Chris Goodwin

Plenty of people backing Reform and Restore are decent folk who feel ignored, and they have every right to be angry: wages have stagnated, housing is out of reach and public services are stretched. Those problems are real, and the mainstream parties let them fester for far too long. But being right that something is broken doesn’t make Lowe and Farage the people to fix it. Judge them on what they propose, not on what they say about who they’re for. Both of them thrive on anger, division and distrust of our democratic institutions. Scrutinising the BBC or the courts is fair game in a democracy. Treating them as the enemy is something else, and so is offering migrants as the explanation for every problem. A voter blaming the small boats is a voter who never asks why two wealthy men have so little to say about wages, rents or the state of local hospitals. Then look at who pays for their Truss-esque plans. Reform would take around £50 BILLION A YEAR mainly from welfare, including replacing most working-age disability support with a far narrower allowance. Restore goes further still: freezing working-age benefits for a whole Parliament and scrapping the pension triple lock, while abolishing inheritance tax and stamp duty altogether! Yes, both would raise the personal allowance, worth a few hundred pounds a year to most workers. But fewer than one estate in twenty pays any inheritance tax at all. Restore would abolish it outright, a gift to the wealthiest families in the country, paid for by disabled people, low-paid families and pensioners. If they genuinely cared about working people, they’d be talking about pay, housing and public services every day. Instead they offer an endless list of scapegoats: Muslims, asylum seekers, judges, universities, unions, regulators, environmentalists, Palestine supporters, journalists, and anyone who points out how inflammatory, misleading and dangerously irresponsible their rhetoric is.

FACT CHECK: HMRC seizing money from your bank account was first introduced by the Tories 100% of Reform MPs are former Tory members 62.5% of Reform MPs former Tory MPs Reform MP Pochin is a former Tory Mayor, and Braverman, Jenrick and Kruger are former Tory Ministers.