Nick & Nigel

Nigel Farage out opinion-polled the Deputy PM after both of their public debates about the EU.  Not a surprise. The BBC's political editor, ex Young-Tory Nick Robinson, thought it might be connected with the public's rather less enthusiastic view of Clegg since the halcyon days before the last election when he was the new boy on the bloc and had not stained his copybook. Admittedly there was something desperate about Clegg's appeals to 'today's Britain' that he, apparently, so loved. A country saddled amongst a long list of horrors, with the highest tuition fees in the western world. The one thing he promised that would not happen. 

In fact Clegg was thoroughly defeated because he based his argument for his version of the future of Britain on the defense of a thoroughly disliked and defeated government. 

The quality of mainstream political debate in Britain has clearly declined. Farage's main propositions were often incoherent, sometimes contradictory, always exaggerated but nobody believed Clegg at all. Farage confused the EU with the west's real war machine, NATO. He was 'appalled' by Britain being potentially dragged into wars by the EU. He mentioned bombing Libya and the saber rattling over Syria and the honey trap offered to the Ukraine. All of these (failed) initiatives were either led or underpinned by NATO. The US and EU's combined armed wing is NATO. Farage wants to identify 'good' western wars as NATO's wars - which he wants to be in and 'bad' western wars with the EU - which he doesn't. Similarly, he constantly berated British 'big business' in the same sentences as his attacks on the unpatriotic rich for selling out Britain's democracy and self-determination. Yet he rushed to the defense of the City of London as 'Britain's biggest employer' and which was 'threatened' by the Coalition's execrable sell out of the City’s rights when they supported (they did not) the EU’s wishes to limit the power of finance (not implemented).  The City of London nearly destroyed the British economy in 2008 (and large parts of the European economy too.) The City is a poisonous anathema to any sort of democratic control that the British people might really require to determine anything important about the future of their country. 

In the event Farage's muddle of political and economic sloganeering did not matter. He was more popular than Clegg because Clegg was an exposed liar and fraud. And Farage sounded radical. He was with ‘the people’ against the Westminster class of politicians. He was with ‘the white British working class’ against the metropolitan elite with their immigrant nannies and gardeners. He denounced over-crowded schools, over-stretched health care and over loaded housing stock all tottering apparently under the weight of EU immigrants. What was left for Clegg in all this? He could only tell us that health ‘had been protected’, that schools ‘had been expanded’, that housing was ‘becoming more available under the Coalition government.’  Nobody believed that. 

The hot heart of Farage’s saloon bar nonsense remains, of course, roaring racism. Immigrants are the reason why living standards have fallen, why hospitals and schools are stretched and why young people have no jobs.  His economics are a crude extension of Thatcher and Osborne’s attack on heath and welfare. And Clegg had no answer to that. Clegg is part of the Westminster consensus supporting austerity as the ‘solution’ to the problems that Farage wants to blame on immigrants. 

Despite the limited appeal of the TV debates there are political signs of the times in all this. It’s true that Farage is an ego in a pint glass (and Clegg is a dead man walking) but if we consider one of the debates leading up to the formation of Ken Loach’s Left Unity last November – should Left Unity, some supporters asked, become the left’s version of UKIP – it is clear that Farage is presently occupying that space. His ‘radicalism’ is out of the textbook of early fascism.  His appeal (in terms of voters) is to the white working class, indeed all those that have abstained in the last elections and now UKIP potentially puts as much pressure on Labour as it puts on the Tories. Putting pressure from a saloon bar version of the left onto the Labour Party is now a seriously contested ground – albeit to paraphrase, that Farage’s radicalism is ‘the radicalism of fools.’

Second, Farage’s rush to adopt the colours of the City of London may be more strategic than it first appears. A bloc of huge capitalist interests, should the EU seek to make some inroads into the arrogant power of finance capital, encouraging the growth of UKIP as leverage against the EU and anybody sympathetic to corralling the bankers in Britain, is perfectly possible. This would be a friend indeed for dear Nigel and could catapult him into the centre of politics.