Man with a mission to bury both globalism and socialism?
UKIP insiders were hinting last night that former leader Nigel Farage is on a mission to reinvent himself in a much broader role. Along with a select group of advisers, the man liberals love to hate wants to move himself further away from a one-issue stance, and stand for the ordinary citizen’s common sense versus the pc élites among whom fancy tends to triumph over fact. The Slog examines Farage’s strategy.
Twitter this morning is flooded with the Twattering Classes offering their usual brand of bile-spitting as some kind of reasoned argument. The more they do it, the more they make the Labour Party look unpleasantly out of touch with real life. I’m neither a Farage nor Trump fan, but in the light of there being no alternatives available for genuine opposition to the Establishment on either side of the Pond, it isn’t enough to use terms like ‘odious prick’, ‘smarmy stain on humanity’, ‘dickhead’, ‘toerag’ (sic) and ‘slimey creep’.
It says a lot about the TC’s that most of the tweets were limp jokes about the new moustache, very few of them having noticed that he shaved it off two days ago. But then, liberals have never been good at putting visual evidence into perspective.
In the UK, a woman with no respect for personal freedoms (and strong relationships with the police and security services) is in power with a clear majority. The Labour Party’s response to this is to try and overturn a massive vote in favour of Corbyn (only 15 months ago) with a Blairite apparatchik. Nobody among either the PLP or the activists beyond Parliament has come out publicly and said, “This man you all hate so much took seven million votes off us last time – why?”
The Labour leadership election is a nasty, bloody mess being orchestrated from behind a thick fire-curtain by Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, and the modernising PR agency of which they are both senior directors and shareholders. Such cynical power-freaks as these like Richard Branson, the UAE, media manipulation…and they think the more lobbyists there are plying their treasonable trade, the better.
I dislike pompous bombast: it is a near generic feature of politicians in the 21st century West. Also I dislike childish bad manners. As Trump and Farage are suffused with both, I can see what they have in common….and I don’t like it.
But to blame the electorate for their existence is about as head up backside as it’s possible for ideologist élites to get. It betrays a dimension I have always detested among the bourgeois ‘intellectual’ liberal Left: a thinly veiled belief that they are innately superior to the people they represent.
Tony Blair demonstrated it in spades when he had the brazen gall to refer to the Referendum result as “a blow for progressive ideas, and the result of being uneducated”. You can almost hear Blair’s very average little brain ticking away, thinking “Hmm, maybe we should be looking at ways to limit the franchise based on educational achievement”.
The Labour Party needs to detach itself from neo-Marxist syntax and theoretical Utopian systemics based on ridiculously outdated and discredited ideas. It needs to get back to people, to citizens, and to maths. But for myself, I long ago lost hope of there being any realistic likelihood of that: Labour – and many of the controlling pc/feminist precepts it embraces – are going into steep decline.
I suspect Farage sees this. He sees the US Left – even the GOP itself – in a flat, squealing panic about Donald Trump, he sees the media trying to distort the level of his popularity, and he sees denial among the radical chics about the Republican candidate’s steadying of support in recent days.
I might dislike the man, and you might detest him, but right now in America he is the anti-Establishment offering – and without doubt, the most realistic one ordinary US voters have had since Carter.
The evidence that Hillary Clinton is a financial crook, a corrupt donations gatherer and a foreign policy hawk is overwhelming. Yet I still hear American friends telling me that Donald Trump is “a threat to world peace”. Trump is a threat to world peace? Jeeesuz.
This new broader role for Nigel Farage represents a huge gamble for the former UKIP boss, but in some ways it’s a shrewd one. There is talk among his circle of Farage looking to identify and ally with anti-Establishment elements across Europe – but not just anti-Brussels groups. There is talk of visits to Poland and Hungary, and to the more strife-torn parts of ClubMed.
I am and will remain an outsider when it comes to both libertarians in general and UKIP in particular; but I do retain very good friendships among both groups. From a distance, it seems to me that if Nigel Farage were to look at the potential role in Western politics for a grouping opposed to big government, globalist colonialism, unnatural fluffy pc drivel and the élite tax privileges of multinational companies, he could very possibly strike gold.
Such a position on the spectrum would steal further support from Labour, be attractive to Tory leavers, get support from SME owners and sew up most of the older electorate. Perhaps above all, it could represent a credible Opposition to the Mayflower crew.
It wouldn’t be my idea of fun. But it would be better than a split-three-ways Labour disaster area….and in the end, it might (dare my scumbigotracist mouth utter such a thought?) do more to restore the labour/capital power balance than the existing Western Parties with a liberal bent have managed. Their performance in that endeavour, let’s face it, has since around 1983 been pretty dire.
The Slog 