Optics could hardly be more different. At a stage, Nigel Farage was in an ancient city of Steel Galloise talk about reopening of coal. On another, Keir Starmer appreciated A comfortable cat With a technological multi-millionaire bearing a leather jacket of £ 7,000.
Does this show that the reform leader of the United Kingdom has managed to use his words, park your tanks On the labor lawn and become the voice of the workers? As always in politics, it’s a little more complicated.
On the one hand, Starmer is not exactly a foreigner at the factory. A little over a week ago, he used a glass plant in St Helens, Merseyside, as a backdrop for a speech Condemn the tax plans of the reform. The last months have seen it appear on car production lines, arms companies and railway infrastructure deposits.
As Prime Minister, you have to take each industry seriously, and it was logical to Starmer to open London technology Week alongside Jensen Huang, even if the head of the American company of semiconductors Nvidia is a man whose brand look is a Tom Ford leather jacket.
Complications work in both directions. For all this fading, used his speech to Port Talbot to transmit a message from Donald Trump of reindustrialisation led by fossil fuel, his natural environment involves a little less dirt under the nails.
To take an example on Monday, Farage in Las Vegas Two weeks ago, “launch of our crypto and digital asset invoice”, when he was in fact a guest speaker during the sumptuous Bitcoin 2025 conference.
We do not know if Farage was paid for appearance, but he is not foreign to business concerts. Since he became a deputy, he pantalous £ 40,000 for a speech at an offshore tax conference and £ 280,000 promoting gold ingots, not to mention television work which pays £ 2,500 an hour.
And yet, in a survey published last week, It has become that A little more British voters think that Farage – a former city merchant educated by schools – is more working class than Starmer, who, as we have heard several times during the general elections, the son of a tool manufacturer. What’s going on?
A context is that in reality, many people believed it about – 19% for Farage and 17% with Starmer. Why so little for the Prime Minister? Partly, it is probably his long pre -political career as a lawyer, then director of public prosecution – and in particular the chivalry that resulted.
More generally, it is just to say that the impressions of the voters of politicians are often a little misty. A long term Yougov Tracker Among the most popular British politicians, the Brexit conservative counterpart was the top David Frost Top, and the secretary of ghost education, Laura Trott, third – improbable results largely supposed because people confused them Late television host And Olympic cyclist respectively.
More relevant is that, with regard to the support of voters, the reform is the first choice among the voters of the working class. A Survey last month said only 17% supported the workforce, compared to 39% for the reform.
Farage is very aware of this current advantage and makes a regular discourse point in the working male clubs, channeling Trump’s paradoxical status as a rich man who spends largely with other rich men but nevertheless attracts support in private areas.
That said, Starmer is determined to move this reform reservoirs by emphasizing another similarity with Trump – the fact that frage policies seem more generally intended for the management class than those of the factory.
Paul Nowak, the secretary general of the TUC, Recently articulated This fading was “cosplaying” as a voice of the workers’ classes, and that its opposition to the bill on the rights of the government’s employment and the lack of coherent economic plan showed its lack of authenticity.
Even when Farage speaks of the return of heavy industry and calls for the nationalization of the water industry, expect more than the same thing of Downing Street, as well as the insistence of Starmer according to which a policy of “Truss 2.0” of the “truss 2.0” of mass to the most harmful to ordinary families.
And if you run a factory, prepare for more political visits.