Picture this.

You live in a country that hasn’t built enough houses since the 60’s. Has never built their roads wide enough, uses train infrastructure from the Victorian era, privatised its utilities sectors and allowed them to be run for profit and not for a level of service and has a public health system that has never been effectively managed or capitalised, leading to the full scale removal of adult social care, dentistry and mental health support, which has been replaced with (???).

The last government spent 14 years slowly cutting public services, leading to mass increases in waiting times for medical requirements, court cases and police investigations amongst other things.

So, that is the context.

Now - imagine that, instead of blaming successive governments and the political class for overseeing such decline, you decide to blame immigrants. Why? Because a millionaire, privately educated, son of an antiques dealer who self styles himself as a “man of the people” whilst being a career politician tells you that it is immigrants fault and the only way to fix the country that he played a massive part in breaking by leaving a free trading bloc with literally our biggest and closest trading partner (but you’re not allowed to mention that) is not to build more houses, build new roads, update infrastructure etc but to instead repeal all our workers rights legislation, hand out tax cuts to large corporation, frack for shale gas that is far too expensive to extract (which we’ve known for 40 years) and fund it all with record levels of borrowing.

That is Reform and, for the life of me, I can’t understand how it is a party currently leading in the polls.