See the original article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/exposing-reforms-corporate-crackdown-means-promising-real-one

REFORM’S pledge to crack down on employers for hiring people without legal residence in Britain is a bid to get back on the front foot.

The scandal over Nigel Farage’s wealthy sponsors refuses to go away, and together with a fresh face at Number 10 has cost Reform its top spot in opinion polls.

Plan A, to reassert his greater popularity with the public than the mainstream parties via a staged showdown in Clacton, has gone badly wrong. Since nobody at Westminster would play ball he can triumph only over various unknowns and joke candidates, which will prove nothing.

So Zia Yusuf has been deployed to announce Plan B. It too is meant to showcase Reform’s anti-Establishment credentials. Prison sentences for corporate bosses who hire illegal labour. Crippling fines, up to 10 per cent of global turnover.

This is a sinister policy. But it isn’t stupid. The impunity of a boss class who routinely break the law is a source of genuine resentment.

It is why contracts-for-cronies and Covid lockdown breaches by the Boris Johnson gang brought down that premiership.

It is one reason the conduct of privatised water companies is so explosive.

Excrement-strewn beaches, unsafe drinking water and the discharge of huge volumes of raw sewage into rivers are outrageous enough as it is — but the knowledge that the CEOs in charge receive salaries in the millions, that the flow of dividends to shareholders is as constant as that of filth into our waterways, is incendiary.

Reform hopes to tap into hostility to corporate fat cats. It pretends to champion working-class Brits: “Corporate CEOs have been making a fortune by hiring illegal workers and undermining British youngsters. Reform will jail them and stop illegal working for good — we will stand up for British workers.”

It will not, of course. Reform would repeal the Employment Rights Act, stripping millions of rights to sick and holiday pay. Farage says the minimum wage should be cut for young workers.

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Morning Star Editorial continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/exposing-reforms-corporate-crackdown-means-promising-real-one

• More Reform UK transactions worth millions reported to National Crime Agency
• Farage now faces four probes over finances as threat of by-election grows
• Questions raised over Reform’s ‘multimillion-pound black hole’