On the eve of last week’s English local elections, the Trades Union Congress posted an Instagram clip aimed at wavering working class voters.
“Why does Nigel Farage want me to lose my job?” a worker in a Merseyside electric car plant says in the video, followed by a clip of the Reform UK leader asking an audience if they would buy an electric car.
After the crowd gives a resounding “No!”, the worker sarcastically adds: “Thanks, mate.”
Britain’s unions have long been the foundation of the centre-left Labour party. The carefully crafted attack was born of a fear that Farage’s rightwing populist message was gaining purchase on their members.
Last week’s results only cemented those concerns, as Reform swept the board in places that were historically a bedrock of trade unionism, including across the former pit villages of County Durham in England’s north-east.
Each summer the area hosts the Durham Miners’ Gala, an annual festival for England’s political left and trade unions. This year the event will be overseen by a local council that has been solidly Labour for most of the last century, but will now be under Reform’s control after the party won more than half its seats.
One of the councillors elected was Howard Brown, a local trade union official for the National Education Union, which a few weeks ago declared Reform a “far right” party.
Before last summer’s general election that swept Farage into parliament and saw Reform come second in dozens of seats, the Unite union ran an internal poll on how its members might vote.
It found “a lot of members voting Reform,” said one senior figure in the group, which is the country’s largest union and Labour’s biggest donor.
“It was very worrying, but these are traditional working class communities,” they said, adding: “The rise of Reform is something we can’t ignore, and we need to have a narrative that combats their message.”
Farage, a former metals trader and devotee of former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has in recent months been honing Reform’s pitch to appeal to the types of voters who make up the TUC’s membership and the heart of the Labour movement.
He backed striking bin workers in Birmingham, turned up at British Steel’s flagship site in Scunthorpe to call for the nationalisation of the steelmaker, and said Thames Water’s investors and bondholders “deserve to lose every single penny”.
Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, who made millions in real estate, even appeared in the House of Commons wearing a trade union pin badge.
As Reform tilts left, Labour ministers have taken more centrist positions on those three issues. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has called the bin strikes “completely unacceptable”, is hoping to find a private sector buyer for British Steel and has said little if anything about Thames Water investors.
Reform’s shape-shifting has been driven by an understanding of economic concerns among a particular cohort of target voters in working class areas, said Matthew McGregor, chief executive of the campaign group 38 Degrees.
“The fact that low-tax, bonfire-of-red-tape, Doge-fan Nigel Farage is now banging the drum for nationalising the commanding heights of the economy is extremely telling,” he said.
Reform’s growing strength in former mining areas such as County Durham and Nottinghamshire demonstrated “that there is big crossover in communities where trade unions have been strong,” he added.
A senior figure in the Communication Workers Union, which has distanced itself from Labour under Starmer’s leadership, added: “The choice really is between Labour and Reform in most workplaces.”
The person added that the more classically leftwing positions being taken by Farage in recent months — including calling for the nationalisation of British Steel — had enamoured some union members to Reform.
Farage’s suggestion that failing water companies should be allowed to collapse had echoes of previous leftwing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn or France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, they added.
“It was a breath of fresh air to be honest.”
Georgie Laming, campaigns director at the campaign group Hope Not Hate, said the crossover between Reform support and trade unionism was borne out by extensive research it had carried out between November and January.
A 100-question survey of more than 22,000 voters identified five cohorts of people most likely to vote for Farage’s party, including one it categorised as the “working right”.
That group, according to its analysis, is attracted to Reform on immigration issues but is also more likely than the average voter to be pro-workers rights.
Some of the highest proportions of Reform voters to fall into that category were in Nottinghamshire, where the party took 40 out of 64 seats on Thursday to take control of the county council.
In a sign of future problems for Labour, similarly high numbers were identified in other areas with traditionally strong trade union support, such as the former mining and manufacturing communities of South Wales and South Yorkshire, which did not go to the polls last week.
Farage, who campaigned for President Donald Trump in the US, has borrowed some of his playbook that saw Trump reach out to unionised auto workers and those in the US who felt left behind by global capitalism.
So far, no British union leader has backed Farage or Reform. TUC general secretary Paul Nowak in a September 2024 conference speech attacked Farage as a “Putin apologist fraud”. Some of its 6mn members would “be tempted to lend their votes”, he conceded.
“But people will see what a hypocrite he is.”
The TUC is campaigning on Farage’s close links to Trump, his open-minded approach to replacing the NHS with an insurance-based model and his previous comments on the Russian president — as well as highlighting his hostility to the package of employment reforms.
Yet, while many people have strong views on Trump or the NHS, it is not clear whether the general public is fully aware of Labour’s “Making Work Pay” employment reforms.
Trade unions are already preparing for a fight with Reform-controlled councils, after Farage warned local officials working on diversity or environmental initiatives to “seek alternative careers”.
Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison, which represents 600,000 local government workers, immediately called on non-unionised staff to join up in order to protect their rights.
She added: “Unions are there to ensure no one can play fast and loose with the law.”
