Making Plans for Nigel

We’d better move quickly though, because Farage is definitely making plans for us

This week, More in Common revealed their latest ‘poll of polls’ analysis indicating what would happen if a general election were held in Britain today.

It predicts that Reform UK would win a comfortable majority in the House Of Commons, with 373 seats. Labour would have 90 seats, the Liberal Democrats 69, the Conservatives 41, and the SNP 24.

This is not a one off. Electoral Calculus, another pollster which uses the same, usually pretty reliable, MRP regression analysis, last month gave Reform 368 seats, with 119 for Labour. It’s latest update (just released) has Reform just short of majority on 301 seats to Labour’s 153.

Nonetheless, these forecasts suggest a majority Reform government is now a real possibility. They also suggest such a majority could be achieved on as little as 31% of the popular vote. If turn out remains at the same level as last time (59.7%) that would mean Farage becoming Prime Minister, and his government at liberty to tear up Britain’s (unwritten) constitution, with the active support of just 18.5% of those eligible to vote.

There is clearly a problem here, both with the numbers of people not bothering to vote, and how, when combined with Britain’s anachronistic first-past-the-post voting system, the current set-up can deliver large parliamentary majorities to parties and leaders who command relatively little popular support.

Keir Starmer won his huge majority last year with just 33.7% of the popular vote, which means he had the support of just over 20% of eligible voters. In the United States, Donald Trump did better, but despite his overwhelming victory in the electoral college, with 49.8% of the popular vote on a turn out of 69.3%, he is currently shredding the US Constitution and sending troops on to the streets with the backing of less than 32% of eligible voters.

There is one obvious solution to the problem of elections delivering such undemocratic outcomes. But first, let’s consider why the prospect of a Reform UK government must be resisted with all possible strength and by all permissible means.

Reform UK is a party of the far right

He may only have got to be Prime Minister with the support of a fifth of the British people, but what a relief it was to hear Keir Starmer attack Nigel Farage’s plan to deport up to to 800,000 people working legally in Britain on Sunday. When asked by Laura Kuenssberg if Farage’s policy was racist, he answered:

‘I do think it’s a racist policy. I do think its immoral, and needs to be called out for what it is.’

Later that day, BBC political correspondent Ian Watson, describing Starmer’s words, said:

‘He used language he usually deploys against the far right to describe Reform UK’s policy.’

I suppose Watson may have chosen that phrase to emphasise a change of approach on Starmer’s part. But more likely, it suggests that the BBC has decided that Reform UK is not a far right party, and should not be described as such, when by any reasonable measure it clearly is.

Millions of people use the BBC as their primary news source and would have heard in Watson’s words a clear legitimation of Farage’s politics and the policies he plans to implement if elected.

It’s been clear for some time now that Farage, though not as explicit in his racism as Tommy Robinson, nonetheless shares the same racist views. By any measure, this makes Reform UK a party of the far right.

In recent months, the line that defines what constitutes acceptable political discourse has been obliterated. Tommy Robinson and the thugs that follow him may be the worst offenders, but Farage is now showing his true colours, and revealing what many of us have known about him for a very long time. He is a racist, and he is not afraid to use racist rhetoric if he thinks it might help him achieve power.

Nigel is making plans for Britain

People of a certain age will note that I’ve taken the title of this post from XTC’s 1979 hit Making Plans for Nigel. Actually it wasn’t a massive hit, but it was one of the defining tracks of that year, as a generation of musicians who’d grown up in the shadow of punk took the best of that insurgent genre and combined it with sublime melodies and fabulous lyrics to produce some timeless tracks.

In recent months, as Reform UK has started to look like a government in waiting, it has become clear that Farage himself has quite specific plans for Britain. And they are not plans that will deliver an improved experience of life to anyone except the super-rich.

I’m not going to make comparisons between Farage / Reform and the early days of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Although both Tommy Robinson, and Farage’s mate Donald Trump, certainly do merit comparison. But I would draw your attention to the concept of protofascism, which Encyclopaedia Britannica defines thus:

a political movement that predates and usually contributes to the emergence of fascism in a given country, sometimes by evolving into a fascist movement itself.

The term protofascism is also used in a slightly more general sense to refer to any political movement whose activities make the emergence of fascism more likely. By definition, protofascist movements display some of the common characteristics of fascism—such as the scapegoating of ethnic or religious minorities, the glorification of violence, and the promotion of the Führerprinzip (“leadership principle”), the belief that the party and the state should have a single leader with absolute power—but usually do not share its radicalism or totalitarian ambitions.

On this definition, it is clear that the United States is now labouring under a protofascist government. We know Farage is an admirer of Trump. We also know that Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch and a host of other Tory MPs have refused to condemn what’s currently happening in the United States. Does this mean the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher is now a protofascist party? What politicians leave unsaid is often as damaging, and revealing, as what they actually say.

History is quite explicit on this point: the rise of authoritarian power is often a consequence of those who oppose it remaining silent. Which is why Keir Starmer’s decision finally to speak out is to be applauded.

Britain’s Shame

At the recent far-right rally in London, which to Britain’s eternal shame attracted more than 100,000 participants, Elon Musk, speaking via video link, called for the violent overthrow of the British government. In the social media furore that followed, I was particularly impressed by this thread from the Labour MP Ben Goldsborough, in which he makes the following comment:

For fifty years, we’ve worked to move away from our worst demons and lift up our better angels. That progress is fragile. We cannot let it be torn down by men who neither know nor care for this country.

I would quibble that this work in fact began in 1945 as the world embarked on the parallel tasks of rebuilding itself after the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, and taking measures to ensure there could never be a repeat of those dual catastrophes. Nonetheless, Goldsborough’s point is very well made.

But the battle between our better angels and our worst demons isn’t generally fought within individuals. Many of those who marched behind Tommy Robinson and that slimeball Laurence Fox (sorry, but….) the other weekend are irredeemably lost. They were not born racist thugs, but their experience of life has led them in a particular direction from which there is, I’m afraid, no return.

But I was reassured to read in

Ian Dunt

’s recent post, in which he describes becoming unwittingly caught up in the march, that the majority of marchers were not typical Robinson thugs. Rather, they were people concerned about the future of their country who have allowed themselves to be seduced by the nationalistic and anti-immigrant rhetoric in which Farage and Robinson deal.

Whether these people can be persuaded not to support Reform in 2029 will depend on what happens between now and then. But Britain has not suddenly become a country of fascists: events, and the compounded failures of successive governments, have conspired to leave a great many people disillusioned with politics and prepared to give their vote to anyone who promises to overthrow the political establishment.

Of course, if they paid proper attention to what’s happening in the United States people might think twice about electing Trump’s number one fan to run Britain. Let’s hope that as things unravel across the pond over the next four years, those inclined to support Farage will think again.

But whatever happens, it is now clear that under certain conditions, conditions which pertain in many countries today, a sizeable proportion of the population enthusiastically embrace the overtures of those who would overthrow democracy, arbitrarily remove the rights of certain groups, and do away with the political freedoms we all enjoy in a liberal, free society.

This is in stark contrast to what happened at the end of the 1930s, a decade in which millions of people were thrown out of work, and millions of others saw a reduction in their living standards. With the exception of Oswald’s Mosley’s Brownshirts (mainly hired thugs bussed in from around the country to foment violence) people didn’t march in support of fascists. They signed up in their hundreds of thousands to fight fascism. And many gave their lives to defend liberal democracy and the freedoms it bestows on all citizens.

Why do so many people not see what is happening?

In part because politicians and commentators, and those among us who are terrified at the spectre of anti-democratic, authoritarian governments in countries like Britain, France and Germany, fail to tell a coherent story about how we got here, and how we might address people’s concerns without turning ourselves into a police state and forcibly removing hundreds of thousands or people; a course of action that would cripple our ailing economy, and likely cause the total collapse of the NHS.

But also because blaming immigration for the country’s ills is a handy scapegoating exercise on the part of those who have failed to deliver an economy that creates enough wealth, and distributes it sufficiently fairly, for people not to become open to manipulation by anti-immigrant rhetoric in the first place.

The rise of Farage, and with it the spectre of a far-right government in Britain, is inextricably tied up with Brexit, and its latest gift: the small boats crisis.

There would be no small boats crisis had Britain not voted for Brexit. Once Britain left the EU in January 2021, the provisions of the Dublin III Regulations ceased to apply. That agreement was specifically designed to ensure that (a) there was a legal route enabling refugee family reunion; and (b) that Britain could return asylum seekers to the EU country from which they had come, regardless of their origin. It’s because Britain can no longer do this that so many are now taking the risk of crossing the channel on small boats. Britain has also shut down alternative safer routes for people wishing to claim asylum here, leaving them no option but to rely on the criminal gangs that control the small boat traffic.

As Derek Robinson suggested in his recent letter to The Guardian, this being the case, the main culprit in the small boats crisis is Farage himself. And the ‘Boris wave’ of immigration is a direct result of Boris Johnson’s promise to ‘get Brexit done’. Why, for pity’s sake, isn’t Keir Starmer telling this story?

To be clear, I’m not advocating for uncontrolled immigration to the UK. Of course it needs to be better managed. This recent post by

Ian Leslie

makes the case for this very well. But the current debate around immigration is so lopsided as to be laughable. With a population ageing as rapidly as Britain’s, the only way we are going to be able to keep our economic heads above water is by encouraging economically active migrants to come here in large numbers.

Then there is the moral issue - rarely discussed - of millions of people worldwide feeling they have no option but to flee their own country because of conflict, economic failure, or the effects of climate change. The forces driving such migration are going to get much worse in the years ahead. Most migrants would far rather stay in their own countries and make a go of it there. But there is no chance of things improving in those countries without coordinated action on the part of the international community. And even if such a community still existed, the scale of the problems facing many of these countries appears insurmountable.

Making Plans for Nigel

There is still time to avoid a Farage victory at the next election, but it will require a complete recasting of the narrative around migration; and more voters to better educate themselves about the facts, and engage fully with reality.

This is the most dangerous and worrying political moment of my life (I was born in 1964). It’s difficult to see how we can avoid the slide to full-blown authoritarian government without inspired leadership and a concerted effort by reasonable people to prevent it. This is not as easy as it should be in a democracy because of the way our electoral system is configured.

In the likely absence of inspired leaders effecting a sea-change in public sentiment, the best way to prevent Reform UK from winning a majority in 2029 is to change the voting system: scrap first-past-the-post and replace it with some form of proportional representation (PR) so that the number of seats allocated to each party reflects their share of the popular vote.

Opponents of PR have previously argued that it would allow fringe or extreme parties to gain a foothold in Parliament. The polls show that we are way past that point. PR would give a much better chance of a ‘progressive’ majority. It would force centre and left parties to find common ground and require them to work together in coalition. It is encouraging that Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester, and putative challenger to Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership, supports a switch to PR.

If Labour, under Starmer or anyone else, loses to Reform in 2029 without having taken the opportunity to bring in PR, then it will only have itself to blame. It would be terminal for the Labour Party, of course, but far worse: it would herald the beginning of a very dark period in British history.

It all seems a long way from 1979, when all we had to worry about was Margaret Thatcher’s nascent plans to reconfigure the British economy while she persuaded us that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Any connection between her achievements and the challenges we face today will have to wait for another post. But Mrs Thatcher knew the importance of Britain’s place in Europe, and she will be spinning in her grave at the thought of Nigel Farage eating his shredded wheat at her kitchen table upstairs in No.10.

For those of you who weren’t born when the Iron Lady was first elected, and also as a reminder that we have to remain positive, and give ourselves a break occasionally, if only to recharge our batteries for the struggle ahead, I leave you with XTC.

I have no problem with Nigel Farage being ‘happy in his world’. But he does not have the right to ruin Britain for the rest of us.