Apparently, there’s a debate going on in the upper echelons of the Labour government about what to do about Nigel Farage. Not a moment too soon, you might say.
The choice, as it’s been posited by Labour insiders, is whether to “confront” or “deflect” Reform UK. Farage’s populist insurgency has picked up lots of local councils, won a by-election – just – and settled in the opinion polls around 25 to 30 per cent ahead of Labour. Not so long ago, it was an unthinkable situation.
Something similar has been going on in the Conservative camp since they lost the general election, and, as we see, it seems the immediate answer to their version of the Farage-ist challenge is to reshuffle the shadow cabinet, bring back James Cleverly, and let Kemi Badenoch have some more time. They can’t work out if they want to collaborate with Farage or confront him.
Both parties actually show signs of appeasing him and aping his policies, from welfare to refugees. It’s not good.
It’s worth reminding the mainstream parties what happened last time they were too fastidious to take an ascendant Farage down, which was the Brexit referendum campaign. It was, as it still is, incredibly time-consuming and tiresome to have to fact-check every vague promise and extravagant claim Farage comes out with, and the easiest thing is just to call him an extremist/populist/fascist/xenophobe/racist or whatever and try to ignore him. Well, we all know what happens. As Farage himself might say: “They’re not laughing now!”
Much the same – less forgivably – goes for the media. Not that it’s an easy job trying to verify whatever casual claims Farage comes out with in real time, but it means he tends to go unchallenged.
Take his appearance on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show. He claimed, off the top of his head, that cancelling net zero – an amorphous concept, in any case – would save some £30bn a year, and said that “even” the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), “a tool of the establishment”, said so.
Kuenssberg had neither the time nor the evidence in front of her to cite Section 4 of the OBR report on long-term fiscal risks that showed that £20bn of the £30bn is due to the loss of fuel duty in the transition to electric cars. If a new levy on electric vehicles were introduced to replace the lost revenues in petrol and diesel sales, the additional cost to the taxpayer would be down to £10bn a year.
The OBR has said in 2021 and apparently endorsed again now that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”. Which happens to be true.
I’m definitely not criticising Kuenssberg here, because no interviewer – even with a researcher in her earpiece – could counter that in time, nor make the argument about how the UK has indeed helped big polluters like China and India at least sign up to CO2 reduction targets – and China is now leading the world in green tech and electric vehicles.
We had the same sort of thing at the press conference where Farage said he’d cut crime in half in five years. The £30bn net zero thing came up again, but the Q&A session wasn’t well suited to pinning him down over it. Asked how he’d pay for his sketchily costed plans to hire another 30,000 police, build “Nightingale prisons”, new “custody suites”, restore the magistrates courts, send “Britain’s worst offenders” to jail in El Salvador, and bang up an unknown number of serious offenders for life, he tossed out a figure of £50bn to £70bn that could be found from scrapping HS2 – even though it’s pretty much been run down and the money diverted to other road and rail projects by Rishi Sunak.
No one thought to ask exactly how Farage would halve crime, how the plan would work in practice, and why, if he could achieve that improbable outcome, he couldn’t abolish crime completely in 10 years.
When Farage does get cornered, as when Kuenssberg pressed him on whether he believes in climate science, and the antics of Reform UK councillors, he has some stock get-outs, and, like so much else he does, they’re straight out of the Donald Trump playbook.
Tactic one is to say he doesn’t know anything about some story, so he can’t answer and doesn’t know if what’s referred to is true. Second, he can just say that no party’s numbers ever add up anyway – the “experts” are always wrong and it’s not worth bothering about. Third, is the superficially plausible line that if he gets more people “with real business experience” into government they’ll sort things out, just like Trump and Elon Musk did in America – and Reform’s pretend Doge team is trying and thus far failing to do in Britain’s skint county councils.
Like Trump in the US, Farage is inviting a public more than usually disillusioned with politicians to turn to brilliant business people such as, erm, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice, and perhaps even the former commodities trader: Farage himself.
I suppose I’m just stating the obvious, really, which is that Farage’s Trumpian brand of populism and its amplification in the right-wing client press and social media presents a challenge to the mainstream parties, and real independent journalism that they have not been able to cope with.
A lot of that failure is, frankly, down to something like laziness, and a reluctance to do the hard graft of countering the lies and busting the myths about economics, immigration, crime and the rest that Reform constantly pumps to “flood the zone”, as they say in the States.
It is tedious to get your head around, say, carbon budgets and remember all the key crime stats for London, because no one carries that much stuff around in their heads. But our leaders could confront Farage a little harder and with a bit more effect than they’ve managed so far.
We could, let’s say, push him much harder on why getting the Royal Navy to take irregular migrants back to Calais is a violation of French sovereignty, and would threaten a cold war with France and the rest of the European Union in retaliation, with huge damage to trade and the economy.
He’s been getting away with this sort of nonsense for far too long, and now it’s getting dangerous. He needs to be confronted – but who is going to do it?
