Farage and Co

The UK’s Road to Perdition

If insanity, according to the definition sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, consists of doing the same thing over and over again in expectation of a different result, then the enduring popularity of Nigel Farage suggests that a significant section of the British electorate has lost its marbles.

Let’s not be polite or genteel about this.

Nine years after the referendum, not a single one of the promises that the Pied Piper of Brexit and his cronies made in 2016 has materialised; there are no tangible gains from a decision that a majority of the population now believes to have been a mistake. Yet none of this has had any negative repercussions whatsoever for the man who bears the principal responsibility for this outcome. In his world, others will always bear responsibility for whatever goes wrong or whatever doesn’t go at all. And if reality fails to meet his expectations, then that is reality’s fault.

It’s infantile, shameful and endlessly enraging. In a country with even a modicum of self-respect, a politician like this would be a national pariah. But this frog-faced satyr remains a ubiquitous presence, with his petulant whining victimhood, his braying fake patriotism, his carefully-curated saloon bar racism, and his smug, lynx-eyed, just-asking-questions cunning.

And now tens of thousands of voters have gifted this cloth-capped Mephistopheles with a political triumph that threatens to collapse the country’s decaying two-party system and transform Farage into the nation’s would-be saviour.

For all those who would like to see the UK live up to its better instincts rather than its worst, last week’s elections were a slap in the face and a wake-up call. Because if Brexit anticipated the first Trump administration, then Trump II is a blueprint of what the UK might expect, should the British electorate be foolish enough to place its national future in the hands of Farage and Co.

Consider what Reform UK is offering on a local level. Promises to ‘Make Doncaster Great Again’ or ‘Make Lincolnshire Great Again’ might make you want to giggle at the sheer inanity of such propositions. But these slogans offer a package that draws directly from the MAGA playbook, contained in the Reform UK - Lincolnshire Facebook group’s pitch to the electorate:

A real agenda for bold reform. We restate our core values: We must return all our liberties to the people. We must preserve freedom of speech. We must control our borders properly. We must protect our proud heritage from the woke folk and celebrate our nation’s incredible successes.

At a pre-election mayoral hustings, the Tory defector Andrea Jenkyns promised to establish a ‘Lincolnshire Doge, just like they do in the US’ in order to ‘root out wasteful spending [and]ensure that every penny of taxpayers money is spent wisely’.

What does ‘wisely’ mean in this context? It means building on ‘Nigel’s relationship with [Donald] Trump’ in order to eliminate ‘woke wastage’ and push back on ‘this ridiculous climate emergency narrative, which is costing every taxpayer in the room.’

Of course, Jenkyns paid lip service to practical nuts and bolts politics, with promises to fix Lincolnshire’s roads and potholes. But no sooner had she won, than she called in her acceptance speech for ‘illegal migrants, people who come here illegally’ to be put in tents instead of hotels in order to bring an end to ‘soft touch Britain.’ If ‘Tents are good enough for France,’ she crowed, ‘they should be good enough for here in Britain.’

Migrants in tents? Is that all? Not quite:

I will keep your taxes low, I will work with you, with our industries, with our business, and with our young people. Together, it’s time to heal, we will deliver once in a generation change. I will lead with a sword of common sense and cut through wastage and bureaucracy….Now that Reform is in a place of power, we can start rebuilding Britain. Inch by inch, Reform will reset Britain to its glorious past.

This is desperate, reactionary, delusional drivel. There is no way that Reform or any other political party can ‘reset’ Britain to whatever glorious past Jenkyns thinks it once had. Nor can it realise aspirations like these:

These are the same kind of unicorn farm fantasies that these charlatans dangled before the electorate in 2016. No net zero. Wars on the woke folk. Flags on every town hall. No home working and migrants in tents - what a world awaits us. Already, Farage has promised that a Reform government will create a Minister for Deportations and implement a ‘zero tolerance policy’ for illegal immigration.

Of course this policy will inevitably involve leaving the ECHR - completing the institutional destruction that his movement began in 2016 and with it, Britain’s transformation into a basketcase.

Last week, Farage and Jenkyns promised to sack all DEI officers from the now Reform-controlled Lincolnshire County Council, regardless of the fact that the council does not employ any DEI officers. As I said, reality is never an impediment to these people.

It’s easy to mock this Tweenies level mini-Musk culture warfare, but Trump and Musk have already demonstrated that idiocy, fantasy, fanaticism and ineptitude are no longer obstacles to political progress, and Reform has exactly the same agenda.

Moral Rearmament

In an interview with the Times (paywalled), Reform’s millionaire chairman Zia Yusuf has pledged to give British youth a ‘moral re-education’ if Farage becomes PM, that will oblige schools to ‘teach a love of Britain’ and address the ‘industrial-scale demoralisation, particularly of young people people in this country, who are basically being taught quite deliberately that they should hate their country.’

With evidence-free claptrap like this spouting from the presentable mainstream face of the party, it is not surprising to find Reform’s danker and less visible crevices crawling with even more insalubrious life forms. When Farage promised to create a Ministry of Deportation on his Facebook page, the comments were flooded with supportive messages, some of which came from people offering to be unpaid volunteers.

These are not people to be giving moral lessons to the youth or anybody else, and the fact that a party like this is now poised to become the main opposition is a bleak testament to a wider political and moral failure that goes beyond Reform itself.

The failure is first of all a failure of accountability. Despite Farage’s endless claims to be an anti-establishment rebel, few politicians have ever had an easier or smoother ride in the media. Even before Brexit, he found his way into public forums that other parties with far more members and MPs could only dream of.

Many voters would be challenged to know what Green Party or Liberal Democrat - or even Labour - MPs think about anything. Yet every stupid, ill-informed provocation and half baked proposal that leaves Farage’s mouth instantly finds its way into mainstream media outlets that treat him like an engaging political novelty, rather than the dangerous, blustering extremist that he is.

Bizarrely, Reform’s popularity is also partly due to Brexit. The Conservative Party is too compromised by its calamitous role in the referendum and its aftermath to recognise the damage Brexit has caused. Labour are too terrified of the right-wing press and their own voters to even attempt to repair the damage.

The result is a grotesque and almost unbelievable situation, in which the politician who has done more than any single individual to bring about his country’s greatest political failure cannot be attacked or criticised for it by his principal political opponents. Even worse, both parties have tried to fend off the threat that Reform poses to their party political interests, by aping his nativist posturing.

And that brings us to the Labour government itself: feeble, cack-handed and cowardly, and so willing to embrace policies that the right once considers its own, that it is also bleeding votes to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. In the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, hundreds of voters could not even bring themselves to vote tactically to keep Reform out - as a result of which Reform won by only six votes.

Labour’s defenders will talk about fickle and immature voters, the complexities of government and how the world has changed. But no one voted for Labour to slash personal independence payments to the disabled, winter fuel payments to pensioners, or cut aid to millions of the world’s poor.

You know something has gone wrong when The Spectator (paywalled) hails Reform’s ‘left-wing turn’ as a ‘triumph’. Of course, Farage’s pitch to working-class voters is bogus, but these pretensions are only possible because of Labour’s timidity and its genuflection at the neo-liberal altar.

It’s not storming the Winter Palace to expect a social democratic government to use its formidable majority to address decades of inequality and the running down of public services, and to seek to build a progressive consensus around these goals. Yet all Labour has to offer are the same stale nostrums that have done so much damage over the last few decades: fiscal rules, discipline, sacrifice and - although the government denies it - austerity.

On immigration, there are only the same punitive policies, deportations, repression, and exclusion - performative displays of toughness which shake the government without translating into political gains.

In short, this is not a government that knows how to fight Farage and his friends with the ferocity and agility required, and is not clear whether it even wants to.

As a result, Starmer may find himself in the utterly invidious position of playing host this year to Donald Trump - a man who is far closer to Reform than he is to Labour, and who may be considering granting asylum to ‘free speech refugees’ from the UK.

Some Labour supporters may argue that last week’s results were just a snapshot of a particular moment in a longer political calendar. It’s true that these elections may not be the watershed moment that Farage and his friends are proclaiming. Reform’s gains may even prove to be counter-productive, as constituents witness these clown car wreckers attempt to actually run cities and councils, and agree on budgets, instead of persecuting migrants or clamping down on ‘transgender ideology’.

It’s also possible that Farage’s adulation of Trump may work against him, as Trumpism pushes the US deeper into chaos, crisis and recession.

But these are small crumbs of possible comfort. Because as things stand, Reform now has a political momentum that it did not have before. It has developed an effective local ground operation that will become more efficient, as big money flows into the party coffers from dubious sources. Its successes may attract Conservative and even Labour defectors.

All this may not be enough to put Farage into Downing Street. But the fact that this possibility is even being considered is a both an indication of how low British society has sunk since 2016, and the clearest possible evidence that it is still sinking.