Will Reform succeed as the party for food and farming?

Could Reform UK become a natural home of voters in the food and drink industry?

It’s not a trivial thought. Nigel Farage is routinely pictured with a pint of bitter in his hand or about to consume a whacking great cream cake. Or both. He wants to demonstrate he sends a middle finger to the metropolitan elite. Call him the Guy Richie of British politics.

Moreover, Reform UK’s success has been disproportionately focused in the east of England, where farming, fishing and food production play a massive part in the regional economy. Its poster child for 1 May is the food heartland of Lincolnshire, where Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the former Conservative minister, could very well become mayor of the UK badlands.

Farmers are alienated

Right now, food and drink could do with a party concerned to support and nurture it. In the past year, the government has proven astonishingly clumsy in its dealings with our most important sector.

Rachel Reeves’ budget seemed almost designed to alienate the industry. Farmers were and are outraged by the changes to Inheritance Tax, and manufacturers and retailers were horrified by the increases in National Insurance contributions.

The government seemed to wrongly assume those increases could be automatically absorbed. Costs, including jobs, had to be cut.

Most recently the impact of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the global trade system – frequently predicted in these columns – has kiboshed the US as a potential market for many food and drink exporters. The consequences of the global trade war pose a tough test on the importance of the food and farming industry for both the prime minister and Farage.

So far, Reform has opted to travel light on policy. Its general election manifesto contained many more pictures of Farage. This time around, its ‘Contract with the People’ has just two specific policies.

On farming, it promises an increase in what it calls “the farming budget” to £3bn, an unexplained “focus on small farms” and a promise to “bring young people into farming”. It actually has specific policies on fishing, which is a vital issue for voters on the Reform-minded east coast.

But there’s nothing on protecting food standards or on the impact of its promise to increase employers’ National Insurance contribution to 20% on all foreign workers.

Farage and Trump

This reflects the big conundrum for Reform: how to mitigate the downside of Farage’s close association with Trump. The president is extraordinarily unpopular with UK voters. So Reform representatives are super-cautious about anything related to Trump – and that includes saying anything meaningful about the problems of food.

Take Jenkyns. She is an experienced politician – years in parliament, regularly on the airwaves, even a few months as a minister. She is normally wonderfully unsubtle in her messaging.

Yet in a long interview in The Times, she spends all her time dodging tricky questions. When faced with the criticisms of a local farmer, she tells the newspaper: “I don’t know enough about chlorinated chicken.” Admirably honest, but not guaranteed to give confidence to those many workers whose livelihood depends on Lincolnshire’s many poultry processing plants.

Reform remains clear in its core issues: immigration and Brexit. But I guess those two shibboleths will be less important to voters next week. It’s not impossible that by then, the UK-US trade deal will be done. Certainly its shape will be clear. It already seems likely to include significant concessions to the US on agricultural imports and possibly some retreat on food standards.

Of course, Keir Starmer will deny the diminution in standards. He will – fairly – point to the economic benefits he has delivered, including on tariffs. Hilariously, because of his links to Trump, Farage will have to defend the deal as well. Farmers will be apoplectic and retailers, manufacturers and shoppers will be unimpressed.

But the prime minister and his chancellor won’t care too much. I bet they have made a clear choice to take the hit on food, safe in the knowledge that it screws Farage and his party, who are bound to offer public support to any trade deal that can be done. It’s very clever politics.

But the wider food and drink industry’s interests are marginalised. It still lacks a clear and coherent voice among our political parties. That is bad for all of us.

Ian Wright, partner at Acuti Associates