In Defense of Nigel Farage

4,529 words

In 2009, Nigel Farage was ranked in a poll as the 41st most powerful right-winger in the UK. Farage might have disagreed with the “right-winger” label, he said at the time, “preferring to consider myself a Whig”, but few would contest now that he has risen from 41st to first in 15 years, and is currently the most important politician in the United Kingdom, let alone right-winger. You can tell he is top dog by all the name-calling. That’s not a reference to the epithets Farage has been piling up: Nazi! Fascist! Hitler! Far right! Reform UK’s leader has got the full card, and Farage must feel as though he is under attack from an army of Touretters. No, it’s high-ranking members of Britain’s Labour administration that have become a bit selective about the calling of names.

Whispers from the Westminster corridors of power indicate that Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister (at least, at the time of writing), insists on being addressed as Sir Keir Starmer. Similarly, Sadiq Khan, London Mayor and Muslim fifth-columnist, will only respond to those addressing him as “Sir Sadiq”, he too having met the late Queen with a sword in her hand. And even David Lammy, Westminster court jester and professional black man, glares at staff who do not call him “Deputy Prime Minister Lammy”, or use his official title of Lord Chancellor. Boy, are they spooked, and it’s these little tells that give them away. They are scared at a national level too, outside the Westminster bubble. Labour have just cancelled another raft of local elections for absurd and deceitful reasons, when in fact they know perfectly well that Reform are in line to win every seat that was to have been contested.

But Labour mandarins are not the only ones in whose heads Nigel Farage – a descendant of those rebellious Huguenots – is enjoying rent-free occupancy. Even Farage’s own supporters have accused him of Caesarism after the acrimonious expulsion of two of Reform UK’s leading figures. Ben Habib is of Pakistani descent, and thus a good piece of CivNat cover for Farage, but he was expelled over personal differences with Farage and formed his own party, Advance UK. Rupert Lowe is by some distance the most conservative Member of Parliament in the House, believing in remigration and the death penalty. Although his post-Reform organization, Restore Britain, is not yet registered as a political party, he intends either to progress to that stage or merge with an already existing party. So, Farage is a control freak, an egotist, and a narcissist, it would appear. I see no argument against that in principle, this being politics, but Farage has the same need for control of his inner circle that Starmer appears to have – what we might call a “Prospero Complex” – and the key will be to what extent Farage and Starmer differ in what it is they are striving to control.

For those of us on the British right who favor Reform, an embattled, ragged army more sinned against than sinning, the main argument against a Farage-led government is that he really represents containment, albeit it under a new, post-Blair political order. Unlike the installation of John Major to replace Thatcher in 1984 to placate the Tory Party, Farage would be shilling for the uniparty, runs the argument, as the unity of the two main parties as one has now been exposed. This, in turn, depends on Farage’s integrity, on whether his public image is natural or crafted, so with a politician all bets are off.

Over a decade ago, when Farage was first starting to emerge from the shadows of the European Parliament, where he was an MEP (Member of the European Parliament) for 20 years, causing much anarchic trouble in the chamber, and into the domestic political limelight, I read up on him. I read two autobiographies and a biography, and it is interesting to turn back to them now and read my own notes on a man whose star was just coming into the ascendant, and the zenith of whose career may be approaching as Prime Minister. Farage clearly felt himself important enough for two autobiographies even a decade and a half ago, at a relatively early stage in his career. (Perhaps we will see a Netflix series if he makes it all the way to Downing Street). The books are The Purple Revolution: The Year that Changed Everything and Flying Free, both by Nigel Farage, and Independently Minded: The Rise of Nigel Farage, by Matthew Lynn.

Farage’s rise has hardly been meteoric. Born in 1963 in the same Kent village as Charles Darwin, it is appropriate that Farage is at the heart of the UK’s current political evolution. It is also Farage’s native Kent which is the epicenter of the immigration invasion currently winding the British people up ever-tighter, and which Farage has built his career around addressing and highlighting. He chose not to go to university, but went into the City of London Stock Exchange. City traders have a mythology weaved around them: they were the yuppies of the 1980s, all Rolex watches, Maseratis, cocaine, and far more money won and lost on gambling in a single day than all the casinos in Monte Carlo. Farage was well aware of the glamor and mystique which hung heavy on the city boys. “Even pop stars dressed like City slickers in the 1980s”, Farage correctly recalls. But Farage’s career path means that he understands world financial markets, whereas Starmer and his utterly hopeless Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, give the impression they wouldn’t understand a farmer’s market.

Farage is clear on the relationship between the City and the EU:

Brussels hates the City—the technocrats there would quite happily see the City close down. They hate what they call the Anglo-Saxon model and they cannot see why an interest rate that is right for the UK economy may not be right for Germany or Greece.

It is encouraging to see Farage use the term “technocrats” well over a decade ago. The British deep state is currently yearning for the UK to rejoin the European Union, a thoroughly globalist enterprise whose most dangerous enemy is Nigel Farage. Farage credits John Major’s signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1991, opening the door to the European Union and forfeiting British sovereignty, with igniting his political passion and his anti-European animus (his marriage to a German notwithstanding). The fire has not dimmed in over 30 years. As for his intellectual growth, J. S. Mill’s On Liberty is singled out for praise among Farage’s political reading. Maastricht and Brexit are two bookends. That’s the way Farage sees it. Both Conservative and Labour were staunchly in the “Remain” camp before the 2016 Brexit referendum, and both parties hate Farage for the same reason: he does not come from the political class and he does not understand what they see as the benefits of globalism. Biographer Mike Lynn is of the opinion that Farage had the measure of the uniparty over a decade ago:

Farage… believes it doesn’t matter whether Labour or the Tories are in power. They are just parish councillors, since all the important decisions are now made in Brussels.

Starmer, knowing that Labour are holed below the waterline but still have four years to ship water, will do everything in their power to reverse the Brexit vote. He knows he is a one-term leader, and he doesn’t even know how long his tenure will be. Re-shackling Britain to the walking corpse of Europe could be the first of many acts of sabotage carried out against an incoming Farage administration.

One would imagine that, in the powerful position in which he finds himself, Nigel Farage would not be short of advice, but the problem may be precisely that he has no one around him to give him sound counsel. He has yet to assemble a credible court. He must use two criteria for a Reform government in terms of hiring: For the actual machinations of government, he must avoid the cult of youth. Farage needs older, wiser heads who have been around in business. If he is smart, Farage will take the line that, if you have made your way up the greasy political pole via the traditional route of the uniparty apparatchik – PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) at Oxbridge, PR, advertising, the law, or journalism – you had better be very good indeed because otherwise there is no point applying for a place in government. Those days are over. Old town, new sheriff. This should be a government free of grifters and political bagmen.

Whoever he chooses, on accession, Farage and his new Cabinet are going to have a number of top-priority problems to address.

1. The Civil Service.

The British Civil Service was the first in the Western world, and was effectively started in the 13th century when King John compiled a national archive. So, when the Sheriff of Nottingham wasn’t chasing Robin Hood and his Merry Men through Sherwood Forest, he was filing. The Civil Service became the executive arm of government when the British went into and ran India (whose population then was around a third of a billion) with a mere 70,000 Civil Servants (compared with today’s domestic figure of well over half a million), and famous British civil servants include Chaucer, Milton, Pepys, Wordsworth, Burns and Trollope. The Civil Service is statutorily required to be impartial, but any serious political observer can see straight away that it is not. The Civil Service, and its hard-Left, “woke” bias, is the first of many dragons Farage will have to slay. The British Civil Service contains separate internal groups, the Muslim entity having over 700 members. Nigerians, many of whom work at the Home Office, also have an activist enclave. In their home country, one of the most venerated gods of the prevalent Yoruba tribe is Eshu, a trickster god. These people all have an independent say in how the Civil Service is to be run for a predominantly white nation.

The whole desperate enterprise will have to be gutted and rebuilt. Quite literally as I write, Danny Kruger, a former Conservative MP who jumped ship to Reform, has just announced DOGE-like plans to cull the Civil Service to the tune of 60,000 civil servants, saving £5billion. These are concrete, costed pledges, and Farage must keep to those, as well as stressing that Labour broke every one of their major manifesto pledges within 18 months of taking office. Kruger will also, according to Farage, be “wrestling” with the House of Lords, to which we shall return.

Kruger is a good example of a potentially dangerous image Farage doesn’t want to foster. Although Kruger himself seems capable, he joined Farage’s crew from the Conservatives, and Reform don’t want to be seen as a retirement home for old Tories. Both Labour and the Conservatives realize that their unpopularity could be terminal come the next election, and there will be a steady trickle of defections if Reform keep their course steady. Farage must make sure he lets the right ones in.

Kruger put out a short promotional video in which he said that “the Civil Service has lost its way” and vowing reform, as in the title of the party. Kruger tells viewers that, should they work for the Civil Service and would like to get in touch to discuss the state of the executive arm of government, they could do so anonymously. Kruger is soliciting whistle-blowers, and forced to guarantee their anonymity. That, if anything, should give an accurate picture of the state of modern Britain.

2. The House of Lords.

The British Parliament, as in the US, operates under a bi-cameral system. That is, a legislative instrument, usually a Bill, is passed in the House of Commons on a vote, and is then passed to the “upper house”, this being the Lords, for ratification. Supposedly, these elders of the community will use their collective wisdom to keep the ship of state sailing fair, but in actuality the British House of Lords is a den of cronyism, filled with those who have had political favors returned by elevation to the Upper Chamber.  Nowadays, of course, they are augmented by “politically correct” appointments. The murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a white gang in 1993, and the resultant MacPherson Report into policing, was the single most deleterious thing to happen to white Britain since the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. As a result of the affair, Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, was made a Lord. This shows how deeply unserious a once-august institution has become, and it has been in dire need of an audit for decades. At one time, Lords in the UK were precisely that, and the seat in the House of Lords of any particular family passed down the hereditary line. That gradually changed until the Blair era, during which Labour stuffed the House of Lords with as many cronies as it feasibly could. They can’t be defenestrated (except by dying), and the presence of no Reform-affiliated Lords at present already poses future problems for Farage with respect to the passage of legislation.

3. The economy.

How Farage addresses the economy depends entirely on how much damage Starmer, or whichever post-Marxist wrecker replaces him, can do in the time allowed. Ideally, the debt to GDP ratio for a national economy should not be more than 40:100. That ratio for the UK today shows debt at over 100% of GDP, and France and America (at least) are in much the same boat, indeed worse off.

On the subject of money, there is criticism of Reform’s funding since they recently received the largest donation to a party in British political history, £9million (around $12million). The forensics began, as though those suddenly disillusioned with Reform suddenly expected clean money to come gushing from the tap marked “political donations”, which would be something of a black swan event. Farage is also boosting crypto-currency, and his Chairman just so happens to have invested heavily in that booming sector, as does the donor in question. There is talk of money-laundering, and financial connections with Russia which would not stand much investigation.

Party Chair Muhammad Zia Yusuf (he’s dropped the “Muhammad” of late, not wanting to spook the horses on the right too much) gave Reform £220,000 and – Bingo! – he was appointed party Chairman. To this extent, Farage is already being caught up in the inexorable moral no-man’s land of politics. Individual donors are keeping Reform healthily in the red, with 75% of Reform’s funding coming from just three men: Richard Tice, Richard Harborne, and Jeremy Hosking. £23million of the £30million Reform have ever received have come from this trio. Tice was previously leader of Reform before Farage’s return to front-line politics, and he has a stake in the party. Unlike other parties, Reform is actually registered as a limited company, which has the advantage of legally required financial transparency. Richard Harborne, who donated £9million, is heavily involved in cryptocurrency and had previously donated 1 £million to the Conservatives. He accompanied then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson on a trip to Ukraine. Hosking is a businessman and a railway enthusiast, in keeping with the bucolic image Farage likes to promote.

It also doesn’t help Farage’s holier-than-thou cause if he hires staffers such as Nathan Gill. Mr. Gill was, until recently, the leader of Reform UK Wales. His career in politics was rudely cut short, however, by a ten-and-a-half-year jail sentence for accepting bribes from Russia to take a pro-Putin line in interviews and speeches. This is a howler by Farage on two fronts. Obviously, those involved in any kind of fraud don’t tend to highlight it on their CVs, but Farage will have to tighten up his vetting procedures. Also, it has allowed Starmer to pounce and set up a review into foreign election interference. This will be streamlined, weaponized, and turned against Farage. The moral for the Reform leader is simple: don’t make a rod for your own back.

4. Immigration

This is Farage’s trump card. He formed UKIP (UK Independence Party) as a single-issue party, and he won the Brexit vote because even the media couldn’t hide that fact that it was a referendum on immigration. The key facilitators to get control of at least illegal immigration are Britain’s leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and de-incentivization. As things stand, an illegal immigrant to the UK – undocumented, unknown, and uncheckable – is given on arrival very high-quality accommodation, money, a telephone, guaranteed and often prioritized healthcare, free legal advice and legal aid if required, free transport, and a variety of bonuses depending on where they are barracked (for this may well be an army that didn’t even need a Trojan Horse to smuggle itself in). The vast majority of corporations don’t offer that kind of package to their most treasured employees. At the moment, the UK is El Dorado for the migrant, a Shangri-La for the undocumented. Farage must grasp this problem and cut it at the windpipe. If he does for the beaches of Kent what Trump has done for the Mexican border, he will hit the ground running in terms of public approval whatever else he does.

Every single British government since Blair effectively opened the floodgates has vowed to reduce immigration, which has then risen under each successive administration. Farage has not yet voiced what seems an obvious truism, that mass immigration and the chaos it brings is intentional, but he is wise not to get dragged into the “Great Replacement” debate at this stage. He will do well to wait for the next, inevitable, Islamist atrocity and capitalize on that.

5. Europe

That Starmer and his treasonous crew are working to get Britain back in the European Union is one of many terribly kept secrets at Westminster. To say that the EU chiefs are not Farage’s warmest admirers would be accurate without really summing up the loathing the unelected European bosses hold for the Reform leader. During a Channel 4 documentary over a decade ago, when Farage was still an MEP running UKIP, Farage takes a reporter into the EU chamber, totally contravening the building’s security protocols. There is more than an air of the naughty schoolboy about Farage. His past performances are legendary in and around the EU, demanding of unelected Chair Herman van Rompuy who he actually is before dismissing him as having “all the personality of a damp rag.”

Farage was the last person the gauleiters of the European Union wanted to see in the chamber then or ever. The EU is actually four bodies, for maximum complication, all with similar names and performing similar functions, but the European citizenry don’t vote them in and, more importantly, they can’t vote them out. The European Parliament cannot instigate legislation, it can only ratify it, and the only thing at which it excels is bureaucracy. It is a technocratic apparatus par excellence, with layer upon layer of administrative complication. This is the EU vision: total uniformity. I believe it was science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard who said that the aim of globalism was to make everywhere look like a suburb of Bonn.

6. Islam

Possibly the trickiest minefield Farage will have to negotiate, although I believe he has already started manoeuvres. Farage, like Starmer before him, will have to be a servant of two masters: The Jewish Chamber of Deputies and the Muslim Council of Great Britain (although we can’t be certain they are not in cahoots). But Farage has rattled the cage bars of a few British YouTubers over his comments on Islam. Farage said, perfectly rationally, that alienating Islam would be electoral suicide in some areas, and it is hard to fault his reasoning. He has, as noted, elevated Zia (née Mohammed) Yusuf to the captain’s table, and there has been open talk about his becoming the UK’s first Muslim Prime Minister. Reform may be the Trojan Horse to end all Trojan Horses. Smuggling in the first Mohammedan Prime Minister using the cover of a critique of multiculturalism would be political acumen in the Machiavellian class.

Muslim commentator Majid Nawaz believes Farage can “capture the moderate Muslim vote.” If he did, it would say much about the party, because Muslims will only ever vote in the interests of the ummah. Often, an imam will tell his people who to vote for if there is no obvious Muslim candidate, or not one of the right clan. This won’t change. Farage cannot ride the Islamic tiger. He must ensure that their cage is lavishly furnished.

The media, even its ideological outliers, are at best lukewarm about Farage. For anyone who follows British politics, journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown hates Farage, which is a compelling reason to have the man around on the political scene. Over-rated print-media hack Andrew Neil observes that “There are votes in being an outsider”, missing the point entirely. Farage is an insider, that’s his appeal. Rod Liddle, louche Social Democrat, drawls that “I like Farage but I wouldn’t vote for him.” Farage is learning from Donald Trump, however. Don’t just discount the media, take the fight to them. As noted, on the dissident right there are already voices raised in protest. Connor Tomlinson, an articulate YouTuber who represents the harder edge forming on the British right, is critical of Reform’s civnat stance. But Farage is already used to frantic media attention, and would be the only PM to take office fully field-trained to deal with the media, barring possibly Boris Johnson.

The most significant name being whispered concerning Farage and the assembly of his media arsenal has been that of Dominic Cummings. Now, Cummings brings to mind Kirk Douglas’ description of Stanley Kubrick after working with him on Paths of Glory: “He’s a talented shit.” Cummings is this generation’s Alastair Campbell, a very bad man who you desperately want on your side. Farage certainly does, and there are rumors which I hope have substance. Cummings has made one or two speeches in the last year which show that he knows British politics to be largely theatrical. I’m sure Farage which have watched Cummings’ discussion of him more than once. In footballing terms, snaring Cummings as a media attack dog would be the equivalent of signing, not a star striker, but one of the best defenders in the world.

Reform’s marketing has been slick and organic, able to adjust and adapt as the government negotiates its latest calamity, but they don’t always read the room. Their gratitude for Bonnie Blue’s endorsement, a woman whose main career achievement appears to be having sex with 1,000 men in a day, is questionable to say the least. Reform’s website is surprisingly stocked with manifesto pledges, however, which is not the impression the British political right are giving. Perhaps they haven’t read it. This is from Farage’s introduction to the site:

Record mass immigration has damaged our country. The small boats crisis threatens our security. Multiculturalism has imported separate communities that reject our way of life. Divisive, ‘woke’ ideology has captured public institutions. Transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children.

 Labour and Conservative sock-puppets may occasionally flirt with low-octane versions of these manifestly true statements, but they are just trying to catch Farage’s dust. The British right, of all stripes, have got to get something through their bovine heads: there isn’t anyone else. Farage is the only choice, and it’s him or the uniparty.

Just as the uniparty smuggled in multiculturalism inside the city walls with its overall agenda, so too Farage might smuggle his agenda through inside the Trojan Horse of multiculturalism. “The government”, Farage continues on the website, “must work for the people. Not against them.” This seems a political truism now, but it really isn’t. It has never been an attack line between Labour and Conservative that the party in power – and it has been those two since the last Liberal government was voted out in 1915 – are actively working to the detriment of the people they were elected to represent. Maybe it’s the English, and it just isn’t the done thing, old boy, but Farage can lift the lid on the deep state by highlighting its malevolence. What Farage cannot say, of course, is that it is primarily the white British against whom the government has taken up arms. Just as with Trump, white nationalism is a cause that dare not speak its name.

Britain is in a political position unique in its history. The professional betting websites are by far the most reliable electoral poll, and they all have Farage as a firm favorite to be the next PM despite the riders being so many furlongs from the finish-line. But this is to Farage’s advantage. With Labour, Farage is adopting the time-honored stratagem of never interrupting your enemy while they are making a mistake. The most surprising thing about the current administration is that they are not even very good technocrats. Blair mapped it all out for them a quarter of a century ago. Alastair Campbell changed the press from the Fourth Estate speaking truth to power to a client media speaking whatever the government told them so speak. The heavy lifting was all done, all Starmer’s team of androids had to do was put it into operation, and they even screwed that up. Overall, though Starmer is doing what he was put there to do: disrupt, despoil, and desecrate England

If Farage turns out to be establishment, as Tony Blair did, then he has put in an Oscar-winning performance playing the part of a level-headed, amiable, canny, patriotic Englishman. As noted, there isn’t anyone else. It is hard to see how Farage could make things worse, and his main problem may be the damage done by Labour between now and 2029. Even if he inherits a ruin, people have very short memories, and will blame a Reform government for any slump once they are in office, lacking the political literacy to see that slumps are sometimes years in the making. This is why the Biden administration was unfairly blamed for a spike in inflation which was pre-programmed by America’s first black President, who doubled the national debt and breathed new life into the financial printing presses, albeit without the collateral to back it.

As for Farage, he has ridden into town on a stolen horse. Ex-City wide boys, riff-raff in the refined air of Westminster, are not supposed to be allowed in with the other guests. Farage is in, though, and like a vampire, once you have allowed him in, it can be very difficult to get him to leave. And he is very aware of the fact, and I am sure is enjoying the sport as far as trolling goes – as is his friend across the pond, President Trump.  For the UK, it is drinking-up time at the Last Chance Saloon, and we can only hope the new sheriff enforces the rules, even if it means breaking others. As Farage says in PR: “We have broken every rule in the book and I really hope that it does not stop here.”

It’s easy to say “won’t get fooled again” in politics but, if we do get fooled again by Farage, at least we have been conned by a nice guy.