Before we expose Reform UK yet again, enjoy the people of Oxford telling racists and one of their ringleaders where to go.
Racist right-wingers organised a protest outside Lush Cosmetics in Oxford over their window display supporting asylum seekers.
Only about four people turned up and anti-racists greeted them with chants of “Get yourself a bath bomb to wash away the Nazi scum.” (Tony Zimnoch)
The latest polling reveals Reform UK dropping 12% since last November as the public wakes up to megaphone politics and the realisation that Reform UK hates the UK. They despise most of its people and appeal to a small minority of bitter, ignorant people who deserve so much more than rancid multimillionaires and their puppets.
The vast majority have awakened to the profoundly sickening appearance of a political party draping itself in the Union flag while showing such naked contempt for the people who actually make this country what it is.
Reform UK speaks endlessly of “saving Britain”, “protecting our borders”, and “defending our culture”, but what it is really doing is poisoning the national conversation with fear, bitterness and manufactured hatred.
This is not patriotism.
It is parasitism.
They feed off the country’s anxieties while offering nothing that heals, builds or unites. They take every hardship people feel, every hospital waiting list, every rent rise, every sense of social decline and rather than confront the real causes, they turn those frustrations into rage against whoever can most easily be blamed.
Migrants.
Foreign governments.
Human rights lawyers.
International bodies.
Former colonies.
Minorities.
There must always be an enemy.
And now we have their latest grotesque offering: a proposal to block visas from countries that seek reparations from Britain for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.
The sheer moral ugliness of this is breathtaking.
Rather than engage honestly with one of the darkest chapters in British history, Reform’s instinct is to lash out in anger and punish entire nations for even raising the question.
That is not strength.
That is petulance masquerading as policy.
It is the politics of a sneer.
The transatlantic slave trade was one of the greatest crimes ever committed by human civilisation. Millions were kidnapped, brutalised, trafficked and worked to death. Vast fortunes were built on that suffering and much of the industrial wealth that helped power Britain’s rise was inseparable from it.
You can debate reparations.
Reasonable people do.
But to respond with threats, punishment and vindictive visa bans is the language of resentment, not statesmanship.
And that is the core of Reform’s entire appeal. An Orwellian march into the bleakest parts of the human soul.
Resentment.
Everything is grievance.
Everything is outrage.
Everything is theatre.
Look at the wider catalogue of proposals.
An ICE-style deportation command to “track down, detain and deport” hundreds of thousands of people.
Plans to deport more than 600,000 people in a single parliament.
A promise to scrap indefinite leave to remain, destabilising settled families and people who have built lives in Britain for decades.
Threats of visa freezes against countries that do not comply with deportation demands.
Calls to leave the ECHR, undermining fundamental legal protections and Britain’s standing in international law.
This is not a programme for national renewal.
It is a menu of punishments.
A politics obsessed not with improving lives but with finding people to hurt.
And that is why the anger many feel towards Reform is not simply ideological disagreement, it is moral disgust.
Because they claim to speak for Britain while constantly diminishing it.
Britain is not just a border checkpoint.
It is not a slogan.
It is not a vessel for endless culture wars.
Britain at its best is a country of fairness, decency, institutions, tolerance, law and community.
Reform offers the opposite.
It offers suspicion.
It offers cruelty as spectacle.
It offers a vision of the country that is smaller, colder and meaner than the one most people actually want to live in.
The tragedy is that this rhetoric only truly appeals to a relatively small minority — those who want politics to validate their anger rather than solve their problems.
People who want someone to blame.
People who mistake volume for truth.
People who cheer every new punitive headline without ever asking whether any of it is workable, lawful or humane.
Meanwhile, the real crises go unanswered.
Where is the plan for the NHS other than selling it off to their mates?
For social care?
For schools?
For council insolvency?
For wages that have flatlined for years?
For housing that young people can actually afford?
For broken transport infrastructure?
For economic growth beyond slogans?
There is none.
Because fury is easier than governance.
Scapegoating is easier than policy.
And waving a flag is easier than loving the country enough to fix it.
That, ultimately, is the anger so many people feel.
It is the fury of watching a party claim ownership of Britain while showing such disdain for the values that actually hold this country together.
They do not defend Britain.
They exploit its fractures.
They do not heal division.
They sharpen it.
And they do not offer hope.
Only enemies.
