KEVIN MAGUIRE: 'Nigel Farage could never be trusted to run Britain after getting Brexit so wrong'

Police-style mugshots and fingerprinting just to go on holiday around Europe are another major reason why Nigel Farage and Reform UK could never be trusted to run Britain.

The hard-right career politician and his crew, who missold Brexit as El Dorado, would slash jobs and incomes, ruin the NHS and destroy the welfare state while deepening despair and division. Quitting the European Union is understandably regretted by most of the United Kingdom, who would vote to go back if we had another referendum.

At the weekend, one good friend of mine on Tyneside added his voice to the hordes sickened at being conned in 2016. Farage is as guilty as fellow Leaver Boris Johnson for the latest travel red tape and all the other costs, burdens and inconveniences of quitting the European Union that have been put upon us, without meaningful gains.

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As is David Cameron, the Tory numbskull who, for backfiring tactical reasons, conceded a referendum that most people didn’t want. No Brexit champion, particularly Farage, is worthy of high office after proving so conclusively wrong on such a seismic issue.

It’s why he and Reform these days rarely talk about Brexit. Migration is their new drum to bang with a focus on small boats, although increasingly the line between people holding visas is blurred with desperate folk risking their lives in the Channel.

Multiculturalism itself is the wider Reform target, the vibrancy and diversity of Britain disliked by a grey, miserable party selling nostalgia in lionising a bygone monochrome era when life really wasn’t better. Vowing to slash the state Thatcher-style, the party pretends it would reduce tax, raise benefits and nationalise water and steel.

But the fundamental innumeracy and contradictions will become clearer as Reform no longer enjoys an easy free ride. Winning council contests last May might be part of Reform’s undoing now that banning Rainbow flags ceases to be cover for councillors who are finding that armies of diversity officers never existed so cannot be sacked.

Behind the Farage propaganda, the reality for people living in Reform-run areas is grim. In Kent, Reform could put up council tax by the maximum 5%.

Reform in Lancashire is threatening to shut care homes for the elderly. In Durham a Reform councillor had to be expelled over drunken behaviour at, get this, a supposedly patriotic Armed Forces Day event.

Fingerprinting and mugshots hammer home Farage’s guilt. Quite simply, he cannot be trusted when empty promises are paid for by people he dupes.