How much longer are Reform’s critics going to be able to get away with calling it a right-wing party? It is an odd kind of right-wing party that proposes to reinstate welfare benefits that even Labour has decided are too expensive; that pledges to nationalise the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities; and whose manifesto for the last election budgeted for £141 billion of spending increases over five years, including an extra £17 billion for the NHS.
Nigel Farage’s party is only ‘right-wing’ if you define your political spectrum entirely in terms of attitudes to national borders and on ‘woke’ issues such as critical race theory and trans rights, or if you see climate change and net zero as a left–right issue. If your political spectrum is drawn along economic lines, on the other hand, Reform is now firmly on the centre-left. It is a party that advocates big spending – big spending which almost certainly wouldn’t be balanced by the £50 billion it claims it could save by abolishing quangos and the like.
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