‘They feel betrayed’: how Reform UK is targeting votes in Britain’s manufacturing heartlands

In the first in a series, the Guardian maps out the rise in support for Farage and how parties are targeting the UK's deindustrialised areas

When Nigel Farage called for the nationalisation of British Steel on a visit to the Scunthorpe steelworks this spring, it was a marked change in direction for a man who had spent almost all of his political career campaigning for a smaller, Thatcherite state.

Two years earlier, he had questioned why British taxpayers' money should be thrown into keeping the fires of the very same blast furnaces burning. Back in 2018 he told an interviewer: I supported Margaret Thatcher's modernisation and reforms of the economy. It was painful for some people, but it had to happen."