Working in events offers (oft-needed) variety in an otherwise gruelling hospitality industry. One shift I’ll work on a hen party and a wedding, another I’ll do catering for Belgian football club KRC Genk’s private dinner. But variety is inherently neutral, and with every opportunity to work on someone’s big day comes the chance of working on a less ideal, even execrable, function. Thus was the case when I arrived for a regular Thursday evening start on August 28 and discovered I’d be working on a 200-pax dinner for Reform UK Scotland. I was disappointed, as my efforts to avoid meeting the worst elements of our political system had seen its end, but also unsurprised for a couple of reasons; one, this was the second time the party made its way to Ingram Street, the first being a smaller launch party for their Scottish branch on March 5 organised by Reform UK’s Scottish Campaign Director; second, Tory MSP for Central Scotland Graham Simpson had appeared on stage at a press conference with Leader Nigel Farage MP a day earlier to announce his defection, marking him as their first representative in Holyrood since May 2021.
Simpson and Deputy Leader Richard Tice MP both gave speeches at the front of the restaurant between courses, filled with usual anti-immigrant drivel and SNP slander about poor public infrastructure. During thedinner, I helped run food, clear plates, and bookended it with a stint in the cloakroom to gawk at the vast collection of HUGO BOSS jackets that adorn these working-class heroes (one of whom generously donated me a £1 tip)! Towards the end of the event, around midnight, I heard two older female party members engaging in a conversation about trans people, at which point one of them said the t-slur and bemoaned how ‘trans people are everywhere’. Two of my colleagues, on the floor and bar, separately reported hearing racial slurs tossed around while clearing tables.
My experience, and that of others who worked the event, speaks to the heart of fascist performativity and political respectability. Reform, on the surface, is a Crombie-clad who’s who of Lombard Street veterans, portraying themselves as ‘disruptors’ tired of the eternal two-horse race between Labour and the Tories. It’s an effective façade, even if it’s complete bullshit. But behind closed doors, away from the cameras and a few drinks down, they exhibit the same type of far-right crassness they seek to expel from their ranks. The kind of low-filter brass attitudes and unsavoury language that turns Farage away from Oswald Mosley wannabe Tommy Robinson.
Importantly, however, these attitudes do not sit at arm’s length outside of Reform but rather sit deep within it. It’s the same ‘adopt-and-reject’ strategy wielded by Adolf Hitler against the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, during his rise to power in the 1920s. Hitler sought to eliminate the paramilitary that helped him be appointed as Chancellor, not just out of fear of a threat to his authority, which he brutally consolidated during the Night of the Long Knives, but also to clean house in the hopes of the NSDAP being seen as a legitimate political party.
Farage conducted a similar but far less lethal purge of Reform’s ranks after the 2025 UK local elections in spring by booting Councillors who openly shared Nazi trite (despite explicitly stating to have vetted all local candidates). In March, Hatfield Councillor Mark Broadhurst was booted just four weeks after being elected to the City of Doncaster Council for saying Hitler would’ve been a “legend” if he had targeted Muslims in a year-old post (while not necessarily targeted, over a thousand Muslims were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp). Two months later, Wayne Titley, Councillor for Eccleshall & Gnosall, was suspended for “personal reasons” and his support for Robinson and bemoaning of an ‘invasion’ of ‘illegal’ immigrants.
Farage wants to be Prime Minister, and to do so, he needs people to vote for him. But if he exclusively appeals to the fringes of the British electorate, he will never set foot in Downing Street. So, by appealing to very real issues facing the 99% of voters, like the cost-of-living crisis, he can co-opt the language of anti-capitalists to shift the blame from his friends in The Gherkin to his perceived enemies crossing the Channel. He favours nationalisation of British Steel and said his party would nationalise 50% of the water industry. That rhetorical tactic was infamously used by Hitler to gain favour among the socialist-curious German populace.
Buried in the archives of interwar American political journalism lies a 1923 interview with Hitler for American Monthly in which he proclaimed: “I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.” Farage’s ministerial career amounts to the adage ‘when nothing goes right, go left’. But like any talentless art school reject knows, you just can’t fake it.
Reform UK has been approached for comment.
