'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 Senior economics correspondent

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.

Rightwing populists around the world are increasingly campaigning on the consequences of deindustrialisation: from Donald Trump's efforts to champion the US rust belt to Alternative für Deutschland targeting east German auto workers. Railing against net zero, sky-high energy prices, and threats to sovereignty amid a fracturing geopolitical landscape are central to the playbook.

It is, however, ironic that it is a privately educated former commodities trader and career politician offering hope for Britain's deindustrialised communities, where successive governments have promised - and largely failed - to turn around decades of stagnation in living standards.

In the first of a series on the battle for Britain's deindustrialised areas, the Guardian maps out the rise in support for Reform, and speaks to its campaigners, Labour, the Conservatives, union leaders and economists to document the high-stakes fight.