Nigel Farage is the herpes of British politics - annoying, nasty, and impossible to get rid of. After saying for weeks that he wouldn’t be contesting the General Election for his Reform Party vanity vehicle, and that Reform would not be doing any deals with the Tories, Farage announced on Monday morning that he and his mini-me Richard Tice would be appearing at 4 pm for an “emergency General Election announcement”: the emergency presumably being that apart from his mates in the panel booking team for BBC Question Time, he’s not been getting the attention that his massive ego and sense of entitlement feel he deserves.
Reform, the successor to UKIP (remember them?), is a party that has caused more damage to the UK than any other. It’s a party that has never won a parliamentary seat. Following May’s local elections in England It has just 10 councillors in England, and none at all in Wales or Scotland. Even our own Cornish devolutionist party, Mebyon Kernow, has five councillors. Yet Reform gets more coverage than many parties with greater support and sitting MPs. Its extreme anti-immigration scaremongering is regularly platformed by the BBC and the other broadcasters. Naturally his announcement was headline news on the BBC. Last week Farage insisted that he still has “one more big card to play” and said that he’d stand for Westminster at some point in the future but ruled out standing this year claiming that he was “extremely disappointed by Sunak’s decision to call a General Election on July 4th. Farage said that he could not campaign both nationally for Reform and for one constituency in the six-week time frame of the General Election.
Of course what has changed since last week is that Nige’s best pal, Donald Trump, has been convicted in a New York court on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. Farage had planned to spend October and November campaigning in the USA on behalf of an actual law breaking fascist, but following his multiple convictions, Trump’s chances of taking the presidency again have felon considerably. Trump is predictably railing against the verdict claiming that the trial was “rigged” because the justice system had the temerity to prosecute him and find him guilty. What is the world coming to when you can’t even falsify business records in an attempt to swing an election any more, because of “woke”?
Farage recently received well deserved condemnation for saying during an interview on Sky News that the streets of British cities are full of people who “undermine British values”. Remarks which were widely perceived as not so much a racist dog whistle as a racist fog horn. How dare some people be Muslim in public? The truth is that nobody has done more to undermine “British values” than Nigel Farage. Mind you, when you think about it, imperialism, racism, and the demonisation of minority groups are very much long established British political traditions.
The “emergency announcement” turned out to be Big Nige telling the press that he is taking over as leader of Reform and intends to fail to become an MP for the eighth time. Which was disappointingly predictable as I had kind of hoped that he was going to tell us that he was going to appear on Strictly. But that would have led to him being judged by a black woman and an EU immigrant and that would never do for a Reform leader. So it transpires that Farage is standing as a candidate in this election after all, and this is an “emergency”? For whom exactly?
The news is dire for the Tories, whose already tiny chances of saving their miserable behinds in this election have now plummeted even further. For all that Farage boasted about taking votes from Labour, it’s the Tories who will be seriously damaged by this development. The Tory vote will now be split in seats which they really need to win if they are to avoid their well deserved electoral oblivion. The Tories will now pivot even further to the right in an attempt to shore up their vote and minimise losses to Farage.
And wither Labour? If we’ve learned one thing about Keir Starmer in recent years, it’s that where the Tories go, he is sure to follow. British politics are becoming ever more right wing, ever more Anglo-British nationalist, and less and less tolerant of difference and minority groups.
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