'Feeling betrayed' How Reform is targeting votes in manufacturing heartlands

When Nigel Farage called for the nationalisation of British Steel on a visit to the Scunthorpe steelworks this spring, it was a marked change in direction for a man who had spent almost all of his political career campaigning for a smaller, Thatcherite state.

- Richard Partington

Two years earlier, he had questioned why British taxpayers' money should be thrown into keeping the fires of the very same blast furnaces burning. Back in 2018 he told an interviewer: "I supported Margaret Thatcher's modernisation and reforms of the economy. It was painful for some people, but it had to happen."

After gaining a fifth MP and sweeping to a string of victories in England's local elections last month, his Reform UK is coming for Labour in places the party once considered its traditional heartlands: the former mill towns, pit villages and workshops of northern England and the Midlands, the steel towns of south Wales and the shipyards of Scotland.

Farage's success in what journalists and politicians know as the "red wall" - ripped from Labour control by Boris Johnson in 2019 - is no coincidence. The targeted campaign plotted from Reform's Millbank Tower headquarters overlooking the River Thames has the general election in 2029 squarely in mind.