Farage is not selling out, he is just preparing Reform for government
There’s a whisper on t’internet that Nigel Farage has sold out. It’s based on things he’s said – ie “it’s impossible” to deport every illegal alien – or the dissenting views of individual Reformers. Vanessa Frake, his new justice adviser, recently opined that it’s impractical to ban all trans women from all prisons, contra the position of Farage himself.
Journalists said Reform must be divided; the Tories, that Reform has turned wet. “Men belong in men’s prisons,” wrote Rob Jenrick. “End of.”
In a sign of how far the Overton window has shifted, even Labour is now attacking Farage as soft on crime. Its latest ad says he “wants to make it easier to share revenge porn online”, as if Nigel had secreted a camera into Rupert Lowe’s bedroom and uploaded the grim results on YouTube.
What is going on? The fuss around Frake needs to be contextualised: she was speaking for herself, and there’s nowt wrong with that.
Reform is a start-up. The whole premise is to offer a platform to those who hate machine politics but still want to serve the public. Such people, completely new to this business, are going to be opinionated; they will speak their mind. Isn’t that what we want? Voters complain that politicians are robotic, yet the minute one of them demonstrates free will, commentators leap on it as evidence of civil war.
Moreover, pluralism of thought is inevitable in any organisation growing this fast. A year ago, Reform was a one-man band. Today it has around 230,000 members, 450 branches and over 850 councillors, with competitive elections under way to staff the board.
Farage could’ve banked winning 10 councils and moved on: instead he has set them a task, chiefly to save money, and invited voters to judge the national party on how local officials, operating beyond his direct control, do. That’s brave; a hostage to fortune. But it reflects Farage’s personal transformation from spoiler vote to potential PM.
If he’s moderating his rhetoric, it’s probably not just because it’s necessary to win. I think that Farage believes he will win. This is a man of conscience on the cusp of power, being careful not to over-hype expectations of what a Reform government can actually achieve.
Consider past mistakes. Rishi Sunak said “stop the boats”, and didn’t. Keir Starmer said “smash the gangs”, and he still hasn’t. The failure to deliver promises on immigration has done as much damage to the country as mass migration itself, fuelling perceptions of elite failure – or lies – and eroding faith in democracy.
The Left assumes that when Farage says Britain is on the verge of “social collapse”, of disorder and riots, this is what he wants to happen, but the opposite is true. He means it as a warning. Instinctual conservatives like Farage abhor revolution, and it’s precisely because he has long operated on the interzone between centre and radical Right that he knows the anger that’s out there and the potential for violent upheaval. Hence a Reform government, far from being fascist, might be the last chance to do the things that quell nativist anger.
Saving our system from itself is the historic role Farage played in the late 2000s, when the rise of Ukip drained support from the BNP, channelling it into the safer waters of euroscepticism. He is the last gasp of the 20th century, defending its liberality and patriotism, and has an old-fashioned reading of British identity rooted in history and constitutionalism, not race or religion.
“I haven’t fought the change,” caused by immigration, he once said, “provided it comes with integration.” I’m sure that to him, men like Zia Yusuf – Reform’s former chairman, Muslim and stinking rich – exemplify a British Dream that stretches from the beaches of Dunkirk to Ibiza, the freedom not to be told what to do, the right to have a laugh.
To populist critics, however, Yusuf is a suspicious character who kept dragging Reform back to an illusionary centre-ground – compromise and betrayal – and Nigel’s tolerance of him epitomised a lack of intellectual rigour. Farage might be tougher than the establishment on immigration, they say, but he’s out-of-date. Doesn’t see how bad things have got, doesn’t get the existential threat posed by Islam. Lowe has speculated that he was driven out of Reform, in part, because the leadership didn’t want him talking about “mass deportation”.
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