CLIVE LEWIS: ‘Nigel Farage is flourishing as a result of individuals really feel the system is stacked in opposition to them’
Clive Lewis, chairman of the all-party Parliamentary group on race and communities writes for The Mirror on Nigel Farage’s employers’ comments
Nigel Farage was accused of siding against workers(Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images)
When Nigel Farage says employers should be allowed to discriminate, he isn’t misspeaking. He’s testing how far he can push an idea that’s been creeping into our politics for years.
The trick is simple. You don’t describe discrimination as cruelty. You sell it as “common sense”. You don’t argue for inequality. You shrug and say it’s just realism. Protections are framed as overreach, fairness as naïve, and rolling rights back as an unfortunate necessity.
Farage rarely spells things out bluntly. He nudges, hints, and dodges responsibility. He says he’s only asking questions, only warning about consequences, only saying what others supposedly think. When people react with anger, he slips neatly into his favourite role: the silenced truth-teller, attacked by elites for speaking plainly. Outrage alone won’t stop that. In fact, it often helps him.
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What matters is where his ideas lead in real life. Letting employers discriminate doesn’t make Britain fairer of better. It makes working life colder and more insecure. It gives bosses more power, workers fewer protections, and leaves more people afraid to speak up. Rights don’t disappear neatly for one group of people. Once you weaken them, everyone feels it.
Most people don’t want a society where your name, background or face decides how you’re treated. They want clear rules that apply to everyone. They want to know that if they work hard, they’ll be treated fairly. That isn’t political correctness. It’s basic decency. But here’s the harder truth we also need to face.
Farage isn’t thriving because Britain has suddenly become more racist. He’s thriving because too many people feel the system is stacked against them, and no one in power is telling a convincing story about how that will change. Politics has spent too long arguing about attitudes instead of outcomes, while rents soar, secure jobs disappear, and public services people rely on are stretched to breaking point.
If Labour wants to cut the ground from under Farage, it has to be unmistakably on the side of the people who need it most: workers, small business owners, sole traders, small-hold farmers. In short, the vast majority who know first-hand how the current system works against them.
That means taking on vested interests, not accommodating them. The privatised water companies hiking bills while polluting rivers. Developers hoarding land. Big corporations dodging tax. The wealthy donors now bankrolling Farage’s politics. Who a government chooses to pick fights with tells people who it is really governing for.
That’s how you beat Farage’s nihilism. Not by shouting louder, but by governing differently. By proving there is an alternative to a politics that shrugs at injustice and calls it realism. And by showing, in people’s daily lives, that Britain can be fairer than he ever wants it to be.
