by the Boris Johnson gang brought down that premiership.

It is one reason the conduct of privatised water companies is so explosive.

Excrement-strewn beaches, unsafe drinking water and the discharge of huge volumes of raw sewage into rivers are outrageous enough as it is — but the knowledge that the CEOs in charge receive salaries in the millions, that the flow of dividends to shareholders is as constant as that of filth into our waterways, is incendiary.

Reform hopes to tap into hostility to corporate fat cats. It pretends to champion working-class Brits: “Corporate CEOs have been making a fortune by hiring illegal workers and undermining British youngsters. Reform will jail them and stop illegal working for good — we will stand up for British workers.”

It will not, of course. Reform would repeal the Employment Rights Act, stripping millions of rights to sick and holiday pay. Farage says the minimum wage should be cut for young workers.

Though its target is ostensibly corporate bosses, the victims will be black, Muslim and migrant workers. Reform wants to turn worker against worker, encouraging a snitch culture where “illegals” are reported to the police.

That will increase racism against workers whether they have the legal right to work here or not. It’s already happening. Racist abuse and assaults on public service workers are growing more common; a survey published this month by the Society of Radiographers found a sharp rise in racist abuse of NHS staff. The “hostile environment” doesn’t check whether you have papers.

Two things are necessary to expose Reform’s anti-Establishment act.

One, divisions in the workforce need to be overcome. Trade union organisation is the surest way to do it, and a co-ordinated campaign to test new access rights in the Employment Rights Act would either pay dividends or expose weaknesses in the legislation that need rectifying. Here, law enabling two-tier workforces must also be overcome: Shabana Mahmood’s attacks on the rights of migrant workers need to be reversed.

Two, public anger at corporations and the rich needs to be channelled to its proper targets. Labour chased headlines with legislation last year that could theoretically jail water bosses, but only if they cover up sewage spills, which they don’t need to do since there are so few consequences anyway.

Jailing the executives of firms that break the law — whether by poisoning the water, defrauding the taxpayer or indeed illegally sacking several hundred workers by Zoom as P&O did a few years back — would be a strong signal that the age of impunity is over.

It’s a big ask of a Labour government, but it should be a demand of the left. We are for solidarity, and for peace — but we are also for justice. A left that cannot harness popular anger will never eclipse the right.