Quotulatiousness

February 5, 2022

A new biography of Nigel Farage

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For a man who’s never been elected to Parliament, Nigel Farage has been a major mover-and-shaker in British politics. In the Literary Review, Steve Richards reviews One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick:

Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is setting up a new one. Between such roles he is on television. Currently, the former leader of UKIP and the Brexit Party hosts a nightly show on GB News.

The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that “it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time”.

Among Crick’s admirable passions is his interest in those individuals or forces that have shaped the major political parties from outside the mainstream. He wrote an important book on Militant, the left-wing group that in the 1980s sought to infiltrate the Labour Party and for a time made life hellish for Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the two party leaders during that stormy decade. His biography of Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP who became a bestselling author and then a convicted prisoner, was revelatory. Now he has set his sights on Farage, who has never been an MP and yet has been such a prominent figure in recent years.

As Crick always does with his subjects, he has researched meticulously every twist and turn in Farage’s life. He regrets that his investigations were constrained by the pandemic. He need not worry too much. His diligence has enabled him seemingly to have unearthed every internal dispute in UKIP and the Brexit Party, along with the eccentric figures who lined up on different sides in them. The characters that emerge would fit neatly into a Dickens novel. One of the most unsavoury right-wingers to feature in the book is now an avid supporter of the Green Party, lives in Germany and is passionately opposed to Brexit – a novelistic metamorphosis. We are also reintroduced to Farage’s old friend Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP and economics spokesman, who in 2013 famously hit Crick with a party conference brochure as the journalist pursued him down the street after he had made characteristically indiscreet and outrageous remarks in a speech to UKIP members.

This book is full of fights, usually between party members. We see Farage repeatedly falling out with other potential leaders. More prominent members who cannot hide their real views in public have to be admonished. Some flirt with the BNP. Even during the triumphant 2016 referendum campaign, there were two pro-Brexit camps, one led by Farage and the other by Dominic Cummings. Farage and Cummings loathe each other and their campaign groups fought bitterly for pre-eminence. This is the most striking theme of the book. UKIP and the Brexit Party, which Farage set up in 2019 to campaign for a hard Brexit, were utterly dysfunctional most of the time. They make the UK’s main political parties, all going through various existential crises at the moment, seem models of smooth, sophisticated professionalism. The amateurism extended well beyond the eccentric characters near or close to the top. Neither party offered coherent policy programmes beyond opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

August 6, 2015

Comedians and UKIP

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 30 Jul 2015

“Progressive” bigotry – the respectable kind.

May 27, 2015

The dis-United Kingdom

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the result of the British general election:

It would be churlish to deny oneself the pleasure of hooting at the politico-media establishment, but, when that’s done, this is a deeply unhealthy electoral result. The Conservatives won because Labour got wiped out in Scotland and the Liberals got wiped out in England. But the reality is that, for a supposedly United Kingdom, the country no longer has any national political party. England and Scotland have taken on the characteristics of Northern Ireland — hermetically sealed polities full of weird, unlovely regional parties (“SNP”, “Conservative”, “Labour”) that have no meaning once you cross the border, and whose internal disputes are of no relevance to the other three-quarters of the kingdom: Nobody outside Ulster cares about “official” Unionists vs the more red-blooded Democratic Unionists. And so it goes with the Scots Nats and Labour in Scotland: nationalist socialists vs unionist socialists; Likewise, with the Tories and UKIP in England: transnationalist conservatives vs nationalist conservatives.

Wales is the exception that proves the rule, where UKIP outpolled Plaid Cymru, albeit with no seats to show for it. The Scottish National Party got 4.7 per cent of the UK vote, and 56 seats. UKIP had nearly thrice as many voters — 12.6 per cent — but only one seat. That discrepancy is because there is no longer any such thing as “the UK vote”. I far prefer the Westminster first-past-the-post system to European “proportional representation”, but it only works if you have genuinely national parties. If the system decays into four groups of regional parties, the House of Commons will look less and less like a genuine national parliament, and more and more like some surly conditional arrangement — Scottish Kurds, Tory Shia and seething Labour Sunni triangles.

The composition of the new house would strike any mid-20th century Briton as freakish and unsettling. It’s a bit like Canada in the Nineties — where Reform couldn’t break out of the west, the Bloc Québécois dominated Quebec, the rump Tories clung on in the Atlantic provinces, and Ontario and a few seats hither and yon gave the Liberals their majority. The difference is that the Bloquistes are pretend separatists; the Scottish National Party are not.

And that’s before you take into account the competing nationalist dynamics of the Anglo-Scottish victors: secession from the UK north of the border and detachment from the EU south. Cameron is a wily operator and one notices he uses the words “United Kingdom” far more than his predecessors. But saying will not make it so.

May 5, 2015

The weirdness of the British political situation

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Charles Stross calls the current situation a “Scottish Political Singularity”:

The UK is heading for a general election next Thursday, and for once I’m on the edge of my seat because, per Hunter S. Thompson, the going got weird.

The overall electoral picture based on polling UK-wide is ambiguous. South of Scotland — meaning, in England and Wales — the classic two-party duopoly that collapsed during the 1970s, admitting the Liberal Democrats as a third minority force, has eroded further. We are seeing the Labour and Conservative parties polling in the low 30s. It is a racing certainty that neither party will be able to form a working majority, which requires 326 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons. The Liberal Democrats lost a lot of support from their soft-left base by going into coalition with the Conservatives, but their electoral heartlands — notably the south-west — are firm enough that while they will lose seats, they will still be a factor after the election; they’re unlikely to return fewer than 15 MPs, although at the last election they peaked around 50.

Getting away from the traditional big three parties, the picture gets more interesting. The homophobic, racist, bigoted scumbags of UKIP (hey, I’m not going to hide my opinions here!) have picked up support haemorrhaging from the right wing of the Conservative party; polling has put them on up to 20%, but they’re unlikely to return more than 2-6 MPs because their base is scattered across England. (Outside England they’re polling as low as 2-4%, suggesting that they’re very much an English nationalist party.) On the opposite pole, the Green party is polling in the 5-10% range, and might pick up an extra MP, taking them to 2 seats. In Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (who are just as barkingly xenophobic as UKIP) are also set to return a handful of MPs.

And then there’s Scotland.

Having lived through a couple of near-national-death experiences here in Canada, I’m less than enthused that the country of my birth is now having similar threats from the Celtic fringe. I’m a fan of Charlie’s writing, and I think he’s someone who thinks interesting thoughts, but I hope he’s wrong in this area.

March 12, 2015

Brendan O’Neill talks to UKIP leader Nigel Farage

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Love him or hate him, it’s difficult to ignore him … especially with a British election heaving into view quite shortly:

“They’re not proper people.”

Pint in one hand, fag in the other, Nigel Farage is passing withering judgement on the political class. “They don’t pass the Farage Test”, he says of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. The Farage Test? Warming to his theme, his voice rising an octave, he explains. “I judge everybody by two simple criteria. Number one: would I employ them? And number two: would I want to have a drink with them? To pass the Farage Test, you only have to pass one of those. There are lots of people I’ve employed over the years who I wouldn’t choose to have a drink with, and there are lots of people who are completely useless but rather nice to have a bit of a jolly with. But this mob don’t pass either.” Then, after eviscerating Them, calling into question their employability and drinkability, wondering out loud if they’re even “proper people”, he lets out what I think we should call the Farage Laugh: a deep and hearty, nicotine-stained guffaw at the world: “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.”

I don’t know if I’d pass the Farage Test, but the UKIP leader has agreed to have a drink with me. We’re at a pub in a small street in central London — outside, natch, for smoking purposes — with a pap lurking behind a parked van, clearly unable to believe his luck that he might get a shot of Farage drinking and smoking and laughing. We’re interrupted every five minutes by passers-by who want to shake Farage’s hand or get a selfie with him. (“Go to UKIP dot org and become a member. Bloody well do it!”, he tells one young fan.) It’s chilly but sunny; Farage is making light work of his pint; he still has a little make-up on from a by-all-accounts barnstorming appearance on ITV’s Loose Women; and he’s ready, he says, to speak his mind. “Interviewing me over a drink — always far better. HA HA HA HA HA HA.”

[…]

He saves his most stinging class-based barbs for the Tories. “The Conservative Party is as upper class today as it has ever been. Over the past hundred years, the upper classes had more connection to their fellow man than they have today. And I’ll tell you why. Firstly, those that were from the landed classes may have been selfish financially, over the corn laws or whatever it was, but they ran their estates themselves. They actually knew the lads that cut the hay and looked after the horses. And then we had two world wars, which brought the whole class system together. Up until the late 1980s you had senior Tory politicians from posh backgrounds who could talk to the lads doing the scaffolding. They can’t do that now.”

It isn’t only the aloof, not-proper-people of the New Conservatives, New Labour and the Lame Lib Dems who fail the Farage Test: his strongest ire is aimed at another group that has of late become a major player in British politics, a key pillar of establishment thinking — the media. He’s cutting. “The media have now become a bigger problem than the politicians. We talk about the Westminster Village in politics, [but] forget it — the media village is even tighter, even narrower, even more inward-looking, and even less in touch with their own potential readership and with the country.”

December 15, 2014

UKIP’s changing demographics force changes to ideology

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:03

In sp!ked, Patrick West explains why as UKIP’s electoral chances have grown, they’ve been talking less and less like they used to:

This weird synthesis is a product of the global downturn, globalisation and UKIP’s reaction to these developments. In recent years, UKIP has started to pick up voters in the north of England and from traditional Labour constituencies. It’s a different beast to that which, during the 1990s, was supported mostly by middle-class, golf-club types and anti-EU monomaniacs.

UKIP has noticeably moved leftwards in accordance with its broadening appeal. A recent YouGov survey for the The Times showed that 56 per cent of the population wanted the state to take back ownership of utilities, and 59 per cent supported renationalising the railways. But the clamour for renationalisation was even higher among UKIP voters – 64 per cent for utilities and 67 per cent for the railways. UKIP now openly speaks of renationalising the railways, with its financial spokesman, Steven Woolfe, earlier this week saying he was open to the idea.

Indeed, today’s UKIP speaks of a ‘living minimum wage’, a tax on the super rich and protecting the NHS from the private sector. It now comes in for as much criticism from Tories and the libertarian right as from the metropolitan left (check out the hashtag #RedUKIP on Twitter, for instance). Why, asks the right-wing libertarian commentator James Delingpole, is UKIP now ‘flirting with the kind of wealth taxes and turnover taxes you’d more usually associate with the Greens or the Socialist Workers Party?’.

It’s no coincidence that free-market, pro-immigration publications such as The Economist and the Financial Times are as hostile to UKIP as the Guardian is. It’s often said that UKIP wants to ‘turn the clock back’, which is a fair accusation. But keep in mind that its supporters also increasingly want to turn the clock back to a pre-Thatcherite Britain.

May 27, 2014

A thumbnail history of UKIP

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:52

In the Telegraph, Iain Martin compares UKIP to the Judean People’s Front:

Eurosceptic politics used to be a lot like the famous scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which a group of revolutionaries – intent on bringing down the Roman Empire – sit in an amphitheatre discussing the various sects into which their movement has subdivided. They contemplate the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front and the Judean Popular People’s Front (“Splitters!”). What, asks one of the revolutionaries, ever happened to the Popular Front? “He’s over there,” says the leader, pointing to a rival sitting forlornly on his own.

In the early Nineties, Britain’s Eurosceptics were a similarly divided rabble. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 by John Major, had turned the looser European Economic Community into the much more integrated European Union and cleared the way for the creation of the single currency – and, it was feared, the destruction of national sovereignty by a new federalist empire.

With the Tories split internally, assorted anti-Maastricht movements began to spawn outside the confines of the two-party system. One was the United Kingdom Independence Party, which had its origins in the Anti-Federalist League, established in 1991 by a group led by Professor Alan Sked, a historian who teaches at the London School of Economics.

By establishing a new party, Sked and his colleagues hoped to create a movement that would build support for EU exit. At the time, this sounded like an outlandish aspiration. Indeed, initially Ukip was just a small band of dedicated campaigners and eccentric obsessives almost incapable of winning elections. The activists – true to form for a small party – seemed to spend more time fighting each other than battling their Europhile opponents. Splits and leadership coups were commonplace. If the Tory end of the political establishment paid any attention, it was only to laugh at what seemed like an irrelevant bunch of jokers.

Well, the Tories are not laughing now.

May 26, 2014

Triumph of the Euro-skeptic parties

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

The Irish Times looks at the Euro election results which have seen big gains for several Euro-skeptic parties:

Among the victors was Ms Le Pen’s National Front party which topped the poll in France with a quarter of the vote, bypassing the conservative UMP party, and leaving François Hollande’s Socialist Party in third place. The party is now in line for 24 seats in Strasbourg.

UKIP was expected to top the poll in Britain, with exit polls last night predicting the party could win 31 per cent of the vote. “Up until now European integration has always seemed inevitable … I think that inevitability will end tonight,” UKIP leader Nigel Farage said last night in a live video link to the European Parliament in Brussels, describing the decision to allow former Soviet countries into the European Union as one of Europe’s “great errors.”

Greece’s main opposition party Syriza topped the polls there, while the far-right Golden Dawn party came third with between 8 and 10 per cent of the vote.

In Germany, support for Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) an anti-EU party formed barely two years ago, reach 6.5 per cent, with the party in the running for six seats.

In Austria, the far-right Freedom party was expected to win 20 per cent of votes, up from 13 per cent in 2009.

However, some extreme anti-EU parties in smaller countries did not poll as well as expected, with the far-right Vlaams Belang in Belgium losing support.

Of course, not all Euro-skeptic parties are the same. UKIP is somewhat nativist and has a vocal anti-immigrant wing. Vlaams Belang has a larger and more vocal anti-immigrant component, while the Greek Golden Dawn are as close to modern day Fascists as you’ll find anywhere; not a party you want to be sharing newspaper space with.

May 24, 2014

A significant factor in UKIP success – all “right thinking” people loathe them

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

Before the recent elections, Brendan O’Neill explained why the serried ranks of anti-UKIP pundits, politicians, and the “great and the good” may well be helping UKIP rather than hurting them:

Try as I might, I cannot remember a time when Britain’s various elites were as united in fury as they are now over UKIP leader Nigel Farage. In the run-up to this week’s Euro-elections, in which the Eurosceptic UKIP is expected to do well, leaders of every hue, from the true blue to the deep red, and hacks of every persuasion, from the right to the right-on, are as one on the issue of Farage. From Nick Clegg to the Twitterati that normally gets off on mocking Nick Clegg, from David Cameron to radical student leaders who normally hate David Cameron, fury with Farage has united all. It has brought together usually scrapping sections of the political and media classes into a centre-ground mush of contempt for UKIP. Not even Nick Griffin — who is a far nastier character than Farage — attracted such unstinting universal ire. What’s up with this Farage fury?

[…]

The real motor to the anti-Farage outlook, the fuel to this unprecedented fury of the elites, is a powerful feeling that he has connected with the public, or a significant section of it, in a way that mainstream politicians and observers have utterly failed to. The elites see in Farage their own inability to understand the populace or to speak to it in a language it understands. They see in his popularity — his oh-so-stubborn popularity, so notably undented by the daily furious outpourings of the anti-Farage elites — their own failure to swing public attitudes in what they consider to be the ‘right’ direction. That Farage’s popularity in the polls has remained pretty high even as our elites have been attacking him on a daily basis fills them not only with fury but with fear: their arguments seem not to have much traction outside the Westminster bubble, outside of medialand, where despite their best efforts the awkward, annoying little people still remain fairly favourable towards a loudmouth politician who isn’t PC and drinks beer. The fury behind the attacks on Farage is really a fury with the throng, with the masses, whose brains have clearly been made so mushy by UKIP propaganda that even the supposedly enlightened arguments and policies of their betters can now make no impact. It isn’t Farage they hate — it’s ordinary people, and more importantly their own palpable inability to make inroads into those people’s hearts or minds.

In short, the true momentum behind both UKIP’s rise in the polls and the rising temperatures it has provoked in pretty much every elite circle in Britain is not the charms or coherent ideologies of Farage himself. (In fact, many take great pleasure in pointing out that most UKIP supporters don’t know UKIP policy on any issue beyond immigration and the EU.) Rather, it is the political class’s alienation from the public, and its existential insecurities, that have propelled UKIP to the top of the political agenda. The aloofness of the old political machine, its growing distance from and contempt for the voters, its view of the public as a blob to be re-educated and made physically fit rather than as sentient beings to be politically engaged, is what has boosted public support for a party like UKIP that seems willing to speak to, and maybe even for, so-called ordinary people. And it is the out-of-touch political class’s subsequent panic at UKIP’s rise, its fear that the success of this party might spell doom for its safe, samey, middle-ground ilk, which leads it to aim its every ideological, political and media gun at Farage, having the unwitting effect of making him both more widely talked-about and possibly even more popular. It is the political class’s crisis of legitimacy and vision which both created and then inflamed the UKIP phenomenon.

April 24, 2014

UKIP’s Nigel Farage as the Tories want you to see him

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

The Torygraph‘s Tom Chivers has unearthed a photo that will shake the very foundations of the British political scene!

Prepare to be AMAZED. The photo of Nigel Farage that the Ukip ESTABLISHMENT didn’t want you to see:

Nigel Farage as a punk

It’s not so much the fact that he’s such an awful rebel, with no respect for the great British institution of the police, that’s embarrassing for the Ukip leader. The real problem is that this photo was apparently taken in 1983 and Mr Farage still looks about 40.

Of course, it’s not just this damning and clearly not at all Photoshopped photo, which has been doing the rounds on Twitter because of its obvious veracity. There are dozens of equally upsetting Farage photos which his party apparatchiks have been desperately trying to ban.

March 10, 2014

Imagine a steel-capped Hush Puppy crushing a state-funded artist’s face, forever

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

To the barricades, comrades! We must save the artists from the pitiless destruction of the inevitable UKIP government repression:

A vision of life under The Ukip’s steel-capped Hush Puppies
How will the artist fare when The Ukip take over? The messages from HQ are far from clear

The inevitable victory of the Scottish independence campaign and the subsequent collapse of the Labour vote in the sorry remnants of the UK will see the next election won by a coalition of The Ukip and The Conservative party. Then the Bullingdon boys’ lack of appeal to the common man will eventually leave the country entirely crushed by The Ukip’s steel-capped Hush Puppy, as a pipe and cardigan version of The Golden Dawn gradually reshapes society in its own image, smothering dissent under an enormous tartan travel rug of hate.

But whether one is a supporter of The Ukip’s position on immigration or not, at least it is easy to grasp. The Ukip dislikes immigration even more than it loves smoking in pubs. But I was born here so I’m all right. What concerns me, as a professional creative, is the apparent incoherence of the anti-immigration party’s arts policy, as this will have a direct effect on my own quality of life, financial future and access to touring theatre productions should I chose to leave London and live in a region.

H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.

November 20, 2013

“Ford Nation” as the Canadian equivalent of UKIP

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

In the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons tries to explain to a British audience how Rob Ford has managed to stay alive in Toronto politics all this time:

… from a British perspective, the oddest aspect of the story is Toronto’s seemingly indomitable affection for its mayor. It is only now, after months of scandal, that public confidence in him is finally starting to dip, and not particularly sharply.

The reason for this reveals the sharp divisions within Canadian society. And while it would be simplistic to offer a like-for-like comparison between different countries, it seems certain that there are lessons here for Ukip.

First some background. Toronto is a divided city. In 1998, six separate municipalities were merged as a “cost-saving measure” by the Government of Ontario. This led to a huge increase in levels of municipal staff, while ambiguity surrounded the question of whether money had actually been saved.

People felt that they had been deprived of their local identities. Even today, in many districts, such as Scarborough and North York, the old names are still defiantly used. The issue is given an added bitterness by the fact that in a referendum on the question in 1997, more than 75 per cent of voters opposed the amalgamation; it was forced through anyway.

Ironically, the unification only entrenched the distinctions between people living in different parts of the city, particularly between those with a 416 (inner city) area code and those with a 905 (the outer suburbs).

Among the metropolitan 416-ers, there is a visceral hatred of Mr Ford. In the more conservative 905 suburbs, however, where people are pro-car, pro-booze and pro-sport, voters feel unfairly removed from the levers of power. Here the mayor commands widespread affection.

[…]

Canadian divisions may not map precisely onto Britain, but the rise of Ukip has demonstrated that we too live in a split society. From the perspective of Ukip followers, their needs and views are simply not represented by the overly polished political elite known as Lib-Lab-Con.

Of course, Nigel Farage’s cigarettes and pints are nothing compared to Mr Ford’s crack pipe and drunken stupors. In Toronto, where tensions and divisions are even more marked, the suburbs have an even greater appetite for the “ordinary guy”.

June 26, 2013

Mark Steyn on the rise of UKIP

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It’s the attack of the swivel-eyed loons:

It’s all but impossible to launch a new political party under America’s electoral arrangements, and extremely easy to do so under Continental proportional representation. The Westminster first-past-the-post system puts the task somewhere in between: tough, but not entirely the realm of fantasy. The Labour party came into being at the dawn of the 20th century, and formed its first government in 1924. The United Kingdom Independence party was born in 1993 and now, a mere two decades later, is on the brink of … well, okay, not forming its first government, but it did do eerily well in May’s local elections. The Liberals were reduced to their all-time lowest share of the vote, the Tories to their lowest since 1982, and for the first time ever, none of the three “mainstream” parties cracked 30 percent: Labour had a good night with 29, the Conservatives came second at 25, and nipping at their heels was the United Kingdom Independence party with 23 percent.

They achieved this impressive result against not three opponents but also a fourth — a media that have almost universally derided the party as a sinkhole of nutters and cranks. UKIP’s leader, the boundlessly affable Nigel Farage, went to P. G. Wodehouse’s old high school, Dulwich College, and to a sneering metropolitan press, Farage’s party is a déclassé Wodehousean touring company mired in an elysian England that never was, populated only by golf-club duffers, halfwit toffs, rustic simpletons, and hail-fellow-well-met bores from the snug of the village pub. When I shared a platform with him in Toronto a few months back, Mr. Farage explained his party’s rise by citing not Wodehouse but another Dulwich old boy, the late British comic Bob Monkhouse: “They all laughed when I said I’d become a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”

The British media spent 20 years laughing at UKIP. But they’re not laughing now — not when one in four electors takes them seriously enough to vote for them. So, having dismissed him as a joke, Fleet Street now warns that Farage uses his famous sense of humor as a sly cover for his dark totalitarian agenda — the same well-trod path to power used by other famous quipsters and gag-merchants such as Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg open-mike nights were legendary. “Nigel Farage is easy to laugh at … that means he’s dangerous,” declared the Independent. The Mirror warned of an “unfulfilled capacity for evil.” “Stop laughing,” ordered Jemma Wayne in the British edition of the Huffington Post. “Farage would lead us back to the dark ages.” The more the “mainstream” shriek about how mad, bad, and dangerous UKIP is, the more they sound like the ones who’ve come unhinged.

May 12, 2013

Modernizing the “rules for radicals”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

James Delingpole suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day):

Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful ideas, many of which we can steal or adapt. But some of them are ill-expressed or incoherent. Eg Rule 10 “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” I think he could have omitted that one, don’t you, without jeopardising his place in history as a great revolutionary thinker?

Who are we? Not the same as the radicals of Alinsky’s generation, that’s for sure. Alinsky’s radicals were broadly on the left: Che admirers; Black Panthers; communist revolutionaries; hippies; communitarians; environmentalists; radical feminists. The hegemony which they were trying to destroy was, very loosely, a conservative one.

Today, though, the positions have reversed. We new radicals are broadly — but not exclusively — of the right, not the left. Many of us would describe ourselves as conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, UKIPers, Tea Partiers. Revolutionaries, yes, but in the traditions of Burke, Wilkes, Cobbett, and, indeed, the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers, rather than of Marx and Lenin. Some of us might not even think of ourselves as righties, but that’s OK, it’s the direction of travel that matters not the labelling.

We’re against: arbitrary authority; big government; high taxes; overregulation; corporatism; cosy stitch ups between the banksters, the lawyers and the political class; the EU; the UN; identity politics; eco-fascists; elf-n-safety; wind turbines; quantitative easing…

We’re for: empiricism; sound money; free markets; liberty; small government; low taxes; deregulation; cheap energy; rigour; meritocracy; integrity; equality of opportunity, perhaps, but most definitely not equality of outcome.

We’re on the right side of a culture war which currently we’re losing. Why are we losing? Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t have all the truth, all the logic, all the arguments on our side. We’re losing because, thanks to Alinsky, the enemy has a forty-year head start on us. They’ve got the techniques. All we’ve got is the moral high ground — except, the way Alinsky’s acolytes have brilliantly spun it, we don’t get to enjoy the benefits even of that.

May 7, 2013

The growing insecurity of the UK’s political classes

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

In sp!ked, Tim Black explains why the modest electoral success of the UK Independence Party in last week’s council elections looms so large in the fears and worries of the major parties and their supporters:

Since the results came in at the end of last week, however, perspective has been singularly lacking. In fact, given the hysterical response among the political and media class to UKIP’s success, you could be forgiven for thinking UKIP had actually come out on top, not third to the UK’s two struggling main parties. Rarely has an electoral success prompted such agonising. UKIP, remember, is a party with fewer actual MPs than either the Green Party or the latest George Galloway Party (they both have one each). Yet while editorials have wrung their papers’ hands, tied as they are by party-political allegiance, and commentators have tried to make sense of just what has gone wrong and rightwards, it’s the party-political establishment which seems most traumatised.

[. . .]

This disparity between the fairly impressive UKIP election results and the massively depressive reaction among the political class does not really tell us that much about UKIP’s electoral performance itself. It testifies, rather, to the political class’s current sense of fragility. UKIP really didn’t have to do much to prompt angst and anger in Westminster; the UK political class’s own insecurity rendered it all too eager to turn this mid-term electoral drama into a long-term crisis, and, with it, to turn UKIP and its leader Farage into a threatening political force.

The roots of this insecurity are not hard to fathom. Isolated and deracinated, today’s main political parties are terrified of one thing in particular: the people, and those whom they support. To the modern Tory and Labour parties, popularity, grounded as they see it in the ‘prejudices’ of the people, is to be feared, not embraced. Hence in the shape of UKIP, they don’t see democracy, but demagoguery. There’s little doubt that UKIP, and in particular its leader Nigel Farage, do resonate in a way that the established parties do not. Where the main parties seek mainly to dodge and attribute blame for problems, UKIP are willing to offer up solutions. Where Cameron or Miliband talk unconvincingly in PR-conscious platitudes, Farage is always keen to speak his mind. To the political establishment, UKIP embodies popular sentiment. And that is why, in Farage’s words, UKIP’s election results have sent a ‘shockwave’ through the political establishment.

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