Nigel Farage is “today’s incarnation of the politics of Enoch Powell”, the business secretary, Peter Kyle, said at the Co-operative party conference.
Kyle described Reform UK as “far right”, while stressing that boosting economic growth was needed to “build an economy and a politics that people can trust to deliver for themselves, their families and their communities”.
He told the conference: “The truth is that without securing higher, sustained economic growth, reconnecting people and politics, generating trust in the potential of democracy and importance of good government becomes almost impossible.
“And the appeal of the parties of the far right – with their dogma of disruption, division and despair – it becomes, too, alluring.”
Kyle added: “We see it today with Reform, just as we did in previous times with the National Front and the British National party.
“Lack of economic growth it is the cause. Nigel Farage, today’s incarnation of the politics of Enoch Powell, is the effect.”
Powell made a speech widely remembered for the phrase “rivers of blood” in 1968, when he was a Conservative shadow minister, which was blamed for inflaming racial tensions at the time.
It comes days after Reform UK was accused of embracing racism after it picked a former academic who argued that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds were not necessarily British as the head of its new student organisation.
Matthew Goodwin, who is now a hard-right activist and prominent Reform supporter, posted on X that he believed even being born and brought up in the UK did not mean that people from black, Asian or other immigrant backgrounds were always British.
Earlier this year, in response to Farage’s opposition to the government’s Online Safety Act, Kyle claimed people like Jimmy Savile would use the internet to exploit children if he was still alive. He insisted anyone against the act, such as Farage, was “on their side”.
