Neither Reform UK nor Matt Goodwin Speak for the Working Class
Both can only ever speak about it - usually from London studios - while advancing policies that would actively hurt it.
I have spent what some may call an unhealthy amount of time analysing Reform UK policies over the past 18 - 20 months or so. Whether they’ve been on immigration (unworkable), the economy (fantasy) or taxation (so regressive it would make Thatcher wince), most of them have crossed my proverbial desk for a going over and each and every time I find myself quietly muttering, on good days “what just a seccy, something doesn’t seem right here” and on slightly more annoyed days “what the actual fuck are these guys thinking?!”
This has been front of my mind over the past 24 hours or so on the back of Reform’s most recent announcement - not the Suella defection (that’s its own whole kettle of that screams of desperation), but rather the decision to stand Matt Goodwin as the party’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election scheduled for 26 February after Andrew Gwynne stood down for “health reasons1.”
The whole situation absolutely fascinates me, and not only because it’s Goodwin, ex-academic turned GB News talking head and semi-professional X troll, but because it’s such an incredible illustration of what the party of Reform UK is actually morphing into: a party that endlessly talks about the working-classes in the UK, while at the same time advancing a package of “policies” that would on even a basic analysis do sweet blue buggerall to improve peoples lives, and specifically, people like the ones that live in Gorton and Denton.
The constituency of Gorton and Denton itself is probably one of the best illustrations of what “left-behind Britain” looks like in real life. It is a constituency with some of the sharpest indicators of deprivation in the United Kingdom:
Nearly 48% of children living in poverty after housing costs, according to End Child Poverty.
Over 33% of households living in Fuel Poverty compared to the 17.9% national average.
Just over 49% of households owning their property, against the 62% average in the rest of the country.
The people of Gorton and Denton do not have it easy, to say the least. Poverty, lack of access to services and overall national neglect have left what was once the Hattery centre of the UK a shell of itself.
Which is ultimately what makes me look at Goodwin and ask “how? Why? What are they thinking?”
Those three questions lead me to have a little closer look at Goodwin, a man who has managed to make quite the career for himself as the supposed translator of working-class anger, all while living very comfortable within elite institutions. He is a university educated academic, former think-tank fixture and now full-time media commentator. None of this, is of course a crime, but it does make the optics slightly questionable when he rails against the supposed elites as though he isn’t one culturally, professionally, geographically and economically.
Reform itself is always very quick to tell us all that it speaks from places like Gorton and Denton, but, in reality, it only ever increasingly speaks about them, and usually does so from London studios, in establishment columns and on national talkshow panels. They do all of this with the confidence of someone who will likely never have to queue for a GP surgery, fight a landlord over mould in the front room or worry about whether the next benefit reassessment will be the event that finally tips the household budget completely into freefall.
That gap between who they say they are and who they actually are runs right through the Reform Policy platform, and the longer and closer you scrutinise their policies, the more you realise that nothing in there is truly a plan for improving the lives of working-class communities like Gorton and Denton, but rather a weird combination of complete fiscal fantasy, entirely undeliverable promises and policies that would actively make lives for working-class people worse.
In terms of fantasies, Reform’s economic policies are absolutely the pinnacle. Their flagship idea is to propose around £90bn in tax cuts, including lifting the personal allowance on income tax to £20k while also raising the higher rate threshold to £70k and then adding a 15% cut to corporate taxation, abolishing business rates for many firms, slashing stamp duty and completely gutting inheritance tax.
This sounds amazing - but ultimately far too good to be true.
Independent analysis by the IFS2 found that these policies are complete nonsense. The cost of these tax cuts will be closer to £88bn rather than the £70bn that Reform has been nattering on about and even under the most optimistic assumption, the package would leave a gaping hole in the treasury to the tune of around £38bn.
But! They say. They have a plan!
Except they don’t, because the solution of saving £150bn from stopping BoE interest payments, eliminating supposed “waste3”, cutting net zero, encouraging benefit claimants back to work and finding those ever elusive “efficiencies” we’ve been hearing from government about is again, not in any way set in reality, and even Nigel Farage had to quietly admit it last year when pushed.
The problem with this type of policy is that for the communities within Gorton and Denton, this wouldn’t be theoretical. Local government has already been stripped back to the bone with social care being especially fragile, public health services mere shades of themselves and overall there really is terribly little to “save” anymore, so when Reform talks about billions saved from “waste”, what it actually means is even further cutting the services that this particular constituency would be most dependent on.
The tax cuts themselves look fabulous, of course, but even then the main winners will not be the people of Gorton and Denton. Raising the higher rate of tax threshold? Hands thousands of pounds to the top 10% of earners. Cutting inheritance tax? In Reform’s policy that overwhelmingly benefits people with estates over £2m. Scrapping business rates? Helps property owners.
Not a single one of these policies will even touch sides in a constituency where half of households don’t own their own homes and nearly a third of adults have no formal income.
Dare to raise this discrepancy with Reform, and it does what it does best - it changes the subject. Instantly we’re talking about immigration, gender, DEI, “two-tier policing”, each one of which is designed to keep attention fixed on identity while the economic programme quietly manages to distribute upwards instead of sideways or downwards where it’s most needed. It is, for anyone from Reform, a far easier task to talk about who belongs in a place than to explain why exactly your tax plans appear to benefit the already wealthy.
Sticking to the identity thought though, this is a place where the mismatch between Reform and Goodwin with Gorton and Denton really falters quite badly, because this is an ethnically diverse community.
In terms of White British, the constituency is made up of around 51% of people identifying in this direction, while 26.6% are Asian British with particularly long-established Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, and around one-in-five residents don’t speak English as their main language4.
Reform has been very explicit on their policies on access to welfare, housing and public services - basing these on citizenship status or length of residency, which would disproportionally hit these exact communities.
Add to this that Goodwin himself has been emphatic about the fact that simply being born in the UK does not automatically make someone British, a statement that he has refused to disown, you are looking at tens of thousands of constituents that he is painting as conditional. That they are, at best, a sort of provisional citizen.
Combine these two aspects, and it becomes clear that not only is Reform barking up the wrong tree, but they’re chucking what is in effect their worst dead cat at the situation at the same time.
When it comes to housing? Reform has made it very clear that they will side in nearly all cases with Landlords by opposing the abolition of no-fault evictions and have railed at the attempts the Labour government has made to strengthen protections for tenants. I will remind you, over half of the constituents that they are looking to win votes from are in rented or social accommodation.
Drawing this to a close, I need to say something out loud here and bring in a final point. I’m a commentator online myself, I write political analysis, not quite for a living, and certainly not nearly to the extent that Goodwin does, but I would personally not stand for office on that qualification alone, and I would certainly not do it in a constituency like Gorton and Denton where I simply don’t have the local knowledge, lived experience or any real connection to the area.
Ultimately the selection of Goodwin as candidate feels to me not only completely tone-deaf, but the logical endpoint of Reform UK’s entire operation. We have here a party that has claimed for years to be the champion of the working class, yet selects a comfortably middle-class academic who has spent years monetising the resentment of the disenfranchised from the safety of London TV studios and think-tank seminars.
Add to this the recent open-armed welcome of a group of what are most certainly not working-class ex-Conservative MPs and that veneer that was already terribly thin becomes near transparent.
At its core, democratic politics is supposed to be about representation - and if you look at a party like Reform and the candidate that they’ve put forward, you have to be honest and say they deserve better.
They deserve better than having a candidate foisted upon them that effectively puts nearly fifty percent of them into an “other” class of citizen and renders large parts of the community as conditional, and they definitely deserve better than policies that would even further hollow out already near non-existent services.
Reform has in this case not only shown that they don’t truly understand working class communities - they’ve shown that they’re not particularly bothered to even try.
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AKA exceptionally dodgy WhatsApp messages were found that made Gwynne look… not great.
Funny point on this - I remember quoting the IFS on the subject of Reform policies at the time, and was told that they were just a bunch of communists anyway. Oh, how I laughed!
Because we all know how well that’s gone with their constituency level DOLGE exercise.
I must, of course, stress that not speaking English as your main language doesn’t mean you can’t speak English at all, despite what people like Rupert Lowe might want people to believe.
Well put Bear.
All Reform has is several coats of gloss trying to conceal rotten woodwork, no primer and crumbling fabric.
They have the interests of the rich at heart and that organ itself is rotten, poisoned by the Faragian levels of bigotry that are their real driving force.
All else is BS intended to bluff the credulous and hard of thinking.
It says something that Reform couldn't come up with a candidate from the constituency.