You can already imagine the video.
A man stands in the middle of a suburban English street holding a wad of cash in his hands. Grinning at the camera he says: “I’m about to pay this entire street’s energy bills.” Cut to gliding drone footage of the neighbourhood. The man knocks on a front door and a bewildered looking woman answers in a fleecy dressing gown. “Congratulations, Carol. You’ve saved more than £1,000 this year!” High-energy electronic music swells to a crescendo as she gives him a hug. Then, a shot of the next neighbour receiving his prize, and another, and another, as a tally at the bottom right of the screen shows the total cash sum rising. Finally, the entire community is out on the street waving their hands with joy.
This is almost certainly the kind of content we’ll be treated to when Reform UK’s energy bill lottery is over. The party announced the “Nigel cut my bills” competition last month: for the price of your personal data – voting history, name, phone number and email – you can win the chance of Farage popping by to pay the energy bills for you and your neighbours for an entire year.
Concerns have been expressed about data collection, but that is not what I’m worried about. I personally find it hard to be exercised by alleged data compliance breaches. No, I am concerned about what such a stunt represents: the MrBeastification of British politics.
The don of YouTube, MrBeast is famous for posting stunts of epic proportions to the joy of preteens around the world. One sub-genre of his videos involves him handing out huge sums of cash to unsuspecting individuals, such as the time he handed $10,000 to a homeless man in North Carolina begging passing cars for money. MrBeast, real name James Donaldson, is insanely popular. His most watched video has 915m views; that’s more than the entire population of Europe.
Reform understands that politics is increasingly playing out online and, in that space, emotions matter. In order to grab people’s attention and, in turn, support, it needs to make voters angry (over small boats) and also excited about what it has to offer. Its stunt uses the same elements found in MrBeast videos: it’s unexpected, the sums of cash are huge, and the randomness of it all makes you excited to think that it could just be you.
The website for “Nigel cut my bills” also features information about how Reform will supposedly reduce everyone’s energy costs if it wins the next election. It will scrap VAT from your energy bill, saving £85. Cut Labour’s green levy, saving £100. Scrap Labour’s carbon tax, saving £15. To give credit where it’s due, the stunt is a brilliant piece of political communication: the act grabs you by the lapels and screams, “Farage is a man who puts money in your pocket” – now and potentially in government.
But, with all the razzle-dazzle, the social-media-minded extremity of it all, it can be easy to miss that Reform is fundamentally misleading people about how energy pricing works. Bills are high not because of VAT, green levies or carbon taxes. They are high because the price of our energy is pegged to the price of our reserve energy source: gas. Fossil-fuel reliance, not renewable energy, is to blame. Nigel Farage’s obsession with drilling in the North Sea would only keep us locked into volatile energy markets. This all means that in the long run Carol and everyone else will continue to lose out.
It reminds me of a Reform policy from its 2024 campaign. The party announced it would charge non-doms (UK residents whose permanent homes for tax purposes are outside the UK) £250,000 for a 10-year renewable residence permit and favourable UK tax status. The money raised by this one-off tax would go directly to Britain’s lowest-paid workers. “Surprise, Carol, here’s your cash prize for voting Reform UK!” However, the real winner from this arrangement would be the very wealthy person who doesn’t live on your street (unless you also have a pied-à-terre in Mayfair), as that measly sum is nothing compared with the money they would have had to pay in tax to the UK’s public services.
After MrBeast hands over the cash to the homeless man in that video, he asks him how he came to be homeless. The man shares a very sad story about losing his family, then being laid off from a factory job and having to live in hotels before his money ran out. Donaldson’s eyes dart around uncomfortably and he grimaces, unsure how to respond.
Big gestures and tokenistic policies don’t grapple with reality – it’s all just for show.
