In the last fortnight we have had several scenes, different and yet related, of politics in post-Brexit Britain. Each of them is unpleasant in itself, but taken together, as pieces in a jigsaw, they reveal a very ugly picture. More than that, they reveal a picture of the profound dangers our country faces.
A walking stick and some oysters
Exhibit one is the scene of how hecklers were treated at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham. These hecklers infiltrated and disrupted the conference, and as such deserved, and no doubt expected, to be ejected. But what happened was not simply an orderly removal by professional security guards. Instead, a crowd of mainly elderly Reform members, of both sexes, punched and slapped them, with at least one young woman being pulled around by her hair and struck with a walking stick (the latter link is to a discussion with the woman, the actual images are, be warned, repulsive). Meanwhile, other delegates cheered the attackers on whilst, on the podium, Nigel Farage laughed.
This may not, in the scheme of things, have been a massively violent assault, although it was certainly vicious and it did cause injuries. Yet it was, in its way, remarkable. I’m sure that the attackers regard themselves as ‘ordinary, decent, respectable people’, but the contorted hatred on their faces as they rounded on the disruptors showed them in an altogether different light. There was also, somehow, a symbolism of the generational political divide in it: old people spitefully lashing out in a self-righteous frenzy at youngsters for having the temerity to disrupt their leader. Old people who, on other days, no doubt congratulate themselves on their staunch advocacy of free speech.
It’s worth recalling (as Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph did) the outrage when, in 2005, a heckler was forcibly removed from Labour’s conference by security guards. That outrage came not least from the political right with, for example, David Cameron denouncing what had happened as “Orwellian”. It’s also worth recalling that, on that occasion, the then Labour leader Tony Blair, and other senior figures in the party, subsequently apologized profusely. By contrast, after this latest event, reactions from Reform MPs included the thuggishly prolier-than-thou Lee Anderson proposing a whip-round to buy a new walking stick for the most violent of the assailants and Robert Jenrick saying “he should be given a medal for what he did”.
The second scene of the fortnight was altogether more urbane, but also provided a glimpse of the Reform party. This was the meeting over oysters and champagne of Farage and senior Reform officials with a supposed potential donor, one of several meetings filmed as part of an undercover ‘sting’ operation and broadcast on Channel Four on the eve of the party’s conference [1]. It was the latest in a long list of ongoing scandals (£) about the funding of both the party and Farage himself, and it is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. But, that aside, what this piece of the jigsaw shows is the gulf, and the relationship, between Reform (and Farage’s) carefully cultivated image as representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘global elite’ and the way that behind it lies a world of dodgy ‘globalist’ financiers and meetings in exclusive restaurants and clubs which few such people penetrate.
A Cambridge compound
It also provided and insight into another of Reform’s worlds where polyester-clad, spittle-flecked old men with walking sticks are notable by their absence, the intellectual salons of the radical right. For one of the senior Reform officials at those meetings was James Orr, the party’s Head of Policy (a post from which he has now stepped down). Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and a major figure in the paradoxically international ‘National Conservatism’ movement and the nexus of thinktanks around it in the UK, US and, at least until Victor Orban’s demise, Hungary (as mentioned, with more details and links, in my post of last April).
Orr, whose conservatism is nationalist but more specifically Christian, was a controversial figure even before the ‘sting’ and on the morning before the Channel Four broadcast had been the subject of a detailed, and at least implicitly critical, profile in the Financial Times (£). An indication of what we might, with suitably Christian charity, call his political philosophy is that, according to that profile, Orr believes in “faith, family and flag”, “opposes abortion including in cases of rape”, and “calls immigration ‘the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion’” (which suggests he is a less accomplished historian than he is a theologian). It bears saying that much of what the FT profile revealed had already been reported by Byline Times, and some aspects of it have been examined in more detail by the 21 Group, an organization which monitors and campaigns against bullying in universities.
Leaving aside the explicitly political aspects of what these various reports show or allege, collectively they reveal, amongst other things, that Orr and his wife have created what he calls “a compound” and she calls “an alternative Cambridge College” in the (presumably substantial) back garden of their Cambridge home. There, several postgraduates and post-docs, apparently all of a Christian Conservative bent, live as a community. This might be regarded as, at best, an unorthodox arrangement, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envisage how the media would report an analogous arrangement whereby, as it might be, an Associate Professor in the Education Faculty created such a community based not on Christian Conservatism but Critical Race Theory.
A fascist militia
It might be comforting to think that the contemporary far right in Britain is captured by these images, distasteful as they are, of nasty old men lashing out with their walking sticks, dodgy deals done in expensive restaurants, and creepy academics alternately gladhanding at peculiar conferences and lording it over impressionable students. But the next piece of the jigsaw we have seen in this last fortnight is far more alarming.
Last Saturday, as many as five hundred men, and they were all men, who were generally described in the media as anti-immigration ‘protestors’, blockaded the roads around the Dover ferry terminal, bringing the town centre to a standstill for several hours. But these were not ‘protestors’ in any normal or reasonable sense of the term. These men appeared, to coin a phrase, to be ‘of fighting age’. They had donned black uniforms, very much in the manner of Mosley’s Blackshirts, and balaclava masks, very much in the manner of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
It was a profoundly chilling sight, the more so as for much of their action they maintained total silence. Subsequently, there were some chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘England for the English’ and other anti-immigration slogans, and another of ‘Christ is King’, but there were no placards or flags waved. In fact the only symbol in evidence was, in several but not all cases, the Christian crucifix. Apparently, it is not only Cambridge theologians who have a perverse interpretation of Jesus’s injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
Absurdly, Kent Police described this as a “spontaneous” gathering, perhaps to avoid admitting that neither they nor the security services seem to have had any inkling that it was going to happen (though there may be other interpretations of this, including claims that the police ignored warnings of what was in prospect and informed speculation that a high-level security operation may, for good reasons, have allowed the action to proceed). At all events, it was abundantly obvious that it had been carefully planned and it was executed with a certain amount of skill and discipline. That discipline included the absence of literal violence, and no arrests were made. However it was certainly violent in the more symbolic sense of being highly intimidating, pregnant with aggression and threat.
I don’t think we have seen anything quite like this, at least on the British mainland, in my lifetime. Unlike the asylum hotel riots, it did not have a particular trigger or target, and the level of organization means the participants could not be described as a mob. Nor was there even any attempt to pretend that these were just ‘ordinary people’ or ‘concerned local citizens’.
On the contrary, ‘Patriot Platform’, the all-male grouping behind it, openly describes itself as being “an army of patriots” and its aim is to “take control of the United Kingdom”. It functions as a covert coordinator of a network of groups and was launched in June by a former soldier and convicted criminal calling himself ‘Danny Tommo’, who is an associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and is connected with the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign. He also helped to organize a ‘Brexit Betrayal’ rally in 2018. ‘Tommo’ aggressively parades his supposed Christianity and Patriot Platform regards itself as a Christian organization. In this and other ways, whilst its core motivation is extreme hostility to immigration, this is wrapped into a broader ideology expressed by its slogan of “Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland”. In short, and regular readers will know I do not use this term casually, they are fascists, and they have now formed a militia [2].
This militia reappeared in Portsmouth the following night, along with a larger mob, attempting to prevent the transfer of cross-channel migrants being transported to an arrival centre. Again, roads were blockaded and this time there was physical violence against police and property. There was also a direct, aggressive confrontation with RNLI crews which has subsequently developed into a campaign of online intimidation and harassment against its volunteers. Subsequently, a nearby hotel was targeted in the belief that migrants were being housed there, when in fact it was the Under-19 cricket team on tour something which, contrary to some of the reaction from both Reform and Labour politicians, was an outrage in and of itself rather than because it was mistargeted.
Whilst this militia, and the manner in which it conducts itself, is new, its beliefs and its aims grow directly out of those which have been swirling around the far-right ecosphere for a few years and the Dover action was openly supported by Rupert Lowe [warning: link to X]. That endorsement at least had the benefit of honesty. More disingenuous was the condemnation which came from Nigel Farage and others in Reform. For them, perhaps, there is some advantage in being able to claim to be the ‘responsible right’, but their own relentless scaremongering about the supposed small boats crisis and their ghoulish equation of asylum seekers with murders and sexual crimes has done a great deal to promote the beliefs espoused by Patriot Platform.
However, responsibility for that is not confined to far-right politicians. It is shared with the political and media class generally, very much including those within the governing Labour party who have dignified such beliefs as being an expression of ‘legitimate concerns’. Notably, government condemnation of the Dover action was rather muted, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds implying that it fell within the category of “peaceful protest” and trivializing its most striking aspect as merely “dressing up in costumes”. The response to Portsmouth was more robust, with, for example, Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, calling the action “thuggish”. But the overall tenor of the government’s reaction, in relation to both events, was wishy-washy and, astoundingly, Andy Burnham made no direct comment at all, so far as I know.
A vulnerable State
If uniformed, masked men taking control, albeit temporarily, of the streets with impunity is a frightening prospect, it is at least one for which, in principle, there are legal remedies. So in some ways what is more frightening is the prospect of the law, and the State itself, falling under the control of extremists. The recent Reform UK conference was so overshadowed by the new financial scandal that it was easy to miss just how extreme the supposedly reasonable face of the far-right has become. Yet anyone with a sense of history should be alarmed that Farage has pledged to declare an immediate ‘national emergency’ if Reform came to power, with threats to reconfigure the judiciary, civil service, and parliament itself under the guise of this emergency [3]. Similarly, whilst less dramatic, Suella Braverman announced that Reform would make it compulsory for schools to fly the national flag and sing the national anthem, whilst delivering a “patriotic curriculum”.
These are not anodyne proposals, even if Braverman couched hers in the cosy nostalgia-porn of Britain being “a collection of little streets, building little hamlets and villages that fold into towns and cities.” They are, at least incipiently, totalitarian in nature and, as the noted legal commentator David Allen Green has argued, our political system is one in which “there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.”
One implication of that, Green suggests, is that the present government should create stronger constitutional guard-rails to reduce these systemic vulnerabilities. I agree, but I think a second implication is the need to tackle the core underlying beliefs which inform this illiberalism, especially the idea that there is an immigration crisis, an asylum crisis, and a cultural crisis which somehow constitute a national emergency.
An absence of political leadership
At issue here is far more than simply condemning violence and intimidation, and more, even, than yesterday’s commitment from the Home Secretary to robustly police that violence, necessary as that is given the threat of further disorder this weekend. And it certainly requires abandoning the government’s continuing insistence (£) that meeting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public by curtailing immigration and reducing or even stopping ‘the boats’ will make the beliefs underpinning such violence disappear. That is nonsense, and it is shown to be nonsense by the fact that those beliefs are becoming more entrenched even as the levels of immigration, asylum applications, and boat crossings are all falling. It didn’t work for Starmer and it won’t work for Burnham, and his premiership may well be the last chance for a different, and more honest, approach.
Such an approach would mean saying something like: flows of refugees and asylum seekers are a global phenomenon, and aren’t going to disappear. The UK is one of the countries least affected, but has legal and humanitarian commitments to fulfil. In doing so, we should and will process asylum claims as quickly and accurately as possible, and seek to discourage life-endangering crossings. But there is no crisis, and there is most definitely no ‘invasion’. Adopting this approach would not just be a matter of a single speech. It would require a concerted communications campaign perhaps including highlighting success stories of asylum claimants and other immigrants who have made positive contributions to society, and emphasising the many senses in which Britain has been a successful example of multi-cultural integration.
In the absence of political leadership along these lines, the dominant narrative, by default, will be, as it already largely is, one in which Britain is depicted as being invaded by a dangerous horde of sexual predators who are living lives of taxpayer-funded luxury. Allowing that to be the default inevitably has the effect of provoking fear and outrage even amongst people who would not, in other circumstances, align with the far right. Conversely, the current approach of treating this fear and outrage as justifiable means that, even whilst condemning violence and intimidation, government ministers are conceding that those responsible are, in some way, representing widespread public concern.
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the government will adopt this approach, and that is, at least in part, because there is a strong strand in Labour thinking – most overtly the Blue Labour strand, but not confined to it – that the fear and outrage are justified; that this is what ‘ordinary people’ believe and the ‘people’s party’ should represent it. As I’ve argued repeatedly in the past, this is, again, at least in part, related to Brexit and the way in which Labour accepted the populist right’s claim that the referendum showed it spoke for ‘the silent majority’. In this way, chiding vocal and violent thugs for ‘crossing the line’ amounts to little more than asserting that Labour ministers are the ‘voice of the people’ whilst leaving entirely unchallenged the thugs’ beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this only entrenches those beliefs and the thuggery continues, or even escalates.
A matter of national security
At stake in all this is, most obviously, whether uniformed fascists are to be allowed to take control of the streets as and when they choose. But what the various developments described in this post should suggest is that the Patriot Platform militia is only one strand within an interwoven braid. The angry pensioners beating youthful hecklers, the Cambridge don and his cultish camp-followers, the intimate meetings in expensive restaurants, the strident politicians of Reform and Restore, the increasingly aggressive invocation of ‘cultural Christianity’, the daily vitriol on social media, amongst many other things, are all part of a related process.
But something much deeper is at stake, which could properly be called a matter of national security. There is no doubt that what is happening domestically in the UK has parallels with what is happening in other countries, with the AfD’s recent success in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany being an obvious example. And the way that this success was cheered in both the US and Russia (£) was the latest, and clearest, illustration of how the transformation of geo-politics matters not just for international relations but for domestic politics. It is now a matter of US state policy, enshrined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, to support the far right in Europe, and that includes the UK. Relatedly, Elon Musk openly supports Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, calling civil war in Britain “inevitable” because of immigration, and there are multiple connections between MAGA and the British far right in both its street-level and intellectual guises.
Meanwhile, Russia’s links to the British far right are well-established, including its encouragement of attacks on mosques and Muslims generally. As with Brexit, Russia seeks to encourage anything which will destabilize Britain. That is only partly to do with seeking to punish us for supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism. More generally it is part of Russia’s attempt to destroy the remnants of the liberal West (liberal in the broadest sense of the commitment to rights and rationality established by the European Enlightenment), something enshrined in successive iterations of its own National Security Strategy. That, in itself, represents a profound national security threat to the UK. It is all the more profound since the US has, for now, and perhaps for ever, changed sides.
This is the bigger context within which the increasingly ugly politics of the British far right should be understood [4]. It is, historically, a new experience for Britain to find itself no longer the great power it was until, say, 1945, and no longer shielded from its decline by being a kind of junior partner to the US during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Now, it is just another ‘medium power’ and, as a result of Brexit, one in self-chosen isolation from its regional moorings. As a result, it is ready prey. It is deeply ironic that those fulminating about the ‘migrant invasion’, and the need to ‘secure our borders’ are not just missing the real threats to national security but are aiding abetting them.
A cause for alarm
This isn’t to posit some huge global conspiracy against Britain, orchestrating its domestic politics. It’s rather that there are multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions in Britain, as in other European countries (although Britain is uniquely isolated because of Brexit). Recognizing that is important because it is what makes disparate events such as those discussed in this post understandable as being related to each other rather than, as might otherwise be thought, just ‘yet another’ piece of unpleasantness. As pieces of a jigsaw, when put together they make a picture.
If all this sounds alarmist, consider some of those pieces side by side: ‘Faith, Flag and Family’; a woman savagely beaten for heckling the Leader at a political rally; black-shirted men in balaclavas blockading the streets; RNLI volunteers denounced as traitors; ‘Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland’; ‘patriotic curriculum’; ‘National Emergency’. It’s not, I think, alarmist to be alarmed.
Notes
[1] Inevitably, the ‘sting’ provoked complaints of ‘entrapment’ from Farage and Reform, along with the familiar claim that it was an example of the Establishment trying to discredit the ‘insurgents’. But such undercover journalism has a long history, and the way that Farage was caught is remarkably similar to the way that in 2010 Channel Four and The Times ‘entrapped’ Labour MP Steve “cab for hire” Byers, which Farage, then leading UKIP, regarded as exposing the corruption of … the Establishment.
[2] The word ‘militia’ is justified, even though the group is not armed, a point made at the time of the debate leading to the 1936 Public Order Act at the time of the Blackshirts (hat tip to the historian Robert Saunders for this information). That legislation prohibited the wearing of political uniforms, although it is not clear whether Patriot Platform’s clothing constitutes a uniform within the meaning of the law.
[3] Restore’s leader Rupert Lowe this week made the even more pernicious suggestion that, if in government, he would retrospectively prosecute civil servants for enacting the present government’s policies.
[4] The examples discussed in this post are all from England, and there is no doubt that it is here where far-right activity is most pronounced. But other nations within the UK are not exempt. For example, this week a tenement building in Glasgow was set ablaze, apparently because of rumours that it was going to be used to house asylum seekers.
Showing posts with label Nigel Farage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nigel Farage. Show all posts
Friday, 11 September 2026
Thursday, 9 July 2026
Parsing Farage’s démarche farce
I had been intending to skip writing this fortnight’s post. There didn’t seem to be much happening, mainly because so much is on hold until Andy Burnham assumes the Prime Ministership. Of course, there are always news stories of relevance to the focus of his blog, but there only seemed to be two main, specifically Brexit-related developments.
One was the demolition of the border barriers between Spain and Gibraltar, in advance of the provisional application of the UK-EU treaty on 15 July which is expected to be formally signed on 13 July. There was also a UK parliamentary debate yesterday showing broad cross-party support for the treaty. This marks an important moment for Gibraltar but also for the Brexit process as a whole in that it resolves the last outstanding issue from the Article 50 negotiations. Those with long memories may recall how, in 2017, there was ridiculous talk from Brexiters, including former Tory leader Michael Howard, of Britain going to war with Spain over this issue. [1]
The other development was a report that the ‘reset’ agreement is near to completion and the delayed UK-EU summit is likely to be held in mid-October. However, another report (£), in the Financial Times, suggested that there are still many unresolved issues and that the summit date remains uncertain. The latter report stated that a particular stumbling block is the UK demand to have a role in EU decision-making, a demand unsurprisingly rejected for the obvious reason that the UK chose to leave the EU.
But within the FT report was a particular sentence, to the effect that the UK demand “was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal from criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party”. It is yet another reminder of the mess post-Brexit Britain is in: still making unrealistic demands of the EU, still allowing Farage to influence policy from outside government, and still caught in the absurd fantasy that doing so will somehow defuse the criticisms that he would make whatever the terms of any deal. That reminder is all the more stark given the miasma of scandal that has recently gathered over Farage.
So when that led to the extraordinary démarche of announcing on Tuesday his intention to resign from, but re-fight, his Clacton seat, I decided that a post this week was worthwhile after all (albeit, as it happens, a day earlier than my usual Friday morning slot). For, however events now play out, this episode is highly revealing about both post-Brexit politics and the politics of Brexitism.
Farage’s petulance and panic
The circumstances of Farage’s announcement are well-known. In brief, the swirl of questions about financial gifts he has received led to the instigation of a parliamentary standards investigation into, specifically, the £5 million he was given by cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne. His responses to questions about this have been contradictory, evasive and increasingly tetchy (and, preposterously, he referred to it in his announcement as being akin to a “lottery win”). Then, amid expectations that the standards investigation would rule that he had breached rules on declaration of the gift, a new scandal was uncovered last weekend when the Sunday Times reported (£) that he had been given substantial monetary gifts by convicted cryptocurrency fraudster George Cottrell, which had also not been declared, also potentially breaching disclosure rules.
This was the background to the ‘resign and re-stand’ announcement. In it, Farage elided numerous issues, most of which are irrelevant to the issue of whether he has or has not broken parliamentary rules on gift declaration. These included the nature and extent of his need for security, and who should pay for it, his right to undertake extra-parliamentary work, and his allegations of media harassment of his daughter. There was also another outing for his ridiculous claim to be a successful businessman rather than a career politician. These and other irrelevant talking points are also being endlessly re-hashed on social media.
As ever with Farage, the accent was on his supposed victimhood, refracted through the familiar mix of self-pity and aggression. Notably, though, as has been the case throughout the recent weeks in which his financial dealings have been in scrutiny (including not just gifts received, but payments for his various business activities including the £270,000 he has earned since becoming an MP as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm), he has lost much of his usual skill in presenting himself as humorous and unflappable. Rather, he seemed petulant and panicky. If so, that suggests that he, too, expects to be found to have breached parliamentary standards since, if not, he could confidently have waited for exoneration.
The populist subversion of democracy
Beyond all the faux-victimhood, Farage articulated a core theme of populism in general, and Brexitism in particular. The link to Brexit was explicit, and made by Farage himself in claiming ‘credit’ for the referendum and for Brexit itself. For all its failure and subsequent unpopularity, and for all that Farage generally says little about it these days, Brexit remains his signature dish. But more importantly, what Farage proposed was that it should be for “the people” of Clacton to decide. To decide what, though? Apparently, they (rather than the media) should judge his probity and they (rather than parliament) whether he had breached the rules on disclosure of gifts. Yet, manifestly, that would be impossible. Without media reports of his conduct, how would people be able to judge his probity? And, certainly, they could not judge whether he has breached disclosure rules until the parliamentary investigation of that has been completed.
So it was a nonsensical proposition, yet it was also a meaningful one. Its meaning is that the sole mechanism of democracy is voting (a principle which does not, by the way, apply to Reform UK’s governing board). This, too, is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. It is what lies behind all the jibes about unelected judges and unelected bureaucrats, jibes which entail that only being voted for brings democratic legitimacy. It ignores that democracy is much more complex than voting and that voting is only one, albeit necessary, condition for its existence. An independent judiciary, a free press, bureaucratic rules for the conduct of representatives, amongst other things, are also vital. Thus what purports to be an absolute commitment to democracy is in fact an attempt to subvert it by hollowing it out.
Here, again, there is a Brexit connection or, rather, an illustration of how Brexit has segued into Brexitism. The idea that the referendum, because it was a vote, gave rise not just to ‘the will of the people’ but rendered all further involvement by judges, civil servants or even parliament itself illegitimate, was one of the most pernicious features of the post-referendum period. Now, Farage is seeking to draw on the same well-spring, by declaring that his by-election will be about ‘the people versus the Establishment’. He even reprised one of the most irresponsible of the appeals to leave voters, to use the vote not to decide on the ostensible issue under consideration but simply to “stick two fingers up at the Establishment”.
If Farage’s gambit succeeds (a question I’ll come back to) then, even if he is subsequently found to have breached parliamentary standards, he will use the result to delegitimize that finding. He has already denounced the process as “political” in order to discredit it as being a motivated attack upon him, but doing so also has the effect of positioning it within the same arena as the overt politics of the voting process. Thus, it becomes possible to say that its findings are irrelevant because ‘the people have spoken’.
The wider issues
However, whilst the outcome of the standards investigation is an important one, both for Farage himself and for the principles it embodies, it’s important to keep in mind that, in itself, it is not the most important issue. The rules on disclosure of gifts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is, they exist to provide transparency about the interests and, perhaps, the obligations of MPs. From that point of view, even if Farage had correctly declared his gifts in line with the rules and, actually, even if it turns out to be true (as he claims) that it was not necessary to declare them, the fact of those gifts is highly significant.
They raise the question of why Farage is so enmeshed with, specifically, cryptocurrency magnates and what that betokens. This question goes beyond the personal gifts he has received to encompass the donations made to Reform UK itself, not least because some of the magnates involved, primarily Harborne, are one and the same. The connection of these issues would arise in relation to any party leader and party but is especially salient in this case because of the peculiar structure of Reform UK and the unique relationship between Farage and the party he created. For, even though he renounced ownership last year, he still has an unusually strong grip on it.
Reform’s reliance on cryptocurrency, both as a source of the wealth of its biggest donors and as the actual currency used for some donations, is unusual and striking. Harborne has given £9 million to the party (the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party) in addition to earlier donations of at least £3 million, along with the £5 million to Farage personally. Another cryptocurrency billionaire, Ben Delo, has donated £4 million to the party. Meanwhile, last year Reform became the only major political party in the UK to accept donations in cryptocurrency (although this is to be prohibited, at least temporarily, under recently announced government regulations).
Reform has other major donors, of course, such as venture capitalist and art collector Sasan Ghandehari who has recently pledged unspecified millions of pounds (£). More modestly, £200,000 was given by Anthony Bamford’s firm JCB, whose products, no doubt coincidentally, have recently been promoted and extravagantly praised by Farage and Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick. But the scale and centrality of cryptocurrency to the finances of both the party and its leader is remarkable. Farage also has his own personal interest in the sector as a substantial investor in, and promoter of, the bitcoin firm Stack BTC.
This does not, as Farage would have it, denote that he and Reform are tech-savvy innovators, geared up for the financial system of the future. Cryptocurrencies are inextricably intertwined with organized crime, money laundering, terrorism and hostile state actors, as the Royal United Services Institute’s research, amongst that of others, has explored. They are also central to Putin’s wartime economy and his attempt to circumvent sanctions, as the RAND organization, amongst others, has shown.
This makes it unsurprising that Farage’s £5 million gift was reported by bankers to the National Crime Agency. It is very difficult to trace the provenance of funds moved through crypto accounts, so banks frequently seek advice from crime agencies when large sums are involved, especially when paid to “politically exposed people”. This latter concept, by the way, was central to the dramatic row that broke out in 2023 when Farage was ‘de-banked’ by Coutts, something which might appear in a fresh light given the more recent revelations.
Nor should the Trump connection be forgotten. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Trump also granted a pardon to Reform donor Ben Delo for his offences relating to anti-money laundering compliance (George Cottrell is reportedly seeking such a pardon for his fraud conviction).
So it is because of, to say the very least, the murky nature of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency speculation that the question of whether Farage did or did not break parliamentary disclosure rules is not the only issue of importance. His longstanding commitment to cryptocurrency deregulation was given tangible form with the publication of Reform’s so-called ‘Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill’ in May 2025. This (which intriguingly has now disappeared from Reform’s website) claimed to set out a “post-Brexit roadmap to make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”. It might not be unduly cynical to wonder what motivates Reform’s commitment to such legislation and, perhaps even more importantly, to be concerned about the calamitous effects it would have on the British economy were anything like it ever to be enacted.
Back to Clacton
One might certainly wonder exactly how Farage and Reform’s enmeshment with cryptocurrencies squares with their anti-globalist and anti-elitist pretensions (this is probably one reason, along with Rupert Lowe’s even more extreme anti-immigration policies, why Restore Britain is siphoning off some of Reform’s core supporters, although Lowe, himself, can hardly be regarded as a horny-handed son of toil). This in itself makes Farage’s framing of the Clacton by-election rather a farce. But, as things are turning out, it will be a farce anyway, as all the other major parties have very wisely decided not to field candidates. Nor will Restore, providing Lowe’s Musk-backed ethno-nationalist party with a rare opportunity to inhabit the moral high ground.
This creates the prospect of a Farage victory, probably on a very low turn-out, over the joke candidate Count Binface (it seems that actor-turned-fruitcake Laurence Fox will also stand). Or, even more humiliatingly, a defeat by Count Binface. Indeed it is a delicious, and perhaps not entirely unlikely possibility, that Farage’s injunction to voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the Establishment’ might actually yield this outcome. It would be reminiscent of the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ episode or, perhaps more pertinently, H’Angus the Monkey’s election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, but with incalculably greater political consequences.
This bizarre situation has already forced Farage’s supporters into some curious postures. Many are drawing a bogus comparison with the Makerfield by-election (bogus for the obvious reason that the sitting MP did not re-stand for election). Some, such as tedious contrarian Brendan O’Neill, are complaining that the failure of the other parties to stand candidates shows they are insulting the working-class people of Clacton. Others are reduced to delving into the background [warning: link to X] of the comedian behind Count Binface to show that he is an anti-Brexit graduate and a prime example of the metropolitan liberal elite. The idea, it seems, is to suggest that he is, after all, a serious candidate representing the Establishment, which is surely a very perverse route to go down.
All of this is, in its way, highly amusing. Even so, the very farcicality of it is a depressing symbol, not least to the world beyond Britain, of the state of British politics. Of course it is also possible that Farage will wriggle out of things, reversing his resignation and no doubt claiming that he has supposedly won a victory by showing that the other parties are ‘too scared’ to fight him, rather than simply showing their disdain for his antics. It is also possible, whether or not this by-election happens now, that one will be triggered if he is found to have broken parliamentary rules. If so, that would presumably be contested by the other parties in the normal way and he would quite possibly win.
Whilst it is certainly too early to write Farage off, there is a palpable sense, which was growing even before his ‘resignation’, that his star is waning. That matters. It is obviously the case that Farage channels a deep vein of political sentiment that would exist without him, and will continue to exist if he were to depart the political scene. But the way in which he has dominated populist politics in Britain for so long, and the very personal hold he has over the Reform party, means that if and when his demise comes British politics in general, and Brexitism, in particular will be significantly re-inflected. His own conduct, especially this week, has probably brought that moment closer.
Note
[1] For detailed discussion of the treaty, see my post of June 2025. For discussion of the 2017 episode, and the background to it, see my post from April of that year.
One was the demolition of the border barriers between Spain and Gibraltar, in advance of the provisional application of the UK-EU treaty on 15 July which is expected to be formally signed on 13 July. There was also a UK parliamentary debate yesterday showing broad cross-party support for the treaty. This marks an important moment for Gibraltar but also for the Brexit process as a whole in that it resolves the last outstanding issue from the Article 50 negotiations. Those with long memories may recall how, in 2017, there was ridiculous talk from Brexiters, including former Tory leader Michael Howard, of Britain going to war with Spain over this issue. [1]
The other development was a report that the ‘reset’ agreement is near to completion and the delayed UK-EU summit is likely to be held in mid-October. However, another report (£), in the Financial Times, suggested that there are still many unresolved issues and that the summit date remains uncertain. The latter report stated that a particular stumbling block is the UK demand to have a role in EU decision-making, a demand unsurprisingly rejected for the obvious reason that the UK chose to leave the EU.
But within the FT report was a particular sentence, to the effect that the UK demand “was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal from criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party”. It is yet another reminder of the mess post-Brexit Britain is in: still making unrealistic demands of the EU, still allowing Farage to influence policy from outside government, and still caught in the absurd fantasy that doing so will somehow defuse the criticisms that he would make whatever the terms of any deal. That reminder is all the more stark given the miasma of scandal that has recently gathered over Farage.
So when that led to the extraordinary démarche of announcing on Tuesday his intention to resign from, but re-fight, his Clacton seat, I decided that a post this week was worthwhile after all (albeit, as it happens, a day earlier than my usual Friday morning slot). For, however events now play out, this episode is highly revealing about both post-Brexit politics and the politics of Brexitism.
Farage’s petulance and panic
The circumstances of Farage’s announcement are well-known. In brief, the swirl of questions about financial gifts he has received led to the instigation of a parliamentary standards investigation into, specifically, the £5 million he was given by cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne. His responses to questions about this have been contradictory, evasive and increasingly tetchy (and, preposterously, he referred to it in his announcement as being akin to a “lottery win”). Then, amid expectations that the standards investigation would rule that he had breached rules on declaration of the gift, a new scandal was uncovered last weekend when the Sunday Times reported (£) that he had been given substantial monetary gifts by convicted cryptocurrency fraudster George Cottrell, which had also not been declared, also potentially breaching disclosure rules.
This was the background to the ‘resign and re-stand’ announcement. In it, Farage elided numerous issues, most of which are irrelevant to the issue of whether he has or has not broken parliamentary rules on gift declaration. These included the nature and extent of his need for security, and who should pay for it, his right to undertake extra-parliamentary work, and his allegations of media harassment of his daughter. There was also another outing for his ridiculous claim to be a successful businessman rather than a career politician. These and other irrelevant talking points are also being endlessly re-hashed on social media.
As ever with Farage, the accent was on his supposed victimhood, refracted through the familiar mix of self-pity and aggression. Notably, though, as has been the case throughout the recent weeks in which his financial dealings have been in scrutiny (including not just gifts received, but payments for his various business activities including the £270,000 he has earned since becoming an MP as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm), he has lost much of his usual skill in presenting himself as humorous and unflappable. Rather, he seemed petulant and panicky. If so, that suggests that he, too, expects to be found to have breached parliamentary standards since, if not, he could confidently have waited for exoneration.
The populist subversion of democracy
Beyond all the faux-victimhood, Farage articulated a core theme of populism in general, and Brexitism in particular. The link to Brexit was explicit, and made by Farage himself in claiming ‘credit’ for the referendum and for Brexit itself. For all its failure and subsequent unpopularity, and for all that Farage generally says little about it these days, Brexit remains his signature dish. But more importantly, what Farage proposed was that it should be for “the people” of Clacton to decide. To decide what, though? Apparently, they (rather than the media) should judge his probity and they (rather than parliament) whether he had breached the rules on disclosure of gifts. Yet, manifestly, that would be impossible. Without media reports of his conduct, how would people be able to judge his probity? And, certainly, they could not judge whether he has breached disclosure rules until the parliamentary investigation of that has been completed.
So it was a nonsensical proposition, yet it was also a meaningful one. Its meaning is that the sole mechanism of democracy is voting (a principle which does not, by the way, apply to Reform UK’s governing board). This, too, is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. It is what lies behind all the jibes about unelected judges and unelected bureaucrats, jibes which entail that only being voted for brings democratic legitimacy. It ignores that democracy is much more complex than voting and that voting is only one, albeit necessary, condition for its existence. An independent judiciary, a free press, bureaucratic rules for the conduct of representatives, amongst other things, are also vital. Thus what purports to be an absolute commitment to democracy is in fact an attempt to subvert it by hollowing it out.
Here, again, there is a Brexit connection or, rather, an illustration of how Brexit has segued into Brexitism. The idea that the referendum, because it was a vote, gave rise not just to ‘the will of the people’ but rendered all further involvement by judges, civil servants or even parliament itself illegitimate, was one of the most pernicious features of the post-referendum period. Now, Farage is seeking to draw on the same well-spring, by declaring that his by-election will be about ‘the people versus the Establishment’. He even reprised one of the most irresponsible of the appeals to leave voters, to use the vote not to decide on the ostensible issue under consideration but simply to “stick two fingers up at the Establishment”.
If Farage’s gambit succeeds (a question I’ll come back to) then, even if he is subsequently found to have breached parliamentary standards, he will use the result to delegitimize that finding. He has already denounced the process as “political” in order to discredit it as being a motivated attack upon him, but doing so also has the effect of positioning it within the same arena as the overt politics of the voting process. Thus, it becomes possible to say that its findings are irrelevant because ‘the people have spoken’.
The wider issues
However, whilst the outcome of the standards investigation is an important one, both for Farage himself and for the principles it embodies, it’s important to keep in mind that, in itself, it is not the most important issue. The rules on disclosure of gifts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is, they exist to provide transparency about the interests and, perhaps, the obligations of MPs. From that point of view, even if Farage had correctly declared his gifts in line with the rules and, actually, even if it turns out to be true (as he claims) that it was not necessary to declare them, the fact of those gifts is highly significant.
They raise the question of why Farage is so enmeshed with, specifically, cryptocurrency magnates and what that betokens. This question goes beyond the personal gifts he has received to encompass the donations made to Reform UK itself, not least because some of the magnates involved, primarily Harborne, are one and the same. The connection of these issues would arise in relation to any party leader and party but is especially salient in this case because of the peculiar structure of Reform UK and the unique relationship between Farage and the party he created. For, even though he renounced ownership last year, he still has an unusually strong grip on it.
Reform’s reliance on cryptocurrency, both as a source of the wealth of its biggest donors and as the actual currency used for some donations, is unusual and striking. Harborne has given £9 million to the party (the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party) in addition to earlier donations of at least £3 million, along with the £5 million to Farage personally. Another cryptocurrency billionaire, Ben Delo, has donated £4 million to the party. Meanwhile, last year Reform became the only major political party in the UK to accept donations in cryptocurrency (although this is to be prohibited, at least temporarily, under recently announced government regulations).
Reform has other major donors, of course, such as venture capitalist and art collector Sasan Ghandehari who has recently pledged unspecified millions of pounds (£). More modestly, £200,000 was given by Anthony Bamford’s firm JCB, whose products, no doubt coincidentally, have recently been promoted and extravagantly praised by Farage and Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick. But the scale and centrality of cryptocurrency to the finances of both the party and its leader is remarkable. Farage also has his own personal interest in the sector as a substantial investor in, and promoter of, the bitcoin firm Stack BTC.
This does not, as Farage would have it, denote that he and Reform are tech-savvy innovators, geared up for the financial system of the future. Cryptocurrencies are inextricably intertwined with organized crime, money laundering, terrorism and hostile state actors, as the Royal United Services Institute’s research, amongst that of others, has explored. They are also central to Putin’s wartime economy and his attempt to circumvent sanctions, as the RAND organization, amongst others, has shown.
This makes it unsurprising that Farage’s £5 million gift was reported by bankers to the National Crime Agency. It is very difficult to trace the provenance of funds moved through crypto accounts, so banks frequently seek advice from crime agencies when large sums are involved, especially when paid to “politically exposed people”. This latter concept, by the way, was central to the dramatic row that broke out in 2023 when Farage was ‘de-banked’ by Coutts, something which might appear in a fresh light given the more recent revelations.
Nor should the Trump connection be forgotten. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Trump also granted a pardon to Reform donor Ben Delo for his offences relating to anti-money laundering compliance (George Cottrell is reportedly seeking such a pardon for his fraud conviction).
So it is because of, to say the very least, the murky nature of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency speculation that the question of whether Farage did or did not break parliamentary disclosure rules is not the only issue of importance. His longstanding commitment to cryptocurrency deregulation was given tangible form with the publication of Reform’s so-called ‘Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill’ in May 2025. This (which intriguingly has now disappeared from Reform’s website) claimed to set out a “post-Brexit roadmap to make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”. It might not be unduly cynical to wonder what motivates Reform’s commitment to such legislation and, perhaps even more importantly, to be concerned about the calamitous effects it would have on the British economy were anything like it ever to be enacted.
Back to Clacton
One might certainly wonder exactly how Farage and Reform’s enmeshment with cryptocurrencies squares with their anti-globalist and anti-elitist pretensions (this is probably one reason, along with Rupert Lowe’s even more extreme anti-immigration policies, why Restore Britain is siphoning off some of Reform’s core supporters, although Lowe, himself, can hardly be regarded as a horny-handed son of toil). This in itself makes Farage’s framing of the Clacton by-election rather a farce. But, as things are turning out, it will be a farce anyway, as all the other major parties have very wisely decided not to field candidates. Nor will Restore, providing Lowe’s Musk-backed ethno-nationalist party with a rare opportunity to inhabit the moral high ground.
This creates the prospect of a Farage victory, probably on a very low turn-out, over the joke candidate Count Binface (it seems that actor-turned-fruitcake Laurence Fox will also stand). Or, even more humiliatingly, a defeat by Count Binface. Indeed it is a delicious, and perhaps not entirely unlikely possibility, that Farage’s injunction to voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the Establishment’ might actually yield this outcome. It would be reminiscent of the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ episode or, perhaps more pertinently, H’Angus the Monkey’s election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, but with incalculably greater political consequences.
This bizarre situation has already forced Farage’s supporters into some curious postures. Many are drawing a bogus comparison with the Makerfield by-election (bogus for the obvious reason that the sitting MP did not re-stand for election). Some, such as tedious contrarian Brendan O’Neill, are complaining that the failure of the other parties to stand candidates shows they are insulting the working-class people of Clacton. Others are reduced to delving into the background [warning: link to X] of the comedian behind Count Binface to show that he is an anti-Brexit graduate and a prime example of the metropolitan liberal elite. The idea, it seems, is to suggest that he is, after all, a serious candidate representing the Establishment, which is surely a very perverse route to go down.
All of this is, in its way, highly amusing. Even so, the very farcicality of it is a depressing symbol, not least to the world beyond Britain, of the state of British politics. Of course it is also possible that Farage will wriggle out of things, reversing his resignation and no doubt claiming that he has supposedly won a victory by showing that the other parties are ‘too scared’ to fight him, rather than simply showing their disdain for his antics. It is also possible, whether or not this by-election happens now, that one will be triggered if he is found to have broken parliamentary rules. If so, that would presumably be contested by the other parties in the normal way and he would quite possibly win.
Whilst it is certainly too early to write Farage off, there is a palpable sense, which was growing even before his ‘resignation’, that his star is waning. That matters. It is obviously the case that Farage channels a deep vein of political sentiment that would exist without him, and will continue to exist if he were to depart the political scene. But the way in which he has dominated populist politics in Britain for so long, and the very personal hold he has over the Reform party, means that if and when his demise comes British politics in general, and Brexitism, in particular will be significantly re-inflected. His own conduct, especially this week, has probably brought that moment closer.
Note
[1] For detailed discussion of the treaty, see my post of June 2025. For discussion of the 2017 episode, and the background to it, see my post from April of that year.
Friday, 14 November 2025
Stasis, sanctimony, and the liberal paradox
Events of the last fortnight are a good illustration of why I recently re-focused and re-titled this blog to Brexit and Brexitism. For the Brexit news, in a narrow sense, is meagre, whereas there is such a profusion of reports of the battle for and against Brexitism that it is hardly possible to discuss them all in a single post.
Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis
On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”
As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU?
The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.
How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.
So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.
The many faces of Farage
On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.
In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.
The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.
This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy.
Stale, predictable and contradictory
Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.
Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].
It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”
This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.
The anti-BBC axis
If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.
The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.
Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.
Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.
The BBC’s liberalism
There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”
In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.
A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.
Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.
Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).
The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.
In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.
The unappeasable
This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.
In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.
On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?
The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.
Notes
[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.
[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.
[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”
Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis
On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”
As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU?
The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.
How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.
So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.
The many faces of Farage
On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.
In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.
The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.
This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy.
Stale, predictable and contradictory
Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.
Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].
It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”
This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.
The anti-BBC axis
If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.
The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.
Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.
Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.
The BBC’s liberalism
There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”
In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.
A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.
Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.
Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).
The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.
In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.
The unappeasable
This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.
In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.
On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?
The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.
Notes
[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.
[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.
[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”
Friday, 21 March 2025
The Brexit reformation
It was always inevitable that once Britain had left the EU it would become more and more difficult to keep tabs on what Brexit means. The consequences are so diffuse, so varied and, often, so technically abstruse as to certainly be beyond the abilities of any one person to catalogue. Many of those consequences are economic, but perhaps the most difficult to chart are the ways Brexit is re-forming British politics [1].
It was also inevitable that Brexit would become bound up with ongoing international politics, as the UK sought a reformation of its relationships not just with the EU but within the international order generally. What couldn’t have been predicted, even until very recently, was how that international order was going to be so radically upended, making Brexit at once something rather minor and yet recasting it as a moving part within something so major.
Framing events
All of which is a rather longwinded way of saying that it is becoming increasingly difficult to write this blog, and that the ‘beyond’ parts of its ‘Brexit and Beyond’ title increasingly overweigh the narrowly ‘Brexit’ parts. Both nationally and internationally, the ‘beyond’ issues are now inextricably linked with Trump and the new global divide I wrote about in my previous post. There have been any number of news stories about this global divide in the last fortnight, most of which can be framed through four inter-related questions:
· To what extent will it lead to closer defence and security integration between the EU and the UK, including integration of military operations, equipment procurement, intelligence sharing etc., and under what terms would/ could these occur?
· If such EU-UK defence integration happens, will it be accompanied by, and perhaps make more extensive than might otherwise have been envisaged, deeper economic and regulatory integration?
· Would EU-UK integration in either or both of these senses be precluded by, or go alongside, a divergence in how each partner related to the US, for example and in particular as regards some form of UK-US ‘economic deal’ struck (including perhaps exemption from Trump tariffs) at the same time as the EU-US relationship becomes more hostile (including perhaps a prolonged trade war)?
· To what extent is the US going to detach itself so far from international norms and constitutional propriety as to make it impossible for the UK to sustain anything resembling a normal relationship with it (whether because US malfeasance becomes too gross for the UK to ignore, or because the US turns decisively and aggressively on the UK)?
At least some answers to these questions are likely to emerge over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, there is, arguably, little point in trying to read the runes of every report of every meeting and statement to try to anticipate what these answers will be.
Looking further ahead, new questions will emerge, some of which by definition cannot be predicted, not least because so many of the key actors, especially Trump, are unpredictable in their very nature. But perhaps the most predictable question (though not its answer) is what would happen, including, especially, how would Trump react, if Putin commits new acts of aggression, and in particular if these are committed against the personnel or territory of a NATO member?
An important sub-set of this question is what would happen if the UK (along with other countries) deploys some form of ‘peace-keeping’ force in Ukraine and it comes under direct Russian attack? At that point, certainly if the US fails to give military backing, then we will be in a dramatically new and dangerous situation, which will make Brexit, even in its most extensive meanings, a triviality.
The Reform fiasco
Meanwhile, and to some extent connected, the effects of Brexit on domestic politics continue to unfold. Of these, currently the most fascinating is the colossal mess that Reform UK has got into. That’s not say it is particularly surprising, for all the reasons which led me to write, immediately after last year’s general election result, that “it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election”. True, it hasn’t imploded yet, but, then again, we are less than a year into the electoral cycle.
The continuing presence of Nigel Farage and a Farageist party is, perhaps first and foremost, a reminder of David Cameron’s disastrously ill-judged attempt to see off the threat of UKIP by holding the referendum in 2016. It is arguable that this was not the sole reason the referendum was held, but it is unarguable that it was high on the list. The failure of that decision was, with bitter irony, a double one: not only did it unleash the disaster of Brexit, it also installed Farage and Farageism as a central part of the political landscape, and it did so to the detriment not just of the Tory Party but of British politics generally.
Farage’s continuing presence is also a reminder of his dishonesty and egotism. After all, he resigned UKIP’s leadership shortly after the referendum, his political ambitions supposedly achieved, only to go on to create the Brexit Party and then Reform. No doubt he would present that as ‘defending Brexit’ from ‘betrayal’, but his decision not to challenge Tory incumbents in the 2019 election opened the door for Boris Johnson to enact Brexit in a form which Farage regards as, precisely, a betrayal and a failure. Lacking even that avowed purpose, Reform exists as a rag-bag of populist complaints, most centrally about immigration, as well as being a fresh vehicle for his ego. British populism did not just bring Brexit about, it was also, itself, changed by Brexit since it lost what had been its defining cause.
There’s every reason to think that Farage’s ego, and more specifically his difficult and unpleasant character, is a big part of the current fiasco within Reform. After all, there is a very long list of people he has fallen out with during his political career. It’s true that, looking at some of the names on that list, it isn’t hard to imagine there were, to say the very least, faults on both sides. For that matter his current colleagues, including his fellow MPs, are not exactly the sort of people that anyone half-sane would want to go camping with. Even so, it is hard to deny, and easy to imagine, that Farage is an almost impossible person to work with. Yet, like it or not (and many of his present and former allies are clearly amongst those who do not), his character has a public appeal that no one else on the populist right of British politics enjoys.
Farage’s political strategy
However there has always been more to Farage’s capacity to mobilize significant numbers of voters than his character (or, perhaps more accurately, his persona). Whatever party he has led, he has had a clear strategic sense about the nature of those voters and what appeals to them. He accurately recognized that weirdos like Godfrey Bloom or Gerard Batten did not have that appeal, regardless of their beliefs, but he also recognizes that he himself would not have that appeal if he were openly to embrace far-right politics. Farage’s political skill, and it is a considerable one, is to appear ‘normal’, even genial, and ‘sensible’, even reasonable, in order to appeal to relatively mainstream voters, whilst being convincing to those on the far right who can hear his ‘dog whistles’ (I wish there was a less clichéd term than that).
In this sense, the current blow up should be understood as being about much more than personalities, for all that they are relevant. It is actually about two, related, matters of substance which derive from Farage’s political strategy. One is the autocratic and undemocratic way in which he runs Reform. Whilst this, too, no doubt reflects his character, it also reflects his experience, particularly in UKIP, of a party of what David Cameron in 2006 called “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”. It was a jibe which was all too obviously true and, although that didn’t matter in terms of UKIP’s core support, it did put a ceiling on what it could achieve electorally. The hastily created Brexit Party had similar problems. Hence, when creating Reform, Farage wanted to be able to exert much more control over his party and that, too, was partly a consequence of Brexit since, unlike UKIP, Reform can’t make use of proportionally representative European elections to build a power base.
The related issue of substance is his determination to ensure that his party’s ‘dog whistles’ to the far right remain just that. This means, firstly, trying to exclude those who do not have his consummate skill in judging how to pitch messages so that only the dogs hear them (or, at least, that they are deniable when anyone else hears them). Even more importantly, it means excluding those who do not even attempt such subterfuge, and are openly on the far right. That certainly doesn’t mean, as Farage likes to claim, that he is somehow engaged in marginalizing the far right: rather, he has sought to harness the far right without frightening off other, less extreme, voters. It is therefore no coincidence that, just as Farage left UKIP in 2018 (having already stood down as leader) over its links with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and the far right, so too are those links central to current events within Reform.
The far-right riots
The immediate roots of these events go back to last summer’s far-right riots and, crucially, to Keir Starmer’s robustness in correctly insisting that they were, indeed, “far-right thuggery”. This caused much outrage on the political right which, whilst largely confected, brought to the fore the relationship between the ‘respectable right’ and far-right extremism. The effect was to expose the two-faced nature of Farage’s entire ‘dog whistle’ strategy of stoking division by, supposedly, ‘just asking questions’ about the causes of the riots whilst insisting that he had never had anything to do with “the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred”.
Shortly afterwards, Robinson was jailed, not in relation to the riots, but for contempt of court and breaking an injunction in relation to his hounding of a Syrian refugee, prompting a far-right rally in his support. Like Farage, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice disavowed Robinson, but others, most notably Ben Habib, argued, no doubt correctly, that many of those demonstrating were Reform’s ‘own people’. Habib, already bitter about having been ousted as Co-Deputy Leader (hardly, one would have thought, a job title to excite strong feelings) left Reform in November 2024, citing Farage’s autocracy as his main reason but clearly, as I just suggested, this autocracy and the position on Robinson are linked. At all events, Habib has subsequently been vocal in describing Robinson as “a political prisoner”.
By early January, at Reform’s East Midlands Conference, Lee Anderson, the thuggish former Tory MP who is now his new party’s Whip, was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Robinson hecklers. As I wrote on social media at the time, “… the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years (see also Habib's recent resignation). There's a very tricky tightrope between being 'respectable' and being more 'radical' than the Tories.”
Immediately afterwards, and just a day after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, who for months had been displaying sympathy for the rioters, and, like Habib, forthright in supporting Robinson as a ‘victim’ and a ‘political prisoner’, denounced Farage as unfit to lead Reform, and went on to suggest, at least, that Rupert Lowe would be a preferable leader. This made Lowe a potential personal threat to Farage whilst also establishing him as a standard bearer for the right of the Reform Party, symbolized not just by his praise for Robinson but by his open advocacy of “mass deportations”.
This, Lowe assured people, would apply ‘only’ to ‘illegal immigrants’, but for Farage such a policy is “politically impossible” and such language is politically unwise, precisely because of its connotations of the ‘send them all home’ repatriation policies of the far right. From this has flowed Lowe’s suspension from the party amid allegations of bullying, which have been reported to the police, and an increasingly sour war of words from leading figures in Reform, as well as a running social media battle between its different factions. At the same time, Farage’s pro-Russian, pro-Trump, and anti-Ukraine positions are, as mentioned in my last post, making him increasingly vulnerable to criticism from both within and outside his party.
Farage exposed
Whilst many of these issues are not new, what is new is that, for the first time, Farage is being pulled apart simultaneously along all of the contradictory fault lines which define his politics. To recapitulate these fault lines: first, there is contradiction between his ‘hail fellow, well met’ public shtick and the ruthlessness with which he pursues his personal ambitions. Second, there is the contradiction between his attempt to pitch to the political ‘mainstream’ whilst dog-whistling to the far right. Third, there is the contradiction between his pretensions to patriotism and his apologism for Putin. Fourth, and most recent, there is the contradiction between his admiration for Trump and Musk and the now open contempt in which he is held by, at least, the latter.
The last of these has a significance which goes beyond Farage and Reform. Although Musk is alone amongst the US radical right in his (ongoing) open criticism of Farage, he is very far from alone in his associated criticisms of the UK. In particular, the idea that last summer’s riots represented the righteous grievance of those forced to live in a multi-cultural society, along with the myth that those who received jail sentences for their actions were being penalized simply for exercising the right to free speech, is now standard in Trumpist circles, and it enfolds the UK into their wider critique of Europe (regardless of Brexit). It was even alluded to by JD Vance when Starmer visited the White House, although the Prime Minister pushed back against it. It is a certainly a standard belief amongst the UK far right, and Reform supporters more generally, including in their endless jibes about ‘two-tier Keir’.
Farage, of course, is happy to join in with much of that, but is now exposed, more than ever before, in the ‘no man’s land’ he has always wanted avoid, whereby he is neither respectable enough nor radical enough. The result is that his ability to hold together a coalition of voters is diminished. Reform voters now split almost exactly three equal ways between those who think the party would do better, worse, or no differently (or don’t know) without Farage as leader, and the percentage of those voters with a favourable view of Farage has fallen from 91% to 73% over just the last month. Yet being able to create, sustain, and grow an electoral coalition matters more than it ever has, because it is only since Brexit that Farage finally managed to become an MP and to lead a Westminster party which, implausibly but not quite ludicrously, has pretensions to government.
Wider implications
The issue here isn’t so much whether Reform, with or without Farage as a leader, loses electoral support. In fact, for all the battles going on within the party, there is no sign yet of a fall in its support in the opinion polls, and, as political scientist Professor Tim Bale has pointed out, that is very likely because it is only a very vocal minority who are engaged in, or by, those battles. The more significant issue is whether it puts a hard cap on the level of support Reform can ever expect to achieve. If so, that probably puts an end to the idea of a Reform electoral breakthrough. That would be consistent with the suggestion of another leading political scientist, Professor Ben Ansell, that, largely because of Trump, populism generally, and Reform’s populism in particular, has reached a peak. It is an analysis cautiously endorsed by political commentator Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£).
However, if the party continues to poll even close to the mid-twenties it will continue to exert unpredictable effects within our electoral system, including potentially significant gains in by-elections, local elections, and the Welsh Senedd and Scottish parliament elections. That will mean a continuing temptation for both Tory and Labour parties to pander to the sensibilities of actual or potential Reform voters, anchoring mainstream political debate around their agenda. Moreover, the fact that Reform has, in effect, its own TV channel in GB News, and the puniness of its regulation, gives the party an influence well beyond that of formal political representation. Certainly my suggestion at the time of the riots that they could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration has proved hopelessly optimistic.
So none of this makes for a neat picture of the shape of post-Brexit politics, and still less is it the basis for a prediction of the shape of things to come. It doesn’t even tell us much about what Farage’s personal fate will be. But the recent buffeting he has received does show the vulnerabilities of post-Brexit populism in Britain and that Trump’s re-election is proving to pose significant problems for it, rather than, as might have been expected, providing a new confidence. And that isn’t just affecting Farage and Reform. Brexiter Atlanticists like Daniel Hannan are suddenly having to recalibrate to a world in which the US is no longer a trustworthy ally (£) although, of course, being Hannan, he draws the fatuous conclusion that the solution is to revive his CANZUK fantasy.
Ultimately, then, there is less of a disconnect between ‘Brexit’ and ‘Beyond’ than I suggested at the beginning of this post. Brexit was always going to leave a long trail of effects on the British polity, including on advocates like Farage, and on the UK’s relations with the wider world. But that was never going to happen in a vacuum; the world was not going to remain static. As it has turned out, not only has the world changed, but it has done so in ways which have shown Brexit and its advocates to be even more adrift and riven by contradictions than they were in 2016.
Note
[1] Vital as these ‘beyond Brexit’ political consequences are, I do think it is also important to keep at least trying to record the ways in which the dull empirical thud of Brexit, in its most basic meaning, keeps punching the bruises it has already created (especially as Brexit apologists continue to trot out bogus arguments to try to downplay its damage). That, too, is more difficult than it used to be as media reporting of the basics has become much sparser. It just isn’t newsworthy any more, unless there is some major anniversary. Nevertheless, some stories make it through, including the report from the Food and Drink Federation that British exports of food and drink to the EU have fallen by a whopping 34.1% since 2019. Circuitously related is the growing awareness of the possibility of food shortages when ‘Phase 3’ labelling rules come into force in Northern Ireland in July under the Windsor Framework (with a concomitant extension of ‘Not for Sale in the EU’ labelling in Great Britain). And circuitously related to that are concerns about impending shortages of animal medicines in Northern Ireland. This is a particularly arcane issue, reaching deep back into the Brexit process, and relating to the way that parts of the original Northern Ireland Protocol were made subject to ‘grace periods’ for implementation. Animal medicines were one product area where implementation was deferred but, unlike human medicines, they were not included in the subsequent Windsor Framework agreement. Now, the already extended grace period is due to expire at the end of the year and, as yet, there is no agreement in place. It is yet another reminder of the consequences of the rush to ‘get Brexit done’, and the many loose ends which are still hanging as a result. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the situation of Gibraltar is another, even bigger, example of that.
It was also inevitable that Brexit would become bound up with ongoing international politics, as the UK sought a reformation of its relationships not just with the EU but within the international order generally. What couldn’t have been predicted, even until very recently, was how that international order was going to be so radically upended, making Brexit at once something rather minor and yet recasting it as a moving part within something so major.
Framing events
All of which is a rather longwinded way of saying that it is becoming increasingly difficult to write this blog, and that the ‘beyond’ parts of its ‘Brexit and Beyond’ title increasingly overweigh the narrowly ‘Brexit’ parts. Both nationally and internationally, the ‘beyond’ issues are now inextricably linked with Trump and the new global divide I wrote about in my previous post. There have been any number of news stories about this global divide in the last fortnight, most of which can be framed through four inter-related questions:
· To what extent will it lead to closer defence and security integration between the EU and the UK, including integration of military operations, equipment procurement, intelligence sharing etc., and under what terms would/ could these occur?
· If such EU-UK defence integration happens, will it be accompanied by, and perhaps make more extensive than might otherwise have been envisaged, deeper economic and regulatory integration?
· Would EU-UK integration in either or both of these senses be precluded by, or go alongside, a divergence in how each partner related to the US, for example and in particular as regards some form of UK-US ‘economic deal’ struck (including perhaps exemption from Trump tariffs) at the same time as the EU-US relationship becomes more hostile (including perhaps a prolonged trade war)?
· To what extent is the US going to detach itself so far from international norms and constitutional propriety as to make it impossible for the UK to sustain anything resembling a normal relationship with it (whether because US malfeasance becomes too gross for the UK to ignore, or because the US turns decisively and aggressively on the UK)?
At least some answers to these questions are likely to emerge over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, there is, arguably, little point in trying to read the runes of every report of every meeting and statement to try to anticipate what these answers will be.
Looking further ahead, new questions will emerge, some of which by definition cannot be predicted, not least because so many of the key actors, especially Trump, are unpredictable in their very nature. But perhaps the most predictable question (though not its answer) is what would happen, including, especially, how would Trump react, if Putin commits new acts of aggression, and in particular if these are committed against the personnel or territory of a NATO member?
An important sub-set of this question is what would happen if the UK (along with other countries) deploys some form of ‘peace-keeping’ force in Ukraine and it comes under direct Russian attack? At that point, certainly if the US fails to give military backing, then we will be in a dramatically new and dangerous situation, which will make Brexit, even in its most extensive meanings, a triviality.
The Reform fiasco
Meanwhile, and to some extent connected, the effects of Brexit on domestic politics continue to unfold. Of these, currently the most fascinating is the colossal mess that Reform UK has got into. That’s not say it is particularly surprising, for all the reasons which led me to write, immediately after last year’s general election result, that “it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election”. True, it hasn’t imploded yet, but, then again, we are less than a year into the electoral cycle.
The continuing presence of Nigel Farage and a Farageist party is, perhaps first and foremost, a reminder of David Cameron’s disastrously ill-judged attempt to see off the threat of UKIP by holding the referendum in 2016. It is arguable that this was not the sole reason the referendum was held, but it is unarguable that it was high on the list. The failure of that decision was, with bitter irony, a double one: not only did it unleash the disaster of Brexit, it also installed Farage and Farageism as a central part of the political landscape, and it did so to the detriment not just of the Tory Party but of British politics generally.
Farage’s continuing presence is also a reminder of his dishonesty and egotism. After all, he resigned UKIP’s leadership shortly after the referendum, his political ambitions supposedly achieved, only to go on to create the Brexit Party and then Reform. No doubt he would present that as ‘defending Brexit’ from ‘betrayal’, but his decision not to challenge Tory incumbents in the 2019 election opened the door for Boris Johnson to enact Brexit in a form which Farage regards as, precisely, a betrayal and a failure. Lacking even that avowed purpose, Reform exists as a rag-bag of populist complaints, most centrally about immigration, as well as being a fresh vehicle for his ego. British populism did not just bring Brexit about, it was also, itself, changed by Brexit since it lost what had been its defining cause.
There’s every reason to think that Farage’s ego, and more specifically his difficult and unpleasant character, is a big part of the current fiasco within Reform. After all, there is a very long list of people he has fallen out with during his political career. It’s true that, looking at some of the names on that list, it isn’t hard to imagine there were, to say the very least, faults on both sides. For that matter his current colleagues, including his fellow MPs, are not exactly the sort of people that anyone half-sane would want to go camping with. Even so, it is hard to deny, and easy to imagine, that Farage is an almost impossible person to work with. Yet, like it or not (and many of his present and former allies are clearly amongst those who do not), his character has a public appeal that no one else on the populist right of British politics enjoys.
Farage’s political strategy
However there has always been more to Farage’s capacity to mobilize significant numbers of voters than his character (or, perhaps more accurately, his persona). Whatever party he has led, he has had a clear strategic sense about the nature of those voters and what appeals to them. He accurately recognized that weirdos like Godfrey Bloom or Gerard Batten did not have that appeal, regardless of their beliefs, but he also recognizes that he himself would not have that appeal if he were openly to embrace far-right politics. Farage’s political skill, and it is a considerable one, is to appear ‘normal’, even genial, and ‘sensible’, even reasonable, in order to appeal to relatively mainstream voters, whilst being convincing to those on the far right who can hear his ‘dog whistles’ (I wish there was a less clichéd term than that).
In this sense, the current blow up should be understood as being about much more than personalities, for all that they are relevant. It is actually about two, related, matters of substance which derive from Farage’s political strategy. One is the autocratic and undemocratic way in which he runs Reform. Whilst this, too, no doubt reflects his character, it also reflects his experience, particularly in UKIP, of a party of what David Cameron in 2006 called “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”. It was a jibe which was all too obviously true and, although that didn’t matter in terms of UKIP’s core support, it did put a ceiling on what it could achieve electorally. The hastily created Brexit Party had similar problems. Hence, when creating Reform, Farage wanted to be able to exert much more control over his party and that, too, was partly a consequence of Brexit since, unlike UKIP, Reform can’t make use of proportionally representative European elections to build a power base.
The related issue of substance is his determination to ensure that his party’s ‘dog whistles’ to the far right remain just that. This means, firstly, trying to exclude those who do not have his consummate skill in judging how to pitch messages so that only the dogs hear them (or, at least, that they are deniable when anyone else hears them). Even more importantly, it means excluding those who do not even attempt such subterfuge, and are openly on the far right. That certainly doesn’t mean, as Farage likes to claim, that he is somehow engaged in marginalizing the far right: rather, he has sought to harness the far right without frightening off other, less extreme, voters. It is therefore no coincidence that, just as Farage left UKIP in 2018 (having already stood down as leader) over its links with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and the far right, so too are those links central to current events within Reform.
The far-right riots
The immediate roots of these events go back to last summer’s far-right riots and, crucially, to Keir Starmer’s robustness in correctly insisting that they were, indeed, “far-right thuggery”. This caused much outrage on the political right which, whilst largely confected, brought to the fore the relationship between the ‘respectable right’ and far-right extremism. The effect was to expose the two-faced nature of Farage’s entire ‘dog whistle’ strategy of stoking division by, supposedly, ‘just asking questions’ about the causes of the riots whilst insisting that he had never had anything to do with “the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred”.
Shortly afterwards, Robinson was jailed, not in relation to the riots, but for contempt of court and breaking an injunction in relation to his hounding of a Syrian refugee, prompting a far-right rally in his support. Like Farage, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice disavowed Robinson, but others, most notably Ben Habib, argued, no doubt correctly, that many of those demonstrating were Reform’s ‘own people’. Habib, already bitter about having been ousted as Co-Deputy Leader (hardly, one would have thought, a job title to excite strong feelings) left Reform in November 2024, citing Farage’s autocracy as his main reason but clearly, as I just suggested, this autocracy and the position on Robinson are linked. At all events, Habib has subsequently been vocal in describing Robinson as “a political prisoner”.
By early January, at Reform’s East Midlands Conference, Lee Anderson, the thuggish former Tory MP who is now his new party’s Whip, was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Robinson hecklers. As I wrote on social media at the time, “… the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years (see also Habib's recent resignation). There's a very tricky tightrope between being 'respectable' and being more 'radical' than the Tories.”
Immediately afterwards, and just a day after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, who for months had been displaying sympathy for the rioters, and, like Habib, forthright in supporting Robinson as a ‘victim’ and a ‘political prisoner’, denounced Farage as unfit to lead Reform, and went on to suggest, at least, that Rupert Lowe would be a preferable leader. This made Lowe a potential personal threat to Farage whilst also establishing him as a standard bearer for the right of the Reform Party, symbolized not just by his praise for Robinson but by his open advocacy of “mass deportations”.
This, Lowe assured people, would apply ‘only’ to ‘illegal immigrants’, but for Farage such a policy is “politically impossible” and such language is politically unwise, precisely because of its connotations of the ‘send them all home’ repatriation policies of the far right. From this has flowed Lowe’s suspension from the party amid allegations of bullying, which have been reported to the police, and an increasingly sour war of words from leading figures in Reform, as well as a running social media battle between its different factions. At the same time, Farage’s pro-Russian, pro-Trump, and anti-Ukraine positions are, as mentioned in my last post, making him increasingly vulnerable to criticism from both within and outside his party.
Farage exposed
Whilst many of these issues are not new, what is new is that, for the first time, Farage is being pulled apart simultaneously along all of the contradictory fault lines which define his politics. To recapitulate these fault lines: first, there is contradiction between his ‘hail fellow, well met’ public shtick and the ruthlessness with which he pursues his personal ambitions. Second, there is the contradiction between his attempt to pitch to the political ‘mainstream’ whilst dog-whistling to the far right. Third, there is the contradiction between his pretensions to patriotism and his apologism for Putin. Fourth, and most recent, there is the contradiction between his admiration for Trump and Musk and the now open contempt in which he is held by, at least, the latter.
The last of these has a significance which goes beyond Farage and Reform. Although Musk is alone amongst the US radical right in his (ongoing) open criticism of Farage, he is very far from alone in his associated criticisms of the UK. In particular, the idea that last summer’s riots represented the righteous grievance of those forced to live in a multi-cultural society, along with the myth that those who received jail sentences for their actions were being penalized simply for exercising the right to free speech, is now standard in Trumpist circles, and it enfolds the UK into their wider critique of Europe (regardless of Brexit). It was even alluded to by JD Vance when Starmer visited the White House, although the Prime Minister pushed back against it. It is a certainly a standard belief amongst the UK far right, and Reform supporters more generally, including in their endless jibes about ‘two-tier Keir’.
Farage, of course, is happy to join in with much of that, but is now exposed, more than ever before, in the ‘no man’s land’ he has always wanted avoid, whereby he is neither respectable enough nor radical enough. The result is that his ability to hold together a coalition of voters is diminished. Reform voters now split almost exactly three equal ways between those who think the party would do better, worse, or no differently (or don’t know) without Farage as leader, and the percentage of those voters with a favourable view of Farage has fallen from 91% to 73% over just the last month. Yet being able to create, sustain, and grow an electoral coalition matters more than it ever has, because it is only since Brexit that Farage finally managed to become an MP and to lead a Westminster party which, implausibly but not quite ludicrously, has pretensions to government.
Wider implications
The issue here isn’t so much whether Reform, with or without Farage as a leader, loses electoral support. In fact, for all the battles going on within the party, there is no sign yet of a fall in its support in the opinion polls, and, as political scientist Professor Tim Bale has pointed out, that is very likely because it is only a very vocal minority who are engaged in, or by, those battles. The more significant issue is whether it puts a hard cap on the level of support Reform can ever expect to achieve. If so, that probably puts an end to the idea of a Reform electoral breakthrough. That would be consistent with the suggestion of another leading political scientist, Professor Ben Ansell, that, largely because of Trump, populism generally, and Reform’s populism in particular, has reached a peak. It is an analysis cautiously endorsed by political commentator Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£).
However, if the party continues to poll even close to the mid-twenties it will continue to exert unpredictable effects within our electoral system, including potentially significant gains in by-elections, local elections, and the Welsh Senedd and Scottish parliament elections. That will mean a continuing temptation for both Tory and Labour parties to pander to the sensibilities of actual or potential Reform voters, anchoring mainstream political debate around their agenda. Moreover, the fact that Reform has, in effect, its own TV channel in GB News, and the puniness of its regulation, gives the party an influence well beyond that of formal political representation. Certainly my suggestion at the time of the riots that they could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration has proved hopelessly optimistic.
So none of this makes for a neat picture of the shape of post-Brexit politics, and still less is it the basis for a prediction of the shape of things to come. It doesn’t even tell us much about what Farage’s personal fate will be. But the recent buffeting he has received does show the vulnerabilities of post-Brexit populism in Britain and that Trump’s re-election is proving to pose significant problems for it, rather than, as might have been expected, providing a new confidence. And that isn’t just affecting Farage and Reform. Brexiter Atlanticists like Daniel Hannan are suddenly having to recalibrate to a world in which the US is no longer a trustworthy ally (£) although, of course, being Hannan, he draws the fatuous conclusion that the solution is to revive his CANZUK fantasy.
Ultimately, then, there is less of a disconnect between ‘Brexit’ and ‘Beyond’ than I suggested at the beginning of this post. Brexit was always going to leave a long trail of effects on the British polity, including on advocates like Farage, and on the UK’s relations with the wider world. But that was never going to happen in a vacuum; the world was not going to remain static. As it has turned out, not only has the world changed, but it has done so in ways which have shown Brexit and its advocates to be even more adrift and riven by contradictions than they were in 2016.
Note
[1] Vital as these ‘beyond Brexit’ political consequences are, I do think it is also important to keep at least trying to record the ways in which the dull empirical thud of Brexit, in its most basic meaning, keeps punching the bruises it has already created (especially as Brexit apologists continue to trot out bogus arguments to try to downplay its damage). That, too, is more difficult than it used to be as media reporting of the basics has become much sparser. It just isn’t newsworthy any more, unless there is some major anniversary. Nevertheless, some stories make it through, including the report from the Food and Drink Federation that British exports of food and drink to the EU have fallen by a whopping 34.1% since 2019. Circuitously related is the growing awareness of the possibility of food shortages when ‘Phase 3’ labelling rules come into force in Northern Ireland in July under the Windsor Framework (with a concomitant extension of ‘Not for Sale in the EU’ labelling in Great Britain). And circuitously related to that are concerns about impending shortages of animal medicines in Northern Ireland. This is a particularly arcane issue, reaching deep back into the Brexit process, and relating to the way that parts of the original Northern Ireland Protocol were made subject to ‘grace periods’ for implementation. Animal medicines were one product area where implementation was deferred but, unlike human medicines, they were not included in the subsequent Windsor Framework agreement. Now, the already extended grace period is due to expire at the end of the year and, as yet, there is no agreement in place. It is yet another reminder of the consequences of the rush to ‘get Brexit done’, and the many loose ends which are still hanging as a result. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the situation of Gibraltar is another, even bigger, example of that.
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