Slouching Towards Farageland

Is Labour Doomed?

It’s June 2029 and the rally at the O2 Arena to celebrate the Tory/Reform coalition’s victory in the British elections is in full swing. Throughout the evening, the audience has heard tributes from US president JD Vance, from Gert Wilders, Alison Pearson, Viktor Orban, Tim Montgomerie, Andrew Tate, and Georgia Meloni.

Now Nigel Farage bounds onto the stage in a striped jacket and yachting shoes, accompanied by Reform’s main donor Elon Musk. The crowd goes wild and waves glow candles to the sound of Dambusters, as balloons rain down from the ceiling. ‘They used to laugh, they’re not laughing now, are they?’ says Nigel, raising a pint. The crowd cheers. Ni-gel! Ni-gel! They roar.

What a moment, says a beaming Laura Kuenssberg, from the sidelines. This is the point when the British two-party system has finally crumbled. And now the crowd falls silent. It’s like a congregation in a cathedral as the great man spells out the program that will Make Britain Great Again. Mass deportations of tens of thousands of immigrants! Leave the ECHR! Send refugees and asylum seekers back to France! No funding to woke universities and nimby pimby courses! No foreign languages on our streets! No woke teachers in our schools!

The man who once boasted that he has got ‘so many women pregnant’ and criticized the ‘lunacy’ of maternity leave, promises to curtail abortion rights. No namby pamby nanny eurostate red tape!

The crowd roars its approval. Because the crowd is the lion, and the lion has awoken. Across the nation, torchlight parades…all right, I’ll stop. You may be tempted to dismiss this scenario as a crazed episode of Years and Years. You might argue that Farage is just a cheap political grifter and a snake oil merchant, who, like Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has stood beneath the window of the electorate singing ‘with feigning voice verses of feigning love/And stol’n the impression of (their) fantasy.’

I recognize that love is not the point here. Farage’s is a message of resentment, grievance and hatred, of sour imperial nostalgia marinated in ethnonationalism, racism and xenophobia, all lubricated with money from dubious sources. Farage is a wrecker, a cynical and cunning disruptor who has prospered in an era dominated by weak, ineffectual and often downright useless politicians, and an equally gormless media.

If this country was ever foolish enough to put him any closer to power than he already is, then the results are likely to be as calamitous for the UK as Trump II is likely to be for America. If you thought Brexit was bad, or Truss and Johnson were bad, a Reform government or even a Conservative-Reform coalition government would be all that, and much, much more.

It would be a government of the absolute worst that the UK has to offer, appealing to the worst and most base sentiments of the British electorate. But if Elon Musk and Trump have their way, Farage will soon be receiving a lot of money, at a delicate moment in British politics. His party is rising in the polls, hard right parties are sweeping the board across the world, and billionaires seem increasingly able to buy the governments they want.

A Reform government would not be a solution to any of the problems that this country faces - some of which Farage has done as much as anyone to worsen. But grievances, not solutions, are the currency of hard-right populism.

These movements offer delusions of cost-free ‘sovereignty’ without any regard for the compromises and commitments that every country is obliged to make in order to exist in the real world. They present voters with a series of spectres: open borders, the deep state, immigrant invasions, tone-deaf liberal elites and woke or globalist conspiracies - and then they promise to burn the straw men they have created.

There was once a time when the prospect of a Farage government would have seemed unimaginable, but in these times the worst possibility can no longer be ruled out, either in this or any other country, and as Brecht said, the one who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.

And remarkably, it’s a possibility that now seems more likely than it was before the last election, as a Labour government that is far more fragile than its majority suggests, continues to stumble repeatedly and struggles to articulate a compelling vision of where it would like to take the country.

This failure is partly that of vision, and it’s also a question of political courage. Some commentators have praised Starmer’s bravery in ‘changing his party’, but there was more than a hint of opportunism rather than courage, in the marginalisation of the Labour left. And having driven the left out of the party and tiptoed into power, essentially by not being the Tories, Starmer and his team now appear to be floundering in the face of multiple attacks.

In government, Starmer has shown no courage at all, whether in regard to Trump, Israel, Elon Musk or Saudi Arabia, and there are alarming signs that he is preparing to take the low road in regard to the political threat of Faragism. Take his speech on immigration on 28 November. In it, Starmer noted correctly, that contrary to what Brexiters once promised, immigration has risen. At this point, a progressive politician might have used these figures to criticize the dishonesty and incompetence of the politicians who made these claims.

Instead, he said this:

What the British people are owed…is an explanation. Because a failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck. It isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball. No – this a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed deliberately, to liberalise immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose. To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders. Global Britain – remember that slogan…That is what they meant.

No, ‘they’ definitely did not. Immigration has risen, because the UK economy needs immigration, and because the EU workers who could no longer come to the UK through Freedom of Movement rules were replaced by workers from other parts of the world. So this increase is not the result of a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’ - it is a product of the incompetence and unrealistic expectations of those who promised that Brexit would reduce immigration.

Starmer could have made these points, with regard to Farage. But that would require a degree of political courage that he does not have. And so he accused Tory governments of doing what Labour itself was once accused of doing in the Blair/Brown years. Where the rightwing press once accused Labour of an experiment in multiculturalism intended to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’, Starmer now makes the nonsensical allegation that Tory governments conducted a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’, whatever that it is.

Inevitably, Starmer presented immigration as a burden and a problem that his party will ‘fix.’ As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also argued that the UK is ‘hopelessly reliant on immigration’ because of skills shortages (partly true), and also because of the absence of ‘welfare reform’ and the ‘2.8 million people out of work on long-term sickness - a problem ignored, left to fester.’

On and on it went, repeating all the clichés we have come to expect: immigrants abusing the system…soft touch…smashing smuggling gangs…secure our borders.

It was possibly the worst single speech I have ever heard any Labour prime minister give on immigration, and it is very difficult to separate this speech from the pantomime villain of Farage (‘He’s behind you!’).

In effect, Starmer was attempting a card trick that mainstream political parties across the West have tried to play in recent years - defeat the hard-right by borrowing their talking points and framing, and then somehow prove that you are better able to deal with these problems than they are.

There is no evidence that this trick ever impresses the constituencies it is aimed at. On the contrary, it tends to give legitimacy to the political forces it attempts to marginalize. And when these ‘solutions’ fail to materialise, then voters tend to turn to the genuine article - insofar as movements like Reform are ‘genuine’ about anything.

Starmer’s more recent ‘milestones’ speech was equally hollow, full of the kind of clunking clichés, improbable goals, paeans to ‘values’ (a word that really should be banned from political conversation), leaden syntax and shopworn metaphors that make you long for a JB Priestley or just someone who could say what they actually mean and sound as if they actually mean it.

Immigration also featured in these milestones. A boast about deportations of ‘foreign national offenders’ (‘up 29 %’ hurrah!); a pathetic echo of Tory/Trumpite rhetoric about deep state bureaucracies and civil servant 'swamps’ - which translate in Starmerspeak into ‘too many people in Whitehall [are]comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.’

This is a vicious and insulting allegation, and no wonder the civil servants’ unions have criticized Starmer for making it. We expect the likes of Truss and Badenoch to make such claims, but when a Labour government talks like this, it loses what should be its own natural supporters, and it is unlikely to gain long-term support from voters who only turned to Labour because the last few Tory governments have been so unbelievably awful.

I don’t say this with any satisfaction. I’m aware that a concerted attempt is being made across the British right-wing media to destroy the government before it has even begun to establish itself. I want Labour to win a second term, and do something substantial to make this country a better place. But to achieve that, it will have to take on more powerful enemies than the ones Starmer is currently lining up.

It will have to show courage and conviction, political skill and vision. It can’t just cosy up to Trump and turn its back on Europe. It can’t be progressive and also attack immigrants and people on benefits. It may not be politically possible to rejoin the EU, but it can’t turn away from Brexit, and the consequences of Brexit. A government that has no movement to support it cannot live indefinitely on borrowed votes.

And a government that claims to be a government of the centre-left cannot defeat Faragism by dressing up in Faragist drag.

As a new survey by the left-of-centre Compass group has shown, Labour is at much at risk in many marginal constituencies from left and left-of-centre voters as it is from the Reform pseudo-insurgency. If Labour loses the former in an attempt to please Reform voters, its brittle majority will quickly flake away, and it will lose the opportunity that it now has to mount a genuine alternative to the right-wing populist surge.

If that happens, then UK voters may yet decide that they might as well have Farage, and this country will continue the same vertiginous descent that Farage’s buddy is now preparing to inflict on the United States.