Nigel Farage's announcement that he is to stand as the Reform Party candidate for Clacton-on-Sea and simultaneously become the leader of that party, replacing Richard Tice in that role, is symbolic of so much that is wrong with politics in the UK.
Firstly, Reform is a private limited company controlled by Farage, and unaccountable as a consequence.
Secondly, press reports suggest that the company is 80% funded by Richard Tice, indicating the extreme power that wealth has to influence outcomes in UK general elections.
Thirdly, Farage would have nothing like the power he has unless the BBC thought it necessary, in the interest of so-called balance, to so frequently platform far-right parties and organisations in this country.
Fourthly, the bias within the BBC itself is exposed when a party with both more MPs and vastly more councillors than Reform is largely ignored by it. I am, of course, referring to the Green Party.
Fifthly, the best election result in Clacton will be that Farage suffers his eighth election defeat, thwarting once again his ambition to be an MP. However, he has chosen his seat with care. This is where Douglas Carswell did, briefly, enjoy success as a UKIP candidate. It also typifies quite a number of areas of deprivation in East Anglia and Lincolnshire where it seems as though far-right led sentiment about migration provides Reform with an opportunity to generate support.
Put all this together, and Farage appears to be little more than a manipulative exploiter of those willing to provide him with patronage in pursuit of his political goals that are intended to create and exploit division in this country. In the process, he sustains his overinflated ego by securing media appearances that to his supporters, at least, provide evidence of his significance.
To the rest of us, Farage's presence in this election makes it clear that populists are more prevalent in this country than is good for the well-being of a great many people with it.
Additionally, media support for Farage - including the blatant support of Farage by GB News that Ofcom has been ignoring - indicates just how readily our media create a far-right agenda for this country which the BBC far too obediently replicates in its programming.
Add these factors together, and it is clear that we have a political system that is far from fit for purpose.
That said, the greatest worry is that Labour appear to have no concerns about this, or intentions to make any change.
Troublingly, as it stands, it would seem that things can only get worse.
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Its a major problem as you say. The BBC is obsessed with giving Farage coverage yet the Greens get little mention. I don’t see a similar thing with Galloway (not that I like his politics), but he did win in a by-election.
Also why were the Greens excluded from the debate in Scotland? They are an important party there.
The whole system is in need of reform but Labour are quite happy to keep things as they are, well they are a conservative party!
The argument being made to exclude the Greens in Scotland is that this is a Westminster election. The Greens have no MPs in Scotland. Personally, I am unimpressed by the Greens in Scotland. I once attended a a land reform event and listened to Patrick Harvie MSP. It was not long before I realised that I was listening to the Delphic Oracle. I also think the renewables policy of the Greens is not clever enough; too ideological, too dogmatic. Why? Oil is a major issue in Scotland. Green policies require the oil industry to work. Why? Because Aberdeen and the oil industry has the required resources; more even than government (save money, and oil has a lot of money). Resources, crucially here are the skills, technology, engineers and technicians; many of whom can go anywhere in the world and are well paid. Clever policy will develop a relationship with oil to do the transition together (and their investment in the old technology is large). Scotland’s greatest contribution to Green policy would be to show the world how, as an oil producer it can work successfully with the oil industry to make a successful green transition. The Greens in Scotland, especially with Harvie, are obsessively ideological and identity politics driven.
I am afraid that there is quite a lot to agree with there
@JSW
Despite having a number of good friends in the Scottish Greens, I’m also unimpressed with them, though for slightly different reasons. They have little to offer in this GE.
The acknowledged and longstanding Scottish expert on Land Reform is Andy Wightman, who has also produced some excellent work on how LVT would work in an independent Scotland, more than substituting for Council Tax.
Yet he was driven out of the party by the translobby, even receiving death threats, for his support of the feminist lobby alongside Joanna Cherry.
The Scottish Greens managed the GRA exceptionally badly and have boldly walked into the culture wars cul de sac whilst ignoring their core purpose.
Losing Andy Wightman was a massive loss of expertise they could not afford.
The Marine Conservation area rebooting policy was as ineptly handled by Lorna Slater as I have ever seen any conservation initiative, and finally dropped. As it happens the MCS have since published a report showing that Scotland has nowhere near effective conservation of the 30% of the seabed allegedly currently protected as is required.
Sustainable Scottish fisheries depend long term in this level of marine protection. They should be natural allies to this. We really cannot afford these policy failures.
As far as North Sea fossil fuels go, none of the parties have got a scooby for the transition.
We still had offshore flaring at 22 billion cubic feet of gas in 2022 which is a criminal environmental disgrace. Capturing that ought to be priority #1, and/or taxed per therm, as pollution.
Then we have the options for reuse of rigs for renewables instead of scrapping them, and for which there are no current targets, (though the UK government have given Shell an almost £200 tax break for decommissioning.)
We also have the Sullom Voe hub proposals for long term conversion to green hydrogen – again a logical transitional step as hydrogen storage from renewables is a key strategy for counterbalancing intermittency.
Lorna Slater is supposedly a marine engineer with experience working on tidal stream turbines.. So where is the transition programme of skills transfers from petrochems to tidal stream engineering ?
(and which ought to be based in Aberdeen with Robert Gordon Uni co-ordinating )
And .. we have unused wind turbine tower construction capacity here in Argyll, but they are now planning a new factory at Ardersier. You could not make it up …
It isn’t just the Scottish Greens who are an environmental joke, because the SNP are very close behind, and the SKS policy gimmick of basing a UK energy company in Scotland is simply aimed at outflanking the SNP, and Labour are marginally worse than the SNP.
However as the supposed messengers of environmental and social sustainability, the Scottish Greens really do take the biscuit.
Thank you and well said, both.
I agree.
@ John: I’m very interested in land reform, too, and have a lot of material, some antique on the subject.
I note your family name and its origins. The BBC and CBS are making a series in time for the 1000th anniversary of William’s birth in 2027. They are avoiding the issue of dispossession. Councils are removing references to land owners from websites. In the noughties, the BBC produced another series on the Normans. Out of the dozen historians featured, only the French one mentioned land and dispossession.
Fascinating
And incredibly relevant to where we are now
‘tony’,
I suspect the SNP have realised, late in the day, that the Greens coalition was a very bad idea; and is having to recalibrate its approach to the green transition. The land reform event I attended years ago was sponsored by a group I was briefly interested in; and I met Wightman at a couple of the events. As I recall, few of the committed land reformers there were convinced by Harvie; but there were few political options available at the time, and the major Parties were simply not interested; too difficult, too complicated, and no easy sound bites, or photo ops as a substitute for substantive policy. They could ignore it, with no consequences; and largely still do. The electorate at some point has to take some responsibility for the failure of their politics; it is nothing to do with them, is not – in the end – an option; because they are ‘the end’. they pay the consequences for their choices. Usually their option has been to do absolutely nothing at all.
I do not think our reasons for rejecting the Greens are perhaps quite as different as you suggest.
Andy and I shared a platform a few years ago in Edinburgh – he is a good guy
@ jsw Col S
It seems we are all connected through Clan Farqhuarson, as my mother was a Findlay.
My natural home politically ought to be the Scottish Greens, but I find the leadership underwhelming, and very urban and culture politics oriented, for an agenda which needs to be prioritised on biodiversity and climate change.
Scotgov’s actual targets are fine in theory, but none of them are remotely likely to be achieved within the timescales Paris mandated.
Agree that land reform, though much needed, given rural Scotland’s very quasi feudal nature, has been fudged as too hard to do.. The socialist left / deep green rewilding groups are much more interested than the Greens these days, and the rural based Tartan Tory wing of the SNP seem to have reverted to forelock touching, especially on grouse friendly moorland management.
As a result we have not seriously tackled any of the upland biodiversity and reforesting issues at all. This is one of the SNP’s conspicuous failures.
The annoying thing is that the ‘company limited by guarantee’ with all powerful Board, has been the sole vehicle for community land ownership, and that structure is a vehicle that has inadvertently perpetuated the laird based, top down, management approach. HIE are the oversight body, and I can’t speak too lowly of their top down quangocratic approach.
Our local community owned Board company has had three second home owners on it, two multi-millionaires, and two big fish small pond Tories. Hardly local, hardly communitarian, with much self aggrandisement and self interest.
That the Scottish electorate will, at some future time, have to face a reckoning with our failures in tackling what are crucial independence related issues is actually a pretty stark reality.
I agree entirely that we need a PR system without the weaknesses of D’Hondt, that it will free up left of centre groupings to propose agendas not dominated by the hate oriented right, and that the FPTP voting dynamic will change.
Land reform has been a fudge and a failure. We only flushed most of the obvious, ancient feudal vestiges in land tenure in 2004. Scotland has been held, almost unnoticed in an imponderable ether of cataleptic political inertia for three hundred years, by the structure of a Union it calculatedly created in a form to protect its own old, deeply entrenched vested interests; and it has never been able to face squarely the inherent problems it leaves us with in the 21st century; still less, adequately address the deep underlying issues. Scotland is still run in many cases by institutions that have simply never adequately been answerable to anyone; and politicians have, frankly been too feart to challenge. They have safely allowed Westminster to set the framework for politics, not because they can’t challenge Westminster, but it is just easier and safer politically for Scottish politicians to go on pretending the problems simply don’t exist. They are hiding in plain sight. Ironically, with section 35 Westminster has done more to threaten the deeper nature of Scotland’s old independence in the Union; than has ever been the case in three hundred years, with two exceptions only: the Patronage Act, 1711 (10 Ann. c. 21), and Big Bang, 1986 – that finally annihilated the great independent, Scottish free banking tradition.
& you are reporting on show business why? I’m being ironic.
This is performative stuff by farage – it gives the idiot media something to enlived the election & farage gets his weak ego massaged.
All that said, if Reform pick up on the pylon thing (see other post) then they could get legs – bolt on Starmer’s authoritarian streak and “Reform” (aka “Back to the 50s”) could do better than expected – or lay ground work for the next election.
Lord “Farage” Farquhar has convinced a percentage of English voters that the reason their grandchildren do not have a “school place” and the all the problems with the NHS is due to “small boat people” and ‘illegal immigrants”.
I know this for a fact as I know three English couples (who have second vacations homes in Florida) who really do not like Farage but “like what he has to say” or so they have said on numerous occasions.
https://tenor.com/search/lord-farquhar-gifs
This is a “Spitting Image” masterpiece. It looks just like Nigel Paul Farage!
“That said, the greatest worry is that Labour appear to have no concerns about this, or intentions to make any change.
…Troublingly, as it stands, it would seem that things can only get worse”
What do you want Labour to do exactly?
Electoral reform
Media regulation reform
Limiting corporate donations to parties
It’s nit hard to work out…..
If PR is introduced Reform
will be the biggest beneficiary.
Wrong
The social democractic left would finally get a voice
“If PR is introduced Reform
will be the biggest beneficiary”.
This seems to miss the point. It assumes with PR people will continue to act as if it was FPTP. It is much more likely that something more significant happens. It will be much more difficult for small ideological cabals simply to take over a political party, with little electoral impact, or loss of support because of traditional Party loyalty.
We will instead be much more likely to find out just how many people are really right-wing neoliberals in Britain. How credible is, not just Farage, but Braverman or Patel, or the narcissistic Badenoch. Given real PR choice (not party-led ‘de Hondt’) voters are far more likely to follow policies than Party (save for the tribal gerontocracy). The Conservative Party has been found out; but under PR it would have to make a decision what sort of Party it wishes to present – and justify – to the voter. The ‘taken-for-granted’ vote will collapse within a few years. Reform will find out just how right-wing Britain has become; and so will we all. I have no idea how it will work out, but it will be much harder for the entryist cabals will be able to hide in plain sight, take over a political party, and receive votes through electoral loyalty to a Party that has in fact deserted the values of the voter.
The Ego has landed.
I suspect this was planned as soon as the election was called to generate maximum publicity.
My nickname for Farage is “Lord Farquhar”! LOL!
“Additionally, media support for Farage – including the blatant support of Farage by GB News that Ofcom has been ignoring – indicates just how readily our media create a far-right agenda for this country which the BBC far too obediently replicates in its programming”.
The BBC replicates support for farage because it is wholly dependent on the the rest of the media, mainly Press to establish for it the ‘News Agenda’. Impartiality requires an independent measure; the BBC cannot just choose what it likes. As a matter of fact the Press sets the News Agenda, every single day. That is why right-wing billionaires invest in loss-making newspapers. Because they know by doing so they influence the major chartered or franchised media in what is ‘news’. They establish the political debate. The public doesn’t. It has no ‘news’ leverage.
BBC Radio4 Today programme spent at least an hour on immigration this morning , taking its cue from Farage whom they platformed yet again – then Cleverley – then a long trail for their own ‘people- smuggling’ feature.
The Tory/Farage strategy is to make the whole election about ‘our borders’, and immigration – so it not only drowns out health, social care, housing, incomes – but also blames all those issues on immigrants. This is Nazism, fascism. And BBC leading the charge.
Their censoring of the Greens – and their promoting of ‘there is no money’ in all election programmes breaks their own editorial guidelines – not to mislead etc etc
But they are not held to account
Mishal Hussein does a good job IMO
I think the reason Labour do not have too much concern about this is that it is clearly bad news for the Tories. It is the Tories worst nightmare, because in the main Farage will appeal to the same hard right, culture war 20% of the population.
In fact, even though he has said some not so good things about Clacton in the past, I think it would be interesting if he did get elected, because for once he could be held accountable for what he says. He would be the only Reform MP in a lonely parliament. I honestly don’t think that Farage will like that.
However, for those thinking of voting for him as “A man of the people”, lets not forget what he stands for. He makes Liz Truss look like a socialist. Buyer beware.
Still, if his running helps stuff the Tories, I’m all for it.
Stage one, for a chance of real reform, is to destroy the Tories. We get nowhere as long as they still have a chance of power. The funny thing is, it could well be FPTP that destroys them. What irony that the very thing that sustained the Tories for so long, could well be their undoing. I really do hope so.
Thank you, Richard.
Un peu d’histoire:
Major threatened media ownership reform after Tory scandals were exposed. He approached Blair for cross party support. Blair preferred to pay homage to Murdoch at Hayman Island.
Murdoch took no chances and helped the Farage faction force out academic and former Liberal candidate Alan Sked as leader of UKIP. Murdoch thought UKIP could exert pressure from the right (immigration) and left (e.g. scrap tuition fees) and protect his empire, so a broader policy offer and more combative leader were needed, not just a focus on the EU. That led to a friendship that endures to this day. Some years ago, the BBC made a documentary about the Murdochs. Soon after, Farage confessed that he had sought permission from his friend to appear.
Farage is not the weapon in the Murdoch armoury. Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, is another. Staines was a Tory student firebrand in late 1980s. He, oddly for someone of Indian origin, wanted a rappprochement with the National Front, BNP etc. and get them to the Tory Party’s street muscle. Staines, a Brexiteer who lives in Ireland, was brought to the attention of Murdoch and used to obtain dirt and publicise it, thus sparing Murdoch from the immediate adverse publicity.
Leveson II may have exposed that, but the Tories cancelled. Corbyn, perhaps unwisely, announced he would launch the second phase.
Much, if not most of the MSM, are like the pair and happy to platform.
I have been compiling a comprehensive list of candidates who we should try to challenge with Independents and Greens. Interestingly the candidate who came second in Clacton last time was Natasha Osben when she was running as a Labour candidate. Natasha Osben deserted the Labour Party to join the Greens and she is running in Clacton again, but as Green Party candidate. If Reform split the Tory vote in Clacton and Labour voters become disenchanted with Starmer’s Tory tribute act Natasha Osben could turn Clacton Green! We can but hope.
As always Farage is focused on selling his hateful anti migrant message as the top issue in this election; I doubt that it is for all but a small minority of people. With the obsession over ‘Net Migration’ the issue never mentioned is that it is a sum total after the number of people living is subtracted from the number arriving. Since we left the EU those wishing to live and work on the continent has screeched to a halt with the end of freedom of movement. While the wealthy can do as they please, those without considerable wealth have become ‘Prisoners of Mother England’ (POMs). This reality has a significant impact on the ‘Net Migration’ sum that no politician is willing to talk about.
Another important reality is that removing any that outstay their welcome in the UK has become even more unpolicable since leaving the EU and not just with regard to Schengan return rights. The Tories have not increased border force personnel or the numbers of Immigration officials assessing asylum seekers’ right to remain. Hmm, I wonder why? The huge distraction of the toxic Rwanda policy and the barges has successfully prevented the UK public from discovering the real agenda that drives Tory immigration policy. The huge backlog of migrants awaiting a decision and the inability of those people to legally work in the UK is by design.
Overwhelmingly, most migrants, including those escaping conflict, come to our country wanting to work and make a better life for themselves and their families. The cruel Tory agenda is to facilitate their ability to slip into the illegal workforce where they can be exploited by dubious businesses, who face minimal fines for employing them on a casual basis for a pitance. What is the objective driving this deliberate policy of increasing the black economy? Not only is it highly beneficial to wealthy Tory business owners, but more importantly, it helps to keep wages low and destroy the power of the unions.
An immigration Lawyer was interviewed on the BBC this morning and asked to comment on the proposals by our major political parties. The only proposal he spoke positively about was the Green Party plan to set up Asylum assessment centres in France in the hope of deterring migrants from risking their lives drowning in the channel. He also suggested that the huge number of asylum seekers who are here already, should be given temporary one year work visas on a rolling basis so that they are able to contribute and live in a decent way while awaiting a decision. Despite reducing the cost to UK taxpayers that the Tories obsess over, I sincerely doubt they would even want to be questioned on this possibility as it would not meet their deceitful objectives.
Sadly, the cost of housing and caring for the daily needs of Asylum seekers is paid for from our dwindling Foreign Aid Budget, the neglect of which promotes instability in the developing world. The current morally bankrupt policy of cherry-picking ‘the Best and the Brightest’ from countries who cannot afford to train them is another serious destabilizing factor. In the ‘Collaborative Circular Migration’ documents I sent you to assess, if you ever find the time, there are several proposals for handling migration in a far less damaging way that would benefit all participants equally.
If ever I find the time…
“Thirdly, Farage would have nothing like the power he has unless the BBC thought it necessary, in the interest of so-called balance, to so frequently platform far-right parties and organisations in this country.”
The current betting is that these “far-rights” will gain some 15% or more of the vote. Why shouldn’t such views gain media representation?
15%, maybe
Not the massive coverage they actually get
Possibly 15% now – ie after the impact of the BBC giving Farage untold access to air time for all the Brexit years and now again. Why not? well if the BBC were to give at least as much time to the Greens and climate and ecological issues then maybe it could be argued that it is balance- but there has certainly been no balance for years.