First Rachel Reeves at the Rochdale bus factory, now Nigel Farage with a Welsh steel worker. It turns out that 2025’s must-have fashion accessory for politicians is a real, live working-class person – Funny, really, as it doesn’t seem all that long since they were clearing the prole stuff out of their closets. That’s fashion for you.
Nigel Farage has gone even further this time, though, and told us that if Reform were elected to run the Senedd, he’d like to re-open the pits. It’s bizarre for those of us old enough to remember 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn said he’d like to look at the same thing — and was universally laughed at by journalists and other MPs alike.
We all know — and Farage knows most of all — that this isn’t going to happen. But what’s rotten about it is that a lot of ex-mining villages and towns never really recovered after the closure of their pits. I grew up in an old pit village in South Yorkshire, and there, the past could seem very attractive, because people had a strong identity then, and they were recognised for the massive service they gave to wider society.
To dangle the idea that you might somehow be able to go back is just callous — because you know how alluring it is. It’s predatory, trying to seduce people with the promise of time travel.
Obviously, it’s hypocritical. About the 1984–85 strike over the Thatcher government’s attack on mining, Farage once boasted: “I supported Margaret Thatcher. She was right… It may have caused a little pain for some, but it had to happen.”
Everyone knows that strike was about breaking the unions — the unions that fought for the safety measures in coal mines. What someone should have asked Farage is: would you have full union representation in your new fantasy mines?
Of course he flipping wouldn’t. And that’s where you see how the likes of him really like the working class to be: doughty, picturesque, but behaving how they think working-class people should behave — and not organising and sticking up for themselves, how they want to.
He’s far from the only one, to be fair. But he’s getting a bit ridiculous now.
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