‘They feel betrayed’: how Reform UK is targeting votes in Britain’s manufacturing heartlands

Reform’s Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf are targeting seats with a higher share of manufacturing jobs than the country at large. Composite: Guardian Design, Getty Images, Alamy, PA

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.

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.”