Nigel Farage is the most consequential British politician of the 21st century. Certainly a more important historic figure than any of the last eight Prime Ministers. Tony Blair is the only realistic rival.
Without Farage, the UK would never have left the European Union. Farage’s role in forcing the issue to the top of the political agenda, and putting electoral pressure on the Tory Party which Cameron sought to assuage through a referendum, was indispensable.
Subsequently Farage has been central to placing racism at the centre of British electoral politics. Farage has been key to redirecting the frustrations of ordinary people at twenty years of falling living standards, while wealth concentrates to an incredible degree in the hands of the billionaire class. That the blame for this has been loaded onto hapless immigrants, rather than those looting the economy, owes much to Farage. He has more than anybody made UK elections revolve around who can promise the most blood-curdling measures against immigrants.
In doing so, Farage appeared to have shattered the UK’s two-party system. He certainly brought about the biggest shift in Labour/Tory dominance since 1921. It was entirely thanks to Farage splitting the right-wing vote, that Starmer could gain a thumping parliamentary majority with just 32% of votes cast, under the UK’s appalling electoral system. Reform had the same effect in the recent Scottish parliamentary elections, enabling the SNP to win 57 out of 73 constituency seats despite a 10% drop in their vote.
Even after all the abuse hurled at Farage by the media in recent weeks, Reform still leads in UK opinion polls.
I am by nature diametrically opposed to Reform’s brand of politics. For me tolerance, empathy and compassion are the most important virtues in life, and I deplore the atavism and racism which is Reform’s stock-in-trade. I also detest their anti-intellectualism, while the stupidity of believing that the hardship to ordinary people caused by the structural imbalance of late capitalist systems, is somehow the fault of poor refugees, fills me with contempt.
I am however relaxed about leaving the EU.
It has become a right-wing bloc of a very unpleasant nature, under leadership of von der Leyen and Kallas. The sight of MEPs chanting “send them back” in the European Parliament was chilling. I am glad to be out of it. However the decision to reject all sensible trading arrangements with the bloc has greatly damaged the UK economy and harmed the prospects of young people. Again at base this was due to Farage’s electoral pressure on the Tory Party and Johnson’s desire to exploit the sentiment which Farage had created.
I would argue that Blair is in fact a more harmful and more evil figure than Farage.
Blair fundamentally changed British society by gutting the political instrument prepared to use the power of the state to improve the condition of the working class – the Labour Party – and turning it into another reliable agency of neoliberalism. The Uniparty in Britain started with Blair. His government furthered privatisation, particularly of services within the NHS, and ended free university education. Together with Brown, Blair brought in the ruinous Private Finance Initiative, to guarantee looting by private capital of public provision. Brown went on to bail out the banks in the biggest single transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
Blair killed hope and progress – in addition to the millions he killed in wars. He now rakes in large multiples of the money made by Farage, from even dodgier sources, while receiving none of the media scrutiny.
Farage of course did not change history on his own. He was relentlessly promoted by both state and corporate media for decades. He has been by a mile the most frequent guest on BBC Question Time, and the relentless media promotion started when he ought to have been an obscure figure, from a party, UKIP, which had never won an election.
In 2005, when I left the FCO and went on to fight Jack Straw in Blackburn in the General Election that year, Nigel Farage contacted me and invited me to lunch. As an Independent I had obtained 5.0% of the vote in Blackburn. UKIP had got 2.2% of the UK vote. Despite having just 2.2% of the vote and no MPs, Farage was already all over the BBC and massively promoted by the newspapers.
Farage said he wanted to explore my joining UKIP. I did a little research, and declined the invitation, finding too much evidence of racism. But interestingly, Farage’s approach to me emphasised his opposition to the Iraq War and to the attack on Human Rights in the name of the “War on Terror”. I believe he was genuine about this – and it is forgotten now that Farage was an outspoken, though in 2001 not very important, critic of the Iraq War – a position he has never repudiated.
All main party politicians are frontmen for other interests. They are owned and controlled by the defence industries, by Big Pharma, by the Israeli lobby, by media barons, by the media industry. Sometimes there is an element of symbiosis, where a politician becomes so confident in the power they exercise in the state as to feel able to address the billionaire class on equal terms, but this is rare.
Farage was promoted, systematically, into a major political figure by intense media coverage. He took full advantage of this, and is a canny operator. His bluff manner and ease in social situations makes him appear different to polished politicians – he can drink a pint without making it look like a rare stunt for the cameras. He was of course always a creature of the wealthy, who promoted him so assiduously.
But having helped turn the dial of politics so far to the right, Farage has been left stranded as it moves rightward still. One problem for him is that Farage is not actually a real racist. He is prepared to pander to racism, to whip it up and exploit it for votes. That is perhaps morally worse than being an actual racist. But Farage does not actually hate brown or Muslim people.
Nor is he enthusiastic for war or NATO expansion.
In the age of the apartheid nurtured, openly racist Elon Musk, the forces that propelled the career of Nigel Farage now want Tommy Robinson and his ilk. Farage is not a stone-cold killer. Trump has cooled his relationship with Farage, and even Farage’s eventual coming round to support Trump on Iran hasn’t changed that.
In UK politics, competing with Shabana Mahmood and Kemi Badenoch, Farage actually comes over as slightly more decent than they are. Politics have moved so far to the right that Farage has nothing really to offer.
When it comes to downright vicious authoritarianism, Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe and others now look a far better prospect to the billionaires, with Tommy Robinson as their King (mostly) over the water.
So poor Farage has been dumped. With an extraordinary coordination, all of the media suddenly savaged him. The BBC, the Murdoch press, the Daily Mail, all of those who put him in place have bitten great lumps out of him in just the last three weeks. Farage’s sordid personal financial dealings are revealed bit by bit.
I don’t see a way back for Farage, though he will get re-elected in Clacton. Mainstream media exposure has been his only weapon. It was devastating when fully lined up behind him, but what has he now?
————————————————————————————-
Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse my work, including in translation.
My work has no funding at all except for your subscriptions. If you already, subscribe I would be grateful if you could check if your subscription is still active. Over 80% of my subscriptions lapse when debit or credit cards expire: the systems do not warn you.
Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up additional new methods of subscription payment including Patreon account and a Substack account ; if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish, subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come to this blog and read the articles for free.
I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
PayPal address for one-off donations: [email protected]
Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:
Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address NatWest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB
Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a
The question of opposition to immigration is, I think, more a social rather than an economic one. I say that with direct experience of fairly low grade employment and therefore exposure to the opinions of people around me.
It’s certainly easier to get the emotional juices flowing over social questions than economic ones.
I dunno, Craig. Farage is not a talented politician, but I see no reason to toss words like “racism” around because he wants to stop mass, unvetted immigration. Most people in Britain do. There’s only so much water the bottle will hold. And I’m not at all convinced by the argument that ordinary people are having their anger about declining living standards re-channelled into anti-immigrant sentiments by this bargain-basement Svengali. I don’t think they’re that stupid. It’s a completely materialistic argument that doesn’t allow for the public having genuine regard for their history and cultural inheritance.
Good points, A. Totally agree. Craig’s inherent decency at times blinds him to the quotidian. People are thoroughly sick of having * things * imposed on them from above and, as you say, don’t require to be – somehow? duped into feeling what they feel – based on their ACTUAL EXPERIENCE.
You’ll never hear it on MSM but formerly very Pro-Immigration countries like Denmark are drastically changing their policies on this issue in the face – of no longer deniable – very negative impacts on Crime figures, the Economy and, perhaps most importantly, Social Cohesion and Safety
The state poses as a racist inciter but only the tiny minority of refugees trying to cross the Channel by water. The larger number of legal migrants are ignored by the state and its corp-0-rat media and the state broadcaster. Cui bono?
Craig,
I have read your posts for many years. I have all your books (some of them signed). I don’t agree with everything you say, but I do agree with a lot of it, and I hugely value your insider knowledge from your FCO time. I also recognise a kindred spirit on matters of alcohol and women.
But you really don’t help your argument by writing things like:
“Blair killed hope and progress – in addition to the millions he killed in wars.”
I can see evidence for (a few at most) hundreds of thousands, but “millions”? No.
(although I am open to evidence to the contrary)
The Iraq war lead by Bush and Blair turned the PNAC from a right wing think tank policy to a bloody reality ie the redrawing of the Middle East – it transpires in support of greater Israel.
On the deaths caused by this bold project Brown university reports
“An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”
I think it is fair given the amount of promotional work for the project done by Blair, that the results can be laid at his (though no solely his) feet
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
I’m afraid that’s a bit too much of a stretch for me. Are we going to attribute all the deaths due to high temperatures in Europe to policies of previous political leaders who allowed fossil fuels to be burned? The directly attributable figure is in the hundreds of thousands for the entire wars, and to put them all on Blair’s head is absurd.
Actually it’s absurd of you to suggest that the inevitable consequences of sending troops to wage war against a country should be treated like some kind of moral orphan; something that “just happened, what can you do, eh?”
If a leader starts an illegal and/or immoral war, he’s responsible for the death and destruction of society that automatically follows from it, yes. Rather than wasting your time glazing war criminals, you should introspect on the deep, personal moral deficiencies that lead you to equivocate regarding the clearest-cut international crime there has ever been a law to prohibit.
The deaths in Iraq that happened as a direct result of US and UK military attacks should not be compared with the “imaginary) harms caused by burning fossil fuels.
There are so many lies circulating – these two Big Lies – that anyone can be forgiven for being confused or misled until they have studied the subjects a bit. I urge you to do so. (Obviously not in the Western mass media or the perpetrators of the atrocities).
War and fossil fuels are inseparable – war is fought with fossil fuels, for fossil fuels – what do you think jet fighters, tanks, personnel carriers and destroyers run on? Why Iraq, Libya, Iran, Venezuela? It’s a game of Last Man Standing when fossil fuels get too hard to extract. After his stint as Prime Minister, Blair jetted all over the world arranging oil deals between the elites.
Your quibbling about the number of noughts to be put behind the number of Bliar’s dead is the merest sophistry.
According to the 2-volume study “Genocide In Iraq” by Dr. Abdul-Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, over 2.8 million people died in Iraq alone as a result of US attacks. That’s just the actual deaths – not counting the maimed, bereaved, orphaned, homeless and exiled. Nor the deliberate and systematic destruction of the infrastructure: the built environment and the structure of society. The US government cold-bloodedly set out to destroy Iraq as a viable nation, and Mr Blair went right along with them. As a psychopath, he seems indifferent to the death and suffering of others. (And of course, like so many such people, he has God on his side).
It’s all too easy to dismiss careful, accurate research into the consequences of wars of choice because we can’t face the idea of being responsible for such terrible harm.
But the answer is simple: don’t conduct or help with such wars.
– “…don’t conduct or help with such wars.”
Stemming the extraction of fossil fuels would be a good start – which is precisely why they’ll never do so.
I think you may possibly be right – though it is extremely difficult to make accurate estimates of people killed as a result of a war. In addition to the people directly killed as a result of violence, one should include, for example hospital patients who die after not receiving crucial medical treatments due to war-caused power outages in hospitals and people who die of cholera after war-related damage to water treatment facilities. The number of non-violent deaths indirectly attributable to war is large in modern conflicts.
There has actually been a lot of research into the number of war-caused deaths in Iraq. In trying to be accurate,however, some researchers have relied on counts of death certificates. In some countries this can be reliable. But in a country in which the State has completely broken down, leaving anarchy, as it did in Iraq, it will inevitably lead to underestimates.
Palestine is a good example. There is little doubt that Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other leading politicians want to exterminate the entire two million Palestinians who lived in Gaza and the West Bank. It simply is not possible to kill so many people by bullets and bombs. They rely on secondary causes like disease to finish off a population weakened by hunger and lack of shelter, and deprived of safe drinking water and even the most basic medical care.
An excellent, perspicacious assessment of the Rise and ( no doubt, extremely well cushioned ) * Fall * of the least credible ‘ Everyman ‘ politician in recent times.
The drinking of pints of * bitter * whilst puffing performatively on fags ( blowing smoke in the public’s face as camouflage ) has been a pretty clever device to fabulate his image as ” Anti-Establishment radical ” – LOL! Now, as you delineate, his cover has been blown, the gig is up and his former backers have abandoned him for * fresher *, more unashamedly Muskite ( as opposed to Muskovite, * wink ) feral ideologues
Could he/Reform win the next G.E? Hard to say at this point but I reckon it’s still very possible, not to say likely. It will depend on which variant of the Zionist Atrocity Apologist + Putin Is Satan Uniparty is deemed the most dependable/malleable to keep those two prime objectives Top of the Props.
Of course * we * may by then be at no-loner-phony war with that formidable Russian Reggae maniac, ie Ras Putin and Crew but actual ” BOOM! there goes London, BOOM! Paree, more cash for * them * no life for * me * ” ( to paraphrase Randy Newman ) WAR : in which scenario in all likelihood there wouldn’t be a G.E but something calling itself a ” Wartime Admin ” or some such would be instigated: and which, given the appalling uniformity of compliance with the ‘ Russian Menace ‘ narrative of the current Political Caste, could be selected by lottery and have the desired effect, ie complete obedience to the Puppeteers interests.
Yes, one illustration of the complicity of Their BBC in whatever narrative/individual/group is to be promoted by the vested interests that are the real rulers of the UK, is the fact of Farage’s multiple appearances on ( Don’t ) Question Time and your own never appearance on same. Fortunately, the legacy media – broadcast & print – is declining drastically and rapidly in significance/influence. Unfortunately, not rapidly enough
Good morning Craig, I’ll just post this for now. You wrote:
– “Farage has been key to redirecting the frustrations of ordinary people at twenty years of falling living standards, while wealth concentrates to an incredible degree in the hands of the billionaire class. That the blame for this has been loaded onto hapless immigrants, rather than those looting the economy, owes much to Farage.”
Readers, please see below, though Ii haven’t watched this specific video from Gary Stevenson yet:
Gary Stevenson says Britain is FINISHED unless we fix this problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPeP9xFrtP0
“A former trader who made millions in the City, Gary Stevenson has gained a huge online following as one of the left’s foremost campaigners against inequality.”
Oh please! If he genuinely believed this he would have already given away most of his millions to deserving causes. He’s obviously just an attention whore. Turning up for a Channel 4 interview in shorts and T-shirt just proves my point.
How do you know that he hasn’t ” given away most of his millions….”? And WTF does his sartorial appearance have to do with anything; do only * Suits * have credibility?
To those of us who aren’t crusties then yes, showing some decorum and respect is important.
But having said that, one of the great things about Craig’s blog is that it attracts an extraordinarily wide range of readers, from ambassadors to the most active activists. For me that is a major plus point.
Ah! so ” decorum and respect ” are apparel-conditional; never knew that, thanks for the heads-up. I’ll remember that when I’m taking my dog-on-a-string for a walk around my New Age Traveler site. Might even get my dreadlocks cut 🙂
agree with your latter point, Paul. Though I find, unless someone mentions their line-of-work, social * standing *, it’s kinda guesswork what these might be. still, I agree there appears to be quite a wide variety of commenters BTL here. As for the % of non-commenting readers, one can only speculate about their composition/disposition
I recall a discussion a few years ago over a game of Scrabble with the person who was at the time the UK Deputy Consul-General here in Hong Kong (and also, BTW, a seriously good Scrabble player). He was well aware of Craig and his blog and his opinions. It seemed clear that he was (and hopefully still is) widely-read within the UK diplomatic community.
You like “decorum and respect”; I prefer intellectual integrity, intelligence, and accurate knowledge.
Jesus said “Ye shall know them by their fruits” – not “by their suits”.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them”.
– Matthew, 7:16-20
Clarification, please! What do you mean by “crusties”? I am unfamiliar with the term, but it sounds as if it might be a derogatory word for old people.
If so, I am surprised. Aren’t older people precisely those who still tend to judge others by their clothing?
When I used to work as a sales technician for a computer company, I attended a meeting to prepare us for a full-day presentation to Lloyds Bank. Among other things we were given very exact instructions on what to wear, right down to the colours and patterns of shirts and ties, and the vital necessity of highly polished black lace-up shoes.
When someone asked why this was so important, we were told that all people judge others by their own standards. So when visiting a certain tightly-knit group in the hope of influencing them, it is best to wear the same clothes as they do. Protective colouration!
At the time, and still today, I wondered privately about the sense of trying to make strangers understand complicated technical facts when their thinking was so primitive. But I dressed up in my best monkey suit like everyone else.
It was all for nothing. After listening politely for 8 hours to everything we had to say, the Lloyds people said, “No thanks”. Asked why, they replied (in effect) “Because you aren’t IBM”.
A day well spent.
I was using crusties in this sense from the Cambridge dictionary:
“a young person who does not live in a way that society considers normal, typically with untidy or dirty clothes and hair, and no regular job or permanent home”
Thanks, Paul. So “crusties” has a meaning almost exactly opposite to the one I guessed (which I have seen used in the past).
My Concise Oxford English Dictionary must be out of date. I remember when you could buy a dictionary and it would still be fairly accurate after 20 years.
Ah ““a young person who does not live in a way that society considers normal, typically with untidy or dirty clothes and hair, and no regular job or permanent home””
A Fremen then?
Paul; Scrabble? Not Iain Orr perchance?
https://web.archive.org/web/20100606055500/http://www.biodiplomacy.net/
No, not Ian Orr – he was a bit before my time here.
Perhaps I’m lucky that you didn’t see me manning out the winter with my arse hanging out of a pair of shorts. As soon as it got warm the flip-flops came out too. I’m not a pox-doctor’s clerk’s assistant and I don’t dress like one.
Paul, play the ball, not the man. Listen to Gary Stevenson’s argument, then criticise that. Otherwise, by definition, you’re just trolling.
“Paul, play the ball, not the man”.
Unlike most of the players in the World Cup.
And turning up for a Channel 4 interview in shorts and T-shirt – in the middle of a series of record shattering heatwaves – is just sensible.
It’s just performative PR. Like ‘call me Dave ‘ and his baseball cap or the tee-shirted nazi Zed, or man of the people Burn’em, or Boris and his hair. It’s not sensible, it’s 100% calculated, don’t be played by these c*nts.
His arguments make sense. Tax wealth not work.
Tax wealth not work. Various people have said that for many decades, yet here we are, no change …
‘He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy !’
Examine his arguments, then tell us what you disagree with and why. Play the ball not the man. If that’s too much to ask, shouldn’t you get the red card?
I watched that the other day, Clark. GS is brilliant at what he does/says; I’ve yet to disagree with anything he says/thinks. But Economics alone is not the existential / definitive issue some seem to think it is. It is, of course, a very important factor, just not exhaustively so
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/07/10/how-to-get-filthy-rich-a-review/
—
[ Mod: From the moderation rules for commenters:
“Contribute
Contributions which are primarily just a link to somewhere else will be deleted. You can post links, but give us the benefit of your thoughts upon them.” ]
Loading the blame for twenty years of falling living standards onto hapless immigrants does indeed deflect from the real culprits, those looting the economy. I agree.
But that doesn’t mean mass immigration isn’t one of the tools used by the looters. It strikes me as significant that so much emphasis is placed on stopping the boats (i.e. Refugees) rather than those with work visas.
The economic argument for legal mass immigration is seriously flawed in my opinion. It operates only from the perspective of employers and the rentier class, not ordinary people struggling to find reasonably well-paid work or affordable places to rent.
Indeed
The poorest people here have limited their fertility for at least 250 years. Legal contraception and abortion have limited working class fertility even more. From where can the boss class increase the reserve army of labour to negate the falling number of local born workers, now that the echoes of the post-war baby boom have also diminished?
Imagine how much fun it was to leave school in 1980….
So, were all the racists who voted leave not racists after all but perhaps old lefties who took the advice of Tony Benn and didn’t trust the undemocratic, corporate beast that it was all along? Need I remind you of Tony B Liar’s involvement in changing Labour policy toward the EU?
I voted outez! because it was the only democratic vote in my life and my choice was calculated to poke the most holes into the boss class. I haven’t stopped laughing since, especially at the liberals who suddenly tried to blame the majority for defying them. I told you that they were fascists in cardigans.
Back at the time of the first EU referendum in the mid 70s (it was called something different back then) the standard response of people on the Left was that we were being asked to join ‘a rich man’s club.’ Von der Leyen and Kallas, born into rather rich political families, have shown that to be a half truth.
“For me tolerance, empathy and compassion are the most important virtues in life…”
Full marks to Mr Murray, then, for personal virtue and decency. But it’s harder for such a person to succeed in politics than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
When Mr Murray sees poor, exiled, persecuted refugees seeking a home in Britain, I see millions of foreigners, many of them from drastically different cultural, religious, and moral backgrounds, coming to an island that is already severely overpopulated. As in about 4 times.
Christian morality certainly directs us always to help the needy and succour the downtrodden. That is one of many reasons why I am not a Christian. I admire the goodness, but cannot see the feasibility. If we believe – as did the early Christians – that the world will end soon and we will all go to heaven or another place, who cares about the viability or sustainability of nations and their economies?
The world is already critically overpopulated, with the highest birth rates mostly in the poorest countries. There are also serious misallocations of resources, such as the foolish belief in global warming and the West’s childish delight in weapons, death, and destruction. The ruthless, merciless accumulation of wealth by the already far too rich – as observed by Mr Murray – is just as dangerous. But it’s probably too difficult to do anything about, since the super-rich own and control the West. China managed to change the system to the vast benefit of all its people, but only at the cost of decades of war and deprivation – and tens of millions of deaths. I don’t see anyone like Mao Zedong accomplishing much in Britain.
Given that the whole human species is in a critical position, the question arises: should we all go down with the ship? Or should those societies that are able try to survive, when necessary denying strangers access to our lifeboat? There is no shortage of people in the world who would like to come to Britain, and more are being born every minute. We could go on welcoming million after million indefinitely until the UK becomes just as poor, backward, and dangerous as some of the nations from which refugees are feeling.
Just to be clear, I absolutely reject Mr Murray’s accusations of “racism”. I would have thought that the British establishment long ago reached and greatly exceeded its goal of virtue-signalling its liking for anyone who is not white and born in Britain. There are two main issues.
First sheer numbers: apparently no one in office even knows the exact population today, but it is certainly well over 60 million and possibly over 70 million. Those who have studied the matter report that Britain could sustainably support about 20 million indefinitely. Whatever can be done about that is unclear – but adding more millions is a long step in the wrong direction. And it doesn’t matter in the least what kind of people immigrants are – just that they weren’t in Britain, and now they are. Britain imports about half its food, and Mr Trump’s antics in the Persian Gulf have demonstrated how quickly and easily raw material imports can vanish from the menu.
The second issue is cultural and social identity. We hear far too much talk about “British values”; when those were universally known and internalised, no one felt the need to mention them. In Islam we are confronted with a militant religion whose only and authoritative holy book commands the faithful to expand, to convert infidels on pain of death, and to kill atheists and lapsed Muslims out of hand. Islamic Sharia law is utterly incompatible with British law of any kind, so governments that have encouraged the growth of Islam in Britain have been abandoning their most basic duty and committing treason against the people. We have laws – recent laws – that forbid British citizens to own or carry weapons, including ordinary kitchen knives, yet knife crime – often fatal – continues to increase. Sikhs are allowed to carry ceremonial knives “because of their religion”; many others do so because they please, and the police seem quite unable to do anything about it.
The basic question is whether we want to preserve the British nation in any even slightly recognisable form, or instead to welcome in anyone who wishes to come, at the price of losing our liberties, our laws, our religion, our traditional way of life, and our very identity.
To be frank, I don’t care as much as I ought to because I shall soon be dead. But I am sad at the prospect that the nation dreamed of by King Alfred and gradually moulded by the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Elizabethans, and the Victorians will soon cease to be. Like all human creations, it had many weaknesses and downright evils – but it also brought forth Chaucer, Donne, the Bacons Roger and Sir Francis, Milton, Newton, Locke, Pope, Swift, Dr Johnson, Adam Smith, David Hume, the Mills father and son, Dickens, Darwin, Wells, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, Russell, Turing, and thousands of other distinguished Britishers. Today the intellectual tradition to which they belonged is already becoming blurred, and may soon be altogether forgotten.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Hilarious stuff, Tom!
Don’t forget Mrs. Mills (1918-1978)
You forgot Gazza, you beastly cad!
I’ll just abstract this bit for its supreme irony:
– We could go on welcoming million after million indefinitely until the UK becomes just as poor, backward, and dangerous as some of the nations from which refugees are feeling.
– Just to be clear, I absolutely reject Mr Murray’s accusations of “racism”…
So these people make their countries “poor, backward, and dangerous”, but you’re not racist. Riiight.
Up until recently-ish “racist” has been a powerful trump card put-down guaranteed to win any argument within the social circles of the educated class. But I don’t think people really care any more.
Also poor, backward, and dangerous countries definitely exist and someone made them that way.
“Also poor, backward, and dangerous countries definitely exist and someone made them that way.”
Like England?
Dear Tom,
We here at CM’s blog will start praying that you don’t spend your final days if not weeks, months or years in a govt nursing facility, to be fed and cared for by migrant contract labour or refugee doctors and nurses – because over the past 45+ years, British governments deliberately cut funding to universities and colleges for the training of medical professionals and other professions requiring technical skills, and preferred to import such labour instead.
Ignore those commenters, Tom. You are right about overpopulation.
No nation should have a population that it cannot support. It should be the first priority.
I am particularly aware because I spend a lot of time in the Philippines.
Back in the 1960s the population was 20 million.
Now it’s 120 million.
The predominant reason is the control of the Catholic church.
The country can no longer grow enough of its rice, its dominate foodstuff, to feed its population.
It has to import and the poor cannot afford it.
Poverty is widespread, and appalling.
Vast numbers live in self-built shacks not fit to keep chickens.
Child stunting is on the rise again, at 25% of the population.
On average, secondary school children are five years behind the world average attainment level.
Britain is heading in that direction.
Piffle, 2% of Britain is built on and about 2% has roads that connect the 2%. Do some research.
Are you replying to somebody else’s comment?
Roads do not feed people.
I have given up trying to reason with people like Squeeth.
The Catholic Church teaches that when we die we will live forever in heaven or hell. So of course it doesn’t think that anything in this world matters.
“…cultural, religious, and moral” Really? Aren’t those words euphemisms for ‘race’?
“…the nation dreamed of by King Alfred and gradually moulded by the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Elizabethans, and the Victorians….”
That’s England, matey; not “Britain”.
I know that, matey. I am Scots.
“The world is already critically overpopulated” The entire population of the world, if they stood side by side, would fit into greater Manchester.
“Subsequently Farage has been central to placing racism at the centre of British electoral politics. Farage has been key to redirecting the frustrations of ordinary people at twenty years of falling living standards, while wealth concentrates to an incredible degree in the hands of the billionaire class. That the blame for this has been loaded onto hapless immigrants, rather than those looting the economy, owes much to Farage. He has more than anybody made UK elections revolve around who can promise the most blood-curdling measures against immigrants.”
Very true but:
Certainly inequality is one of the 3 big issues in the world that matter (+fall of US empire & climate change).
Of course it dominates domestic politics. But:
Try asking if the top rate of tax should be 70% or 80% at a dinner party.
Try suggesting Universal benefits funded by a wealth tax
Try suggesting higher death duties.
You will be shouted down before you get your sentence out – at dinner parties, public events, TV discussion programs, and shut down by editors as quick as if you were to say “Genocide”.
You may freely link immigration to inequality though – discussion is permitted.
I don’t get invited to dinner parties and wouldn’t accept if I did; I prefer a better class of person. ;O)
Nigel Farage is not ‘ Anti – Establishment ‘ – he works and gets paid by the REAL ( not State ) Establishment meaning the rich who really run the show and have done for decades.
Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe are paid similarly but not as much.
I agree with Craig the EU is openly the fawning and getting poorer relation of the US and because of no resistance ( only performative resistance as they say) to the US it can only get poorer and more vindictive on not just immigrants but its indigenous people.
There are theories that Russia is behind the Right Winging of the EU – I think the opposite and believe that the US is the biggest pusher of Europe to go much further to the Right.
There is a problem though, which the US took a long time to wake up to in the run up to the Second World War.
Does the US want a Re- Militarised Germany with Nukes this time?
I’m not saying it will happen but, in future years it is possible.
Been there – T Shirt and all that.
You have to be careful what you wish for because a War on/in Russia is leading everyone down a very dangerous path.
“Nigel Farage is not ‘ Anti – Establishment ‘ – he works and gets paid by the REAL ( not State ) Establishment meaning the rich who really run the show and have done for decades.
“Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe are paid similarly but not as much”.
How do you know these important but no doubt confidential facts? I only ask because I want to know.
Tommy Robinson is MI5 and Zionist owned as has been obvious since his work at the Quilliam Foundation and his tour of occupied territory in Palestine.
Then there was his miraculous evasion of immigration control in JFK airport in New York.
They see Robinson as someone capable of getting a mob out on the streets, to help with a coup if required. I think they over estimate his abilities to be Ernst Rohm although Farage has proved to be a reasonably competent Goebbels. Farage will still be needed but I can’t see the UK rallying behind an absurdity like Rupert Lowe. Al Carns as Head of a Wartime Coalition might be a different matter though.
https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2026/july/10/nigel-farage-biggest-secret-exposed-who-really-owns-reform
—
[ Mod: From the moderation rules for commenters:
“Contribute
Contributions which are primarily just a link to somewhere else will be deleted. You can post links, but give us the benefit of your thoughts upon them.” ]
Who are these people saying owns Reform, then? I clicked on that link and saw a big link to a Youtube video and some photos further down that look as though they’re from an out-of-the-box Facebook site or a “Mom and Pop” small-seller site or something. What’s a summary in one or two sentences?
Tom Welsh
You can read his ‘connections ‘ on that well known Left Wing Website Wikipedia.
Or you can look up a guy called Lowkey who has all the goods on the Grifter.
Note carefully Robinson has had meetings to drum up funding in the US – Russia and Israel.
he doesn’t do Tin Rattling – that’s Old Skool lefty stuff – he’s more professional these days.
Rupert Lowe is Musk’s Man .
Enough said.
By the way: if we are playing Amateur Courtroom Lawyers, you tell me where he gets his ‘funding for his many holidays? ‘
I’ve presented my evidence M’Lud – show me yours.
At least there is one here that gets it.
Conservatives constantly push the opinion that socialism does not work. The fact is that everywhere socialism has been attempted the state in question has been forced to endure either a scenario tantamount to war or else the very actuality of war. It is certainly rich for US conservatives to pontificate about socialism not working when the CIA has spent trillions of dollars making it not work.
NB Vladimir Putin is no socialist but is a right wing nationalist leader. However,since he has stopped stooges like Boris Berezhovsky from facilitating the siphoning off of Russia’s natural resources at the behest of Western capital and seems to have the temerity to believe that his country’s vast natural resources should primarily benefit the Russian state and the Russian nation, he has embarked on a course inimical to Western capital in much the same way as if he had embraced full blown socialism, and therefore is facing much the same response.
In a recent post I alluded to the Bob Dylan song Mr Tambourine Man, which by my reading sees the eponymous minstrel has a latterday Pied Piper, leading the young into the blood and gore of the Vietnam war. It is worth remembering that, prising back the layers of legend that have accumulated over the centuries, that the Pied Piper story has its roots not in the Black Death of 1348, but several generations earlier, with minstrels leading processions of the young to putatively fight against the Islamic invaders of the Holy Land in the event that became known as Children’s Crusade. Most of the young crusaders ended up sold into slavery in the bazaars of the Middle. Western policy towards Russia is all too likely to lead the ingenuous populations of the West into a procession into not merely slavery but nuclear Armageddon.
Socialism for rich bastards has never worked better but only because it sits atop the fascist economy for the rest of us. Anarchism is the only alternative.
“Brown went on to bail out the banks in the biggest single transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.”
…. since superseded by Covid, the largest global transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
” Covid, the largest global transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history..”
^ Yes.
It is remarkable that much of the left saw the oil shocks of the early 1970s in those terms, and rightly so – many for example called the “energy crisis” a “capitalist strategy” – but hardly anyone has enough brain cells remaining to take a view of Covid. The morons think it would be rude to question what the rulers say when the rulers package it as connected with “public health”. Instead they all jump to attention and salute, and offer their services to hunt down the “vaccination reluctant”.
Modern authoritarians of various types are always given cover by the Guardian and other such publications. But note how little covid is mentioned these days, anywhere.
Covid doesn’t get mentioned because it was the most consequential outsourcing accident of all time, by far:
https://thebulletin.org/biography/nicholas-wade/
Apart from the deaths and other health effects, entire economies were closed down for months on end. Think of the compensation; both the USA and China would be bankrupted.
Think also of the literal £billions that were fraudulently claimed – something even Sunak later admitted – by businesses and individuals. Not to mention the absolute plunder of * public * money by avaricious wretches like Mone & Harding et al and – as per these days – they got away it; other than that fckn idiot Mone who actually thought making a few bob, getting a Knighthood or some such bauble and supporting ‘ Better Together ‘ against the interests of her native Scotland would grease her access to the Brit Establishment – ha fckn ha – she and her crawling ilk are never accepted as ” one of us “.
Noticeable nonetheless that it was ONLY her – the Working Class Jock made good – that suffered any kind of repercussion; the dafty probably imagined her Upper Class aspiring sycophancy would give her impunity. HA!
The opportunity Covid presented to corrupt elites with their PPE scams and to capitalistic big pharma with their mRNA vaccines and such was certainly seized with gusto. Why would they behave any other way? The transfer of wealth doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real health issue, though.
Well, maybe not, but it sure-as-hell made if very difficult to distinguish between medical/health and financial interests. Exactly as it does between realistic Defence requirements and Arms Industry profits/shareholder dividends interests. The water being not so much muddy as completely opaque when vast sums of money are in play.
If you look at the situation in the US where most of the big ( getting less big ) T.V & Cable * News * channels are funded by Big Pharma and then see the uniform promotion the ” most lethal virus EVER! ” narrative and this * new * Black Death’s panacea -yip…vaccines – those ” novel ” * vaccines * some of which had been patented well before the outbreak of the Covid Mass Hysteria – as the ONLY valid medical treatment and the equally unison scorning of other treatments, eg Ivermectin which despite being written off as ” Horse Medicine ” and anyone even suggesting it might have efficacy being scorned, censored and in some cases threatened with prosecution actually proved to be more effective in many cases than much of the officially sanctioned nostrums; you don’t have to be a * Conspiracy Theorist * to think…..” hmmm maybe there are commercial determinants in how this thing is being * presented * .
Similarly, it doesn’t take a genius – or a paranoic – to observe who benefits most from what now seems like Permanent War
We commonly make the mistake of thinking ” they ” wouldn’t do ” THAT! “. Oh yes they would. Where money & power are concerned there are no moral/legal/political limits
It seems to me the migrants are brought to the UK and then the service companies plug into them until their asylum claim is dealt with.
I looked up a couple of migrant hotel owners – they had names similar to the migrants coming here.
This is just modern day slavery – not in the fields , just sit in a hotel and plug in.
Then where do they go – I guess to be exploited by their higher-ups, tossed into HMOs, food delivery, working in factories hidden in the countryside, or marijuana or meth farms, and maybe a hefty chunk of their wages from the guys in the local organised crime unit.
And then just watch them come over on dangerous, overcrowded boats and do nothing, except mourn some poor soul lost to the sea, or pushed overboard.
And is it only whites that don’t like mass migration , do black, asian and others ethnicities and religions not like it too. The word ‘racist’ implies whites, not people of colour.
There was this one lad, he was good at mass migration, Joe, Josef Starling maybe
Perhaps the conflicts that encouraged mass migration had as one of their purposes the ensuing refugee crisis.
Britain et al bombs their countries, making them refugees and then turns round and calls anybody who opposed the refugees as racist. Surely the destruction of their country was the racism.
Britain is basically at war with Russia, so is it possible that the dastardly Russians might slip in a few agents, it seems quite a good idea.
Racist today is just another thought-stopper word – you’ve been labelled so shut up, nothing you say is relevant
Illegal immigrants work in agriculture, egg transport, all kinds of delivery work, etc., too.
What is needed is strong trade unions that offer union cards to every worker, including legal and illegal immigrants.
Also a rising movement against debt.
Divisions among workers break them. Meanwhile personal indebtedness weakens the individual and what remains of the collectivity. This is when the racists and nationalists get their flags out with some success.
Call me old fashioned, but if someone is ‘illegal’ they shouldn’t be working and they shouldn’t be running around the streets. They should be detained until legally dealt with.
“Racist today is just another thought-stopper word – you’ve been labelled so shut up, nothing you say is relevant.”
Piffle, racism exists because of racists, the state, the Tory-Liarbour-Liberal-Green Partei (“Selling out the working class since 1922”) CommercialPrivateEquitybbc, the Graun, Indy et al.
1. I’m not convinced Farage has been dumped in the sense that he will fall away into police hands like Nicola Sturgeon or into the dust like John Major’s underwear.
2. Also if he is so egregiously venal then he’d be able to move further rightwards as well as in any other direction he was paid to move in. And he did start ranting about “white people” (inverted commas because this is a direct quote) and how they are so hard done by when the Henry Nowak video was released. A propos of which, why was the video was released at that time? Still got some friends in the state, it would seem.
3. @Craig – when Farage approached you and bigged up his feelings against the war on Iraq, how do you know he hadn’t been 6-asked to do so?
4. Last point – where ballot boxes are concerned (although not necessarily in other contexts) the role of Tommy Robinson for the moment is analogous to his fellow Zionist Eric Zemmour’s.
John Major didn’t disappear he became a Garter Knight
Reference was to Steve Bell’s cartoon strip in the Guardian in the last days of the Tory government in 1997 🙂
More generally, everyone knew the Tories were on their way out, and they were being hit by sleaze allegation after sleaze allegation, with “sleaze” being a buzzword of the time, because it’s not the done thing to call the British regime what it is – a) a regime, and b) corrupt.
Farage may possibly be on his way out. I’m just not convinced, that’s all, at this stage.
Old Prime Ministers never die, they go into the House of Lords, which is to politicians what amber is to Jurassic mosquitos
Along with any politico that helps keep Scotland in the Union……
No question he was sound on the criminal, unprovoked invasion of Iraq. That’s completely erased now by his fervent support for the criminal, unprovoked attack on Iran.
He also quickly backed off criticism of the billions being shovelled into the proxy war on Russia after a few howls from the warmongers.
On Gaza, Farage has issued no criticism whatsoever of his ‘enemy’ Starmer’s role in the Gaza Genocide. Indeed, he denies it even is genocide and says he would continue arms exports to Israel.
Farage’s only criticism of Labour on the issue is their toleration of ‘antisemitic hate marches’, aka anti-Genocide marches. Ironic considering his own, very real and fanatical antisemitism at Dulwich College.
We know of course that is standard practice in British journalism for genuine antisemites to be portrayed as deeply moral anti-racists if they smear anti-genocide protest as antisemitic.
“One problem for him is that Farage is not actually a real racist. He is prepared to pander to racism, to whip it up and exploit if for votes. That is perhaps morally worse than being an actual racist. But Farage does not actually hate brown or Muslim people.”
I remember reading the same of Oswald Mosley as not “really” being antisemitic, but exploiting the antisemitism of his supporters to whip up — antisemitism. I do not think one is morally worse than the other, each is as morally bad as the other. As is the current weaponisation of anti – racism and anti – semitism, all signs of moral and political turpitude.
If memory serves, Mosley had a Jewish gangster in charge of his security for a while, but certainly by the time of the Battle of Cable Street he was on the side of the non-Jewish (and anti-Jewish) East End gangsters and against the Jewish gangsters in the same part of London.
The truth is that both street fascism and street anti-fascism have often been mixed up with gangsterism in Britain, whether in London, Brighton, Manchester, or elsewhere.
The British Union of Fascists (even though Mosley was a baronet) were a very different strand from those anti-“Semitic” British fascists who kept going on about Christian boys’ blood being used in matzos etc., who weren’t much interested in the street or in electoral politics.
Mosley was certainly not anti-semitic. To understand the situation in the late 1930s you need to at least be aware that:
1. Mosley wanted to keep Britain out of another European war. He was also a patriot: he was always very clear that if any foreign country [meaning Germany] tried to invade Britain, it was the duty of every member of the British Union of Fascists to fight against the invader.
2. Not unnaturally, the Jewish community on the whole wanted Britain to join a war against Germany. In view of the situation in Germany at the time that is completely understandable.There was therefore a substantial Jewish component among the groups who tried to break up Mosley’s meetings.
3. The pro-war faction centred around Churchill. Like any able politicians, Churchill and his supporters seized on anything that could be used to mobilise opinion against Mosley. They were much better at this than Mosley was, and the popularly-held opinion of Mosley ever since has been the propaganda image created by Churchill and his supporters
I’m writing this comment in leafy Royal Berkshire where women and girls are afraid to venture out on their own, where young people have no prospect of buying or even renting a house, where you can’t see a dentist or a doctor unless you can afford to pay massive private fees and where the bankrupt water company’s primary focus appears to be digging up all the roads in order to install mandatory water meters. On the plus side, we enjoy the privilege of having lukewarm curries and soggy pizzas delivered direct to our front door at any time, day or night by a guy on an untaxed and uninsured moped. Craig, I’m here to tell you we don’t need any more people thank you very much.
The problems you refer to aren’t the fault of low-paid illegal delivery workers!
This one was resident at the Moat House Hotel, Sindlesham just 400 yards from the local primary school until he got banged up last November. None of the locals were aware of his presence in the area until the case came to court almost two years after the offence.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0kpmp26pj8o
And incidentally the sentence (9 and a half years) is incredibly light for raping a child. Compare with the sentences of up to 8 years for trying to hinder genocide.
I wish I had a pound for every time I’ve seen Keir Starmer stand up and lecture us that anyone found to have pushed a wheely bin in the direction of a police officer or damaged some missiles will be dealt with to the full extent of the law. On the other hand, I’ve never heard him say anything about genocide or those who commit genocide.
I get it that as a rapist of a 15 year old he has caused women and girls to be afraid to venture out on their own, but what was his role in removing from young people their prospects of buying or renting a house, in the lack of access to dentists or “doctors” for those who can’t afford to pay massive private fees, and in the doings of the water company?
More people = more pressure on public services. When services are already working beyond full capacity the first thing to do is turn off the taps.
How many schools, hospitals, shops, factories and offices have been closed by migrants? Blaming refugees for the state’s redistribution of wealth from poor to rich adds insult to injury.
To paraphrase from above – loading the blame for twenty years of falling living standards onto hapless immigrants deflects from the real culprits; those who have been looting the economy for the past century or more.
The majority of those seeking asylum are fleeing from wars, often caused by the sale of UK made weapons and by the climate change, often caused by the denial endorsed by Trump, Vance and their brand of Christianity, which believes in the right to torture and to assassinate. But of course one must not mention these facts: the UK government could never support the killing of doctors, journalists or children.After all the English love animals, far more than people.
“The majority of those seeking asylum are fleeing from wars” I have no objection to immigrants, legal or not, but the majority are fleeing from France.
“Reform had the same effect in the recent Scottish parliamentary elections”
On the above Reform IN Scotland, is a branch office of its London HQ, and like the Tories Labour and the Lib/Dems they are NOT a Scottish party, they are a Fifth Column parties there to keep the status quo intact or to enable the dissolution of Holyrood, mind you Holyrood is a child of Westminster, and its utterly subservient to Westminster – we need to bypass it and declare UDI and restore our sovereignty in the process.
Its been proven beyond any doubt that there was no union, the UN unofficially sees Scotland as a colony of England’s (soon to be official) several colonial imperial loving European nations will not understand/recognise or aid Scotland – but the Global South knows our plight well, and is behind us – UDI restores our much needed sovereignty, with much recognition from the Global South – and parts of Europe, the rest can go and f*ck themselves.
Farage is the only politician I know – where the BBC reserves a seat for him on the propaganda BBC programme that is Question Time – even though for years there, UKIP never had one single MP.
Only QT’s red jacket man – who the BBC invited onto QT propaganda programmes in Scotland, when anyone mentioned dissolving the union, or the SNP, when Salmond was in charge.
Can you explain the red jacket man reference please. Some kinda rent-a-loyalist?
Farage has also for many years been given high ranking at the Cenotaph ceremony in London.
The BBC is about the most loyalist institution it is possible to imagine. Them and the British Council.
Near enough Brian – a Scottish guy in a red jacket (That’s why people cottoned on to him) appeared on QT quite few times when it was in Scotland – he was always allowed a question, and always allowed a reply – oh and to no ones surprise he was vehemently against Scotland leaving the union.
Apparently he was also up against Farage as well.
And don’t forget ‘red jacket man’ was photographed in the Question Time studio pre-broadcast; chatting with the host and other unionists who were due to be on air shortly afterwards.
But there’s no bias. Oh, no no…
I think this is one of the best posts Craig Murray has ever written.
One can quibble with a few minor points. “All main party politicians are frontmen for other interests”. All? What about Clement Attlee? Make that “Almost all”.
“Blair … [killed] millions in wars”. Somebody already quibbled with the “millions”. I don’t think it’s terribly important to decide whether he’s responsible for 300,000 deaths or 2 million, and actually I don’t understand why people argue about such things (like the vehement to vitriolic arguments people have over whether Himmler killed 2 million or 6 million Jews). I mean, does it really matter? A mass murderer is a mass murderer, surely?
I’ve wondered sometimes what influence lay behind the ‘New Labour’ phenomenon of Neil Kinnock, and Tony Blair after him. Why did Blair join Labour in the first place, and then ‘New’ Labour? What was going on?
In the excellent 2010 film The Special Relationship, Bill Clinton says to Tony Blair at the very end “We both know that the best way to ensure that you’re remembered is to link yourself to an American president. But be careful. These guys, they play rough. Their administration has been born in controversy, national shame and illegality. and it is my bet that that’s the way they’ll go out. So the question you need to ask yourself is, what business does a progressive center-left politician from a tiny little island in Europe have making friends with folks like that? But then again… I’m not sure whether you are a progressive center-left politician anymore… Or if you ever were.”
As for Nigel Farage, he may well be elected again in Clacton, and the expenses scandal may come to nothing – I don’t know. But Reform did very well in the local elections, and could be a real threat in the future except that Andy Burnham gave Reform a thrashing in Makerfield, and that’s a hopeful sign, that the support for Farage, like Brexit, was a sign of frustration, a letting off of steam, and if Burnham does well things could change. If the UK doesn’t fully rejoin the EU, it might do a deal like Norway or Switzerland, out of enlightened national self-interest.
Farage had seemed to me to have fallen in with the British establishment having previously annoyed them lots over Brexit.
In the 2019 election he split the Labour vote taking pro-Brexit voters in the so called ‘Red Wall’ among others thereby stopping Corbyn in his tracks and gifting the election to Jonson. Nice job, thanks a lot said the establishment.
In the 2024 election he split the, already decimated, Tory vote thereby gifting the election to the establishment’s boy, Starmer, having himself already been gifted the Clacton seat by Starmer withdrawing the Labour candidate. Nice job, thanks a lot said the establishment.
Then as Starmer clearly worked hard to drag us back into the wretched, degenerate EU, Farage remained conspicuously silent and was out of the country at the time of at least one significant pro-EU parliamentary vote. Nice job Nigel said the establishment, thanks a lot.
But now they have very obviously turned against him. Why?
To make way for Jenrick, Lowe and, God forbid, Israel’s choice Tommy Robinson?
Musk has frequently spoken favourably of Robinson, and Musk’s father has even said Robinson should be the next PM of the UK.
Has the British establishment moved so far to the extreme right? It would explain a lot.
If that’s true, and assuming he hasn’t already capitulated to it, Andy Burnham better be ready for the shitstorm coming his way and be prepared to stand tall, unflinchingly against it.
Are we all ready for war with Russia?
I really think Count Binface is in with a chance this time; or possibly Piers Corbyn. He’s against Israeli genocide.
Anyone from Clacton on this thread?
Much of the London brown-noser media is spouting the line that Farage’s only opponent is Binface (har har), which is false. More than 10 parties or independents have said they’ll stand, including, as you say, Piers Corbyn. Could it be that the media types get off on juxtaposing the idea of working class voters with the image of a dustbin? (Try saying “Clacton” the way Lady Bracknell says “handbag” for full effect.) The fact is that neither the government party nor any of the older main “opposition” parties are bothering to try to persuade voters in Clacton that they’d do a good job of representing them. They’re just sneering.
Good luck, Piers!
I was thinking of having a tenner on Count Binface but the best odds you can get is 15/2 – hardly worth it. Piers Corbyn, however, is still 500/1. Best odds on Frottage are a miserly1/7.
Re: ‘Farage has been key to redirecting the frustrations of ordinary people at twenty years of falling living standards, while wealth concentrates to an incredible degree in the hands of the billionaire class.’
Reform UK, like UKIP before it, draws most of its support from older people, most of whom own their homes without mortgages and have generous pensions. The UK’s resident billionaires own just 3-4% of the nation’s wealth.
Re: ‘However the decision to reject all sensible trading arrangements with the bloc has greatly damaged the UK economy’
The true ‘damage’ is about 1% of UK GDP, due to SMEs that can’t be arsed with the additional paperwork needed to trade with Europe. Don’t believe that 8% nonsense figure from the Remoaners.
Re: ‘I would argue that Blair is in fact a more harmful and more evil figure than Farage.’
Finally something we can agree on. Farage is only where he is because the UK’s political media wanted someone to act as a bulwark against Nick Griffin’s BNP after they got over 6% of the vote in the 2009 EU Parliament election, and 2% in the general election a year later despite only standing in half of the constituencies.* Then Cameron played into his hands by failing to reduce net immigration to ‘the tens of thousands’ as promised, and legalising gay marriage.
* Most people have no idea what the BNP could have been capable of had it got its act together in the noughties.
Fascinating insights. The downfalls of Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer look suspiciously similar – both feted by almost the entire media for years when it suited the powerbrokers then hounded out on the basis of not particularly damning allegations. Farage and Starmer have often looked like stooges, both essentially promoting the British establishment’s hard Brexit, and probably the way they have been so ruthlessly dropped now probably proves it. The worrying wider question is: Why are the rulers clearing the decks so efficiently at this point, and installing Burnham with blatant disregard to meaningful democracy?
That’s a very interesting observation about the ops against Starmer and Farage coming at the same time. (Or it will be if Farage is removed.)
The sickmaking “hail to the chief” aspect of the piping in of the Burnham administration would fit well with war.
There’s unlikely to be much space for telling Burnham to stick his reforms up his bum, or for calling him or any of his special advisers or associates a crook.
PS Is Richard Leese, Burnham’s former deputy mayor in Manchester, related to (son of Lancashire) Arnold Leese? (Not that anyone should be held responsible for anything done by their ancestors. Just asking.)
Farage doesn’t care. He’s got enough dough.
HIGNFY made him.
Don’t remember ever seeing Frottage appear on HIGNFY, Are you thinking of Boris by any chance? Anyway, who really cares? They’re both cunts.
ahahaha most elegantly and succinctly put, compadre 🙂
Back in 2014. Fruitcake or Loony?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVqoq1IGZv4
Like Boris they’ve ripped the piss out of him many times since.
I wonder whether the Makersfield by-election was the decisive moment when the establishment turned against Nigel. He wasn’t able to show himself more popular than Andy Burnham, so a decision was made to dump him and look to other figures on the right.
Also, if Reform is cancelled out, then the right vote is no longer split. Perhaps the plan is to look to Badenoch now. It feels like they are going after not just Farage, but the whole Reform party (i.e. Jenrick, Tice).
Nah, I think “Peak Frottage” was reached before the previous by-election (Gorton & Denton, I think – when Hannah Whatshername beat arch-fuckwit Matt Goodwin).
Stories had begun to surface in the dead-tree media about his schooldays at Dulwich College from former pupils, who remember him bullying and being abusive to fellow pupils e.g. singing “Gas them all” to Jewish boys and generally being an all-round gobshite and bully – much as he still is today. Like Starmer, he became more of a liability than an asset and so has been discarded like a used condom in a secluded car park.
Conservative votes in by elections and local elections have been miserable under Badenoch; she has far less chance of beating Burnham’s Labour Party than Farage does. But despite these awful results she has been given a very favourable press in the last 6 months so for whatever reasons she is still deemed useful for what is being planned ahead.
There is surely an element of keeping one’s powder dry in the delay and confluence of media attacks on Farage. Lines of investigation will have long been pursued, but the timing of releases will owe much to events and agendas beyond the media’s control. And once one outlet breaks a story, others follow to avoid staling their own stories.
Plus there have been signs of legally-advised restraint in the hints of the homosocial and classically British-establishment culture of Reform’s inner circle which didn’t organically surface with the schooldays racism accusations of a while back.
If this has also been a testbed for behavioural modification (of electorates etc), the experiment had to run its course and limits be found. As a means of disillusioning people about their own public, authorities, political system, education system and culture, it probably worked pretty well, but with uncertain generational effects, partly because of all the hypocrisy, stupidity, hollowness and absurdity of Reform’s platform, aside from its viciousness. How can you despise migration but love the British Empire (and take money from expats)? Celebrate British genius but hate intellectuals? Bang on about ‘British value X’ then embody its opposite?
This incoherent project could never have held together nor satisfied its domestic voters and foreign backers.
Farage is a survivor, he’s been around long enough to know how to outlast his right wing fellow travellers. Talk of his demise is premature. Reform is a strange melange of disaffected tories and nutters, and if it was to get into power, I can’t see anything but disaster following. Tice, in particular is mossad’s man, so a Reform government would be run out of Tel-Aviv, no change there then. I’ve always thought that what Farage really wants is a position in the conservatives, with the impending implosion of Reform that view hasn’t changed. Farage is a bit like the anti-Corbyn, the establishment approved right wing rebel. Being a pain in the ass is his role, he’ll be around for a while yet.
@Stevie Boy, has Nigel Farage been a pain in your ass yet?
According to Britpolls.co.uk the typical Reform UK supporter is male, aged 45+ with a peak in the 55–64 group, without a university degree, a Brexit voter and from the Midlands, Yorkshire, or the North of England. Most are disillusioned working class Tories but with a large chunk of disillusioned possibly post Blair Labour voters i.e. conservatives who voted Labour in 1997 which was a similar phenomenon to 2024 – things could only get better and all that
Otherwise they seem to bang on about the very things that the Greens, Your Party, George Galloway and the Uncle Tom Cobley left also bang on about, the cost of living. the NHS, and the electoral system because it does not do anything about the issues that concern ordinary people. They are of course distinguished from the leftish parties in these matters by their social conservatism as reflected in their confused attitudes on immigration, traditionalism and adherence to Samuel Smiles.
Nothing new about the attack on Farage, typical Establishment backlash to Demos. Starmer’s downfall has different causes.
“I am however relaxed about leaving the EU.”
At the referendum I voted out, on the grounds that a stupid question deserved a stupid answer.
Now I regard it as prescience.