After everything, why would anyone still back Nigel Farage? In some of the comments below my piece last week about Reform UK, I spot the usual answers: Farage’s supporters are dim, racist, deplorable. Yet away from Westminster and the news cycle, Reform voters are being manufactured – not with headlines or crypto funds but through the failure of institutions they once trusted to protect them. To see what I mean, leave SW1 and go 40 miles up the road, to Luton.
In a deserted hotel bar, five men are reminiscing about how their world ended. Their minds are on a Friday afternoon in March last year, as the place where they had worked for two or three decades apiece, making friends and even meeting future wives, is about to shut for good.
Continue reading...