Will no one hold Nigel Farage to account?
Little England on the Downs
By DonkeyHotey - Nigel Farage
Have you ever had a man badger you so loudly and relentlessly that you give in just to shut him up?
Maybe you agreed to let him sleep with you because he wanted it so badly. Maybe you suppressed all your well-founded objections and agreed to go along with whatever conspiracy theory he was bellowing round the bar just so you could finish your beer in peace.
In 2016, 52 percent of the British said in effect to Nigel Farage: Yeah OK, Nige, have it your way. You have been banging on about Brexit since 1992. If it makes you happy, we will give it to you.
Now will you leave us alone?
The thing about Nige, however, is that nothing can make him happy and he can never leave us alone.
Brexit was the gravest act of economic self-harm in modern British history. You might have thought that Farage would have slunk away and never shown his face in public again.
Brexit is why our taxes are so high and public services so poor. But as far as British politics in 2025 is concerned, it is as if nothing bad has happened.
On the rare occasions the BBC makes a token effort to hold Farage to account, its pusillanimous reporters let him get away with the excuse that the “failure” of Brexit wasn’t his fault – for nothing is ever Nige’s fault – but the fault of “useless" Tory politicians "mismanaging" the departure.
It’s ludicrous. Farage formed a pact with Boris Johnson and his “useless” Conservative party that allowed them to win the 2019 general election and impose a hard Brexit – the hard Brexit Farage wanted.
But there seems to be some kind of law against any journalist saying this, so Nige gets away with it once again.
He wants to be prime minister now, and our lunatic electoral system could make his dreams come true. His programme is so economically illiterate it would cause Liz Truss to blush with shame. But as with Brexit a large portion of the electorate won’t worry about the pain until it’s too late.
One wonders what will be left of this country when all the attempts to appease and placate Farage are over. We already know that being nice to Nige comes at a hell of a cost.
In the Lowdown this week I interviewed James Hawes the author of The Shortest History of England, The Shortest History of Germany, Speak for England, and many more works of fiction and non-fiction.
He was deeply pessimistic about the UK’s future.
Echoing his contacts in the upper echelons of the state, Hawes believes that the mess left by Brexit and the Tories will overwhelm Keir Starmer. Stagnation and decline will lead to a revival of English nationalism under Farage, and "because Labour will no longer be able to say to the Scots that “we are your bulwark against the southern English right” there will be a revival of Scottish nationalism and the collapse of the UK.
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I am working on a long piece on how the failure of Brexit and Truss has radicalised rather than moderated the British right, which I hope to have out by the end of the week.
In the meantime, here is my explanation of why the BBC never asks the hard questions about Brexit
Why the BBC cannot hold the right to account
The image of Alastair Campbell as a truth teller is hard to bear for those of us who remember the early years of the century.
And then a piece on how Donald Trump is encouraging some of the worst people in Britain.
Western conservatism collapses under the weight of MAGA
In December 2024, flushed by the defeat of the hated libs, the historian Niall Ferguson wrote a jaw-dropping hymn of praise to Donald Trump. It now reads like an obituary for western conservatism.
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All the best,
Nick
The chance of Farage slinking away and never showing his face in public again would have been a bit higher if all those who know Brexit was a great folly had been prepared to say it. But the Labour leadership have insisted on saying a Hard Brexit is fine and just needs a bit of fine tuning. I doubt whether many of them really believe it.
Blame farage and that’s just fine, but a lot of people voted for brexit, a lot of people voted for reform…..the cat is out of the bag, either we are fools or we just need to be honest and say a lot of people want what farage is shovelling… that’s what has to be addressed and no one really knows how to put the cat in the bag. There is no sense of shared vision to pin peoples hopes