Nigel Farage at a rally. [Pic Owain Davies for Wiki Creative Commons]
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I don’t mean to tempt fate or wish ill on a dead country, but it is perfectly possible that Nigel Farage will be the UK’s next prime minister. It’s easy to see how we could then follow the path of the US and Hungary and move from a widely despised old political elite to a corrupt autocracy whose wheels are greased with shady money and outright lies.
If these seem bold predictions, look at Farage’s party conference, which ended yesterday.
Farage honoured convicted criminals who incited violence against migrants, just as Trump honoured criminals who stormed the US Congress.
He welcomed an anti-Vaxxer who works with Trump’s pet quack Robert Kennedy Jr to fatally weaken public health.
And, astonishingly to those of us who can remember the standards of the old Britain, there was no backlash.
Instead of asking hard questions, the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason, cooed like a state broadcaster in a dictatorship: “Nigel Farage has a focus and sense of purpose I haven't seen in the best part of two decades of reporting on him,” he burbled.
Reform feels like it is hosting a “big party conference - but it retains the insurgency vibe.”
A vibe? Seriously? Reform was welcoming rabble rousers who incited arson attacks on asylum seekers. Is that what an insurgency vibe looks like?
Anti-vaxxers will bring about the needless deaths of children from measles and polio. Oh wow, how deliciously vibey of them.
Mason takes £264,000 a year from the public. All we ask in return for making him a very rich man is that he acts like a journalist not a flunkey and holds power to account.
He cannot do it. Read his fanfic, and there’s not one word on Reform’s embrace of quackery that may kill children or on women who incite hatreds that might kill Muslims and migrants, just flattery and puffery.
This is how democracy dies: not with a bang but a simper
Readers who can get through his gushing prose will know that such sycophancy from the national broadcaster is a warning that a dark future is on the way
You can see it most clearly in Farage’s double standards on free speech, which echo Donald Trump’s hypocrisies.
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