Oh, it’s only Nigel, the politician who’s always standing because he never gets a seat. It’s only Clacton: practically Ukip-on-Sea. It’ll only harm Rishi Sunak, and he’s already terminal.
Oh, the excuses! Even as Westminster journalists this week trotted along an Essex pier after Nigel Farage, they made two arguments that pull in opposite directions. First, can you blame them for giving Mr Brexit the star treatment? A third of the way into a turgid election contest, they finally get a bit of box office – a “master of the theatrics of politics”, as the BBC put it, which is an awfully kind way to refer to a serial loser. Yet even as they splash the man across every front page, they trivialise his importance. To read the broadsheets this week, they are lavishing so much attention on an inveterate attention-seeker because he spells certain defeat for Rishi Sunak, who in any case is a total loser. Got it?
Except that’s not the way Britain works. Over the course of his career, Farage has shown time and again that you need not win Westminster elections to change Westminster politics. As a politician, Farage is no Boris Johnson; yet, as a mode of politics, the power of Faragism is vast.
Take one example from this week: on Monday afternoon, Farage declares this will be “the immigration election”; on Tuesday morning, the Conservatives announce a cap on migration; on Tuesday evening, Labour’s Keir Starmer calls Sunak “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration”. That is classic Faragism: from abattoir to plate in 24 hours. Everything about that sequence would have the man in the boating blazer rubbing his little pink hands in glee: from a child of immigrants launching a cap on immigrants, to a human rights lawyer using the term “liberal” as a swearword, just like Fox TV anchors do.
That is Farage all over: not the featured name on the ballot paper, but among the chief ghostwriters of our politics. He has not reached that position by democratic means, if by democracy we mean open and rigorous testing of ideas and arguments. Instead, he has relied upon sugar-daddy businessmen such as Arron Banks, who funded Leave.EU. He also depends upon the chuckling indulgence of the media, from the BBC comedy shows and panel discussions (no fewer than 36 appearances on Question Time, analysts calculate) to theTorygraph and all its various franchises. This is some profile for a man who laughingly defends racial slurs (After a Ukip candidate used the word “Chinky”, Farage said: “If you and your mates were going out for a Chinese, what do you say you’re going for?”) and worships that old hero of the National Front, Enoch Powell.
Faragism claims only to be voicing what people think but dare not say. And it derives extra influence when mainstream politicians are not saying anything much, such as now. The head-to-head between Sunak and Starmer was notable for how much this prime minister and the next agreed. No rises in the main taxes, no sparing the axe when it comes to spending cuts and no disagreement on nukes.
Starmer may promise change, but the main change he offers is in tone. He will be less strident and more regretful when denying nurses pay rises. By taxing private schools, he will provide 6,500 extra teachers for around 24,000 state schools – which works out as about a quarter of a teacher per school. If Labour really means to stick to these unbelievably tight spending plans, then within a couple of years it could become almost as unpopular as the Tories are today.
At that point, Farage’s party will become not Sunak’s headache, but Starmer’s. Analysis of the polling data suggests that at next month’s election, Reform will be the main opposition to Labour in something like 27 seats: places such as Hartlepool, Barnsley and those other stretches of the “red wall” – where voters long ago fell out of the habit of backing the red party. They haven’t been won back by Starmer, but they were betrayed by Boris Johnson’s Tories. And from Brexit to net zero to immigration, betrayal is pure fuel for Faragism.
What does Labour offer these voters? Forget the wishful thinking about growth. Take the genuflection in front of the union jack as being the trite little gesture politics that it really is. What are you left with? A party whose main defence against Farage would be to adopt ever more Faragism. To crack down on migrants, verbally rough up a few dissenting Muslims, make clear that it will not water down Brexit. And here is where the debacle over Labour’s selection of its candidates for election comes in. Not because the electorate has been avidly Abbott v Starmer v Rayner v Shaheen: that fuss will be largely forgotten come polling day. But because the process has been used to parachute untested favourites and those owed favours into plum parliamentary jobs.
Over the past few days, six members of the party’s top decision-making body, the NEC, have been handed safe seats. To the lobbyists and thinktankers have gone the spoils. Again, this is a gift to the former private schoolboy turned City trader Farage, who is always taking aim at cosseted elites and the sameness of the people at Westminster.
He’ll have plenty of targets in the next few years. Take the former Hackney councillor turned Oxford resident Luke Akehurst, who is now campaigning for a parliamentary seat in North Durham. I am sure Akehurst’s loved ones can list why he is a perfect fit for a seat in the north east (having already tried and failed in Hampshire and Essex), but one of the reasons voters in safe Labour seats stopped voting Labour is the completely justified sense they were being taken for granted. We’ll see in a few years whether history rhymes.
At its root, Faragism is a project to take this country further and further to the right. And from Brexit through to Suella Braverman, it has worked. Its most devoted support in this project has been the media, which sees leaving the EU or denying care system migrant workers as essential and easy tasks, while taxing the rich or investing in public services are swivel-eyed Marxism. Such an argument cannot be appeased or compromised with. It needs to be countered, disproved with facts and its progenitors shown as the cosseted chancers they are. Yet it is a feature of Westminster politics that there is no institution willing or able to make that case.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
