Saturday, 12 September 2026

To understand Nigel Farage and Reform, just watch The Producers by Mel Brooks

 Have you ever watched The Producers by Mel Brooks? If you haven't, you should. Mostly because it is a brilliant and hilarious film (I mean the 1967 version, not the awful, turgid remake). The central character is a Spiv like chancer called Max Bialystock, who is a highly unsuccessful chancer, who funds his terrible productions by seducing rich elderly ladies and getting them to fund his terrible productions. His life is transformed when he meets earnest accountant Leo Bloom. Bloom realised that Max has invented the perfect scam by accident. All you need to do is get a bunch of naive people to funnel a shedload of money into a show. Promise them the earth in rewards when it is a hit. You them make a production so awful that it closes on the first night, to terrible reviews. Because the show fails, no one will ask for their money back and you keep the lot. All you need is the worst script, the worst director, the worst actors and the worst director. You hype it up to the maximum, offer small bungs to unbribable critics, knowing they will be disgusted and pan the show, Simple, isn't it? The only real problem will happen if the show is actually a success, despite doing everything wrong.

Today I awoke to the news that Nigel Farage and Reform had received the biggest ever bung for a political party from a crypto-billionaire. I simply couldn't help but be reminded of the Mel Brooks classic. For many years, when Nigel Farage ran UKIP, he had the best job in politics. He was a Euro MP. You get paid a fortune, you have almost unlimited expenses and you don't have to do any work. It is a matter of public record that Farage never thought Leave would win the Referendum. When they did, he realised the gravy train was over and UKIP fell apart. I don't know who the Leo Bloom character was who persuaded him to get involved in the Reform project, but clearly something happened. The scam is different. The carrot isn't a juicy job in the EU Parliament, it is a much bigger pot of cash, as we seem to be continually finding more and more. Unlike Max, it is not rich old ladies who are seduced for cash (although strangely rich old ladies are the core of the Reform support base). For Nigel, it is crypto billionaires, etc that are to be seduced. The carrot is simple, give us a pot of cash and we will deregulate the UK economy, so you can make even more cash. As we have seen, the cash rolls in. I don't know too much about the world of crypto, but what I do know is that it attracts gamblers, who love a punt and when they win convince themselves that it is because they are very clever. Just the type of character that a chancer like Farage sees as ripe for financial seduction and rinsing.

I first started having my suspicions when I saw the team he has built. The Tories got absolutely mullered at the last election. The one thing that was clear was that the public hated them. So what would be the most logical thing to do if you were doing a Producers style scam? You'd recruit the most bonkers Tories that you could find, the ones that people either turn off the telly because they are so horrible, or keep it on, because they enjoy watching a car crash. People who were absolutely associated with the failure of the last Tory government. Farage recruited former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. It is the job of the Home Secretary to keep the country safe, so Farage picked someone who had completely failed to do so, and who has no self awareness at all. He recruited Nadine Dorries, who was most famous as culture secretary for giving interviews when completely plastered. He recruited Robert Jenryck, a fomer Justice Secretary who again had a record of total failure. Other key figures are rather strange. Zia Yusuf is the Home Affairs spokesman. Despite being a practising Muslim, he is best known for criticising other Muslims. He has seemingly fallen out with many of his colleagues and also has aspirations to be leader. I speak to many Reform supporters and when I ask them who else in Reform, other than Farage, would they trust with the top job, I am invariably met with silence, or the name of someone I've never heard of. Most are deeply uncomfortable with the dodgy Tories that have been recruited. 

Then we move on  to the script. Max chose a script called "Springtime for Hitler" written by an unreformed Nazi, on the basis that it was the absolute worst one he could find. I won't mention what might be seen as another parallel here. Just that the script was chosen because it was awful. Whcih brings us to Reform policies. Reform are riding high in the polls, but this is not based on actual policies, but on the basis that they are anti immigration and a belief that they will 'do something'. Whenever Reform actually make a policy announcement, it invariably is pulled apart within a couple of days and is never mentioned again. A great example is Nigel Farage's commitment to deploy the Royal Navy in the channel to "stop the boats". There were three major problems with this, The biggest is that we simply don't have the capacity to do this. The very Tories who Farage is so keen to recruit shrank the Navy to a point where it can barely perform its basic defence functions. The second problem is that when you board refugees onto a naval ship, they become our problem. British warships are simply not allowed to sail into French ports and dock without permission. The third problem is that the global situation as it stands at the moment, means that the Royal Navy is not set up for this sort of work, large, relatively slow warships are not designed to intercept small boats and decant people in the middle of the sea from them. We would need a whole fleet of new, fast boats that are purposely designed for the task and we'd need to properly train and fund the whole thing. I know that many Reform supporters would love this, but it is not a trivial undertaking. 

As for Farage's economic policies, this is what he is proposing

  • Public Spending Reductions: Proposes roughly £80 billion to £150 billion in spending reductions across public services, government waste, and administration.
  • Welfare Reform: Aims to slash welfare spending by targeting disability benefits, including removing Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for mild or non-major anxiety, requiring in-person third-party reassessments, and restricting welfare access primarily to British citizens. 
  • Net Zero Scrapping: Plans to abandon net-zero carbon emission targets and subsidies to save billions, though critics argue this creates economic risks and lost revenues. 

    • As you can see, there is virtually nothing that is properly thought out and costed. How many times have we heard Labour and Tories state that they will "cut waste and administration". If it was that easy, it would have been done years ago. When they say they will cut public services, is this librarys, bin collections, street lighting? 

    As for Welfare Reform, whilst targetting disability benefits may sound attractive and we are bombarded with stories of people who are on the take, with no real disability, such broad brush strokes usually end uop hitting decent, honest people who tell the truth and missing those who know how to play the system. I believe that if it would work, the Tories (lead by the likes of Boris, Braverman and Jenryck) would have done it.

    Scrapping Net Zero targets sounds attractive to many. I would agree with many that the whole implementation of the Net Zero agenda has been botched. Given that we have coal and gas reserves, I think it is insanity to import these, when we still have a requirement for them for the country to work. Shipping coal from abroad usually in large,  diesel powered ships adds more carbon to the atmosphere. We should have a proper policy to phase these out, but using our own supplies. We should be doing things like updating planning laws to require all new homes to be energy efficient, have solar panels, batteries etc. We should have sane and sensible transport policies, with long term improvements to public transport and infrastructure. But this isn't what Reform are proposing. They are proposing a sudden jibe in government policy that will throw everything into chaos in planning and infratstructure spending, 

    What does all of this actualluy mean? Well you have a bunch of undeliverable policies, presented by a bunch of largely discredited clowns. What could possibly go right? Well the punch line of The Producers was "We picked the wrong play, the wrong actors, the wrong director, how did it all go right?". Springtime for Hitler was a massive hit, so they blew up the Theatre and all went to jail.

    And therein lies the conundrum. Millions in the UK are totally disillusioned with the mainstream UK political parties. Many feel that they are not being listened to. Many feel that the people who live in the UK are treated badly by our own government, whilst the red carpet is rolled out to immigrants. Simply addressing these fears by saying "All of this is just dog whistle politics stirring up a bunch of racists" is not the way that you win arguments. What has actually happened in the last 10 years is people have become bolder about saying things that had become socially unacceptable. I actually agree that millions of people in the UK, mostly those at the bottom of the pile, get an absolutely raw deal. The estates where the Union Jacks went up, where the is no jobs and little prosperity, have been let down for decades. Everyone knows this and no one is interested, the perception is that there are no votes in it. This is the bedrock of the Reform support. If one good thing comes out of the rise of Reform is that maybe politicians will be forced to address this. If they don't we may yet have the nightmare scenario, that I beleive Farage dreads, where he becomes PM. I think he has seen the film and knows the ending.

    The election will not be decided in wealthy areas such as Camden and Hampstead. It will be decided across the country in places like Derbyshire, former red wall seats. There was a council by-election this week and it is quite sobering. I don't know the area, but clearly the Andy Burnham bounce has passed them by


    My view is that Farage wants to do well enough to keep the cash rolling in, whilst making sure that this is not enough to actually win. The crypto bosses must be kept believing and pouring the cash in, it must be credible. It is pretty clear to me that the donation came because Reform are plunging in the polls. Farage clearly said "We need this now or we are f**k*d" and it worked. Whilst £36 million sounds a lot, consider this. It costs 91p for a second class letter. This won't even cover  a second class mailout to the 48 million registered UK voters. Parties like Labour and The Tories have a well organised team of local activists to deliver these for free. Where Reform have been found wanting is in on the ground organisation. I genuinely don't think donations from crypto billionaires deals with this. What it does do though, is make sure that Nigel Farage won't be short of beer, fags and expensive plonk for a very long time.

    The big tragedy of this is that there are millions of very disenchanted people in the UK who have been taken in by all this. They have hopes and aspirations. They think that these very rich, career politicans care for them. I believe that nothing could be further from the truth. The bottom line is that Reform is not properly run. This is not just my view, right wing super pundit Tim Montgomerie said the same thing earlier this week, after resigning from Reform. 


    Where do I think it will all end for Reform? I suspect there is a clue in the final scene of the Producers.



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