Shun The Stereotypes

Ian Lavery writes:

The Makerfield by-election has thrust Reform’s candidate selection back into the spotlight. Robert Kenyon, a recently elected Wigan Borough Councillor and plumber who stood for Reform in 2024, was once again chosen to represent the party. By-elections by their nature attract significant scrutiny. And this one, given its circumstances, is attracting more than most.

Days after being selected as a candidate it was revealed that Mr Kenyon had made some pretty unpleasant comments online. His remarks relating to Carol Vorderman are perhaps those best known to the public. But perhaps even more important are his statement that ‘I’m sexist, sorry but I am’ and his extreme anti-abortion positions, including the shocking claim that British women are using them as a form of contraception so that they can ‘shag anyone they want’.

Under pressure, Kenyon has distanced himself from his avowed sexism, but when asked to apologise to Carol Vorderman and to women more generally he has repeatedly deflected. Meanwhile, Reform has made the telling decision to double down on their defence of the candidate.

Last September John Allen, a council candidate elected for Reform in Blyth and Ashington, was exposed for a series of comments he made on YouTube. Amongst the slew of racism and homophobia was his explicitly stated desire to kill Keir Starmer. This was enough for Reform to kick Allen out of the party, along with a number of other candidates with beyond-the-pale views, in what seemed to be an attempt to look more professional. The party’s new attitude, however, seems to be more tolerant of such views.

Under threat from their right flank, Reform are now allowing some sinister characters to sit within their ranks. Only a couple of weeks back a councillor in Sunderland who said Nigerians should be melted down to fill potholes was allowed back into the party after an investigation. The defence of Kenyon appears to be following the same tactic.

Nigel Farage will neither condemn his candidate nor ask him to apologise. As the Reform leader put it, ‘they’re the sort of comments that you won’t necessarily get if you’re an Oxford-educated career politician living in a nice postcode in London, but I tell you what, they’re the kind of comments you’ll hear in every pub in the country every evening’. What a disgrace.

Though the Clacton MP might well have seen the inside of a few pubs, this privately educated former investment banker and professional politician is hardly in a place to judge what working-class people talk about over a pint. This is a grotesque smear on ordinary people up and down the country, to whom he’s attached a totally distorted stereotype.

It’s something the press aren’t talking about, but it has reached public discourse. A couple of weeks ago I was walking my son’s dog, Olive. As I was about to take the corner and head for home I was stopped by a former colleague from Ellington Colliery. It was great to see him. But he was incensed by something he’d seen on the TV: that crude comments from Kenyon were being normalised by Farage, that they were being presented as something working-class men said and did all the time. It’s something I’ve thought about deeply since.

I’ve thought about my own dad and what he might have said. My dad was a mountain of a man. A man who had worked at the pit since being a boy. A man who suffered an injury at home and the injustice it brought impacted him in the workplace. He liked a drink, he liked a tab [you might have explained that for a London audience, Ian, lest it get altogether the wrong idea], he liked a bet. He was what might be termed a man’s man.

He would have been absolutely horrified to hear the grotesque comments of Reform’s Makerfield candidate. He would have been incandescent with rage to be told by Nigel Farage that this was what men like him talked like in the pub, or social club in his case.

Is this really the caricature of millions of working-class men that Farage wants to perpetuate? That we are all proudly sexist, that we all speak in such crass terms when we’re ‘down the pub’?

There’s no doubt that many working-class men and women have lost faith in politics to change their lives. No doubt many are incensed by the degradation they see in the communities and the lack of agency to make a positive change. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that many are willing to listen to alternative voices and that the easy answers spewed out by the likes of Farage are getting a hearing.

But once again, this isn’t a case of the mask slipping. It’s them telling you, in no uncertain terms, who they really are. Farage must be laughing his socks off every night, checking that hefty bank balance of ill-gotten crypto cash and wondering how this upper-class Thatcher tribute act has so many people listening to him. Working-class communities are crying out for hope. A hope that once proud places and once proud people can feel that pride once again. Reform and Farage offer nothing other than scapegoating and division.

It’s time to shun the stereotypes perpetuated by those who want to line their own pockets. Working-class communities have a diverse range of views, but the vast majority of people simply want to see a hopeful future. They are warm, friendly and rooted in solidarity: a million miles from Reform’s crude caricatures.