You can’t win a battle against the radical right without fighting it

Starmer gives Farage a free pass

Photo by Matt Brown on Unsplash

Here are two facts about modern Britain which barely impinge on what passes for the national “debate” in politics and the media.

First, Donald Trump is hugely unpopular. Only about 16% of people in the UK approve of him. Here as in every other European country the belief that the United States is a force for good in the world is collapsing.

This isn’t a question of left versus right or woke verses reactionaries. Trump’s tariffs threaten the economy and his hostility to NATO threatens national security. He wants to put “America first.” No politician in the UK – or in any other country for that matter – can cheer him on. Except for Nigel Farage – apparently.

If the UK had robust Labour politicians, they would have slammed Farage. Pierre Poilievre and his Canadian Conservatives lost an election they ought to have won because they were too close to Trump. Yet their links were as nothing compared to the near-decade of grovelling before the MAGA movement Nigel Farage has put in.

And yet Keir Starmer did not brand the radical right as an unpatriotic fifth column, even though he had every opportunity to do so.

He did not tour steelworks and car plants and denounce Farage for his subservience to a US president who was threatening British manufacturing jobs with his tariffs. He did not make the betrayal of Ukraine an election issue.

The Labour left once accused Starmer of “wrapping himself in the union jack” and worried that ethnic minorities and intellectuals would think Labour was a “far-right group”.

But when the opportunity came to build a progressive patriotism in yesterday’s local elections and Parliamentary by election, Starmer refused to take it.

He thought he could win political battles without fighting them and paid the inevitable price.

Farage took the Runcorn parliamentary seat and pocketed gains in local and mayoral elections.

Kemi Badenoch, the doomed leader of the Conservative party also refused to fight Farage. But then there is no real difference between the Tories and Farage – at least none that anyone can show me. Both Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, former prime ministers of this country, no less, betrayed this country’s best interests by supporting Trump’s campaign against Kamala Harris.

Even more reason, one might think, for Starmer to go on the attack. He could include the Tories in his condemnations of right-wingers selling out the UK to a hostile foreign power – and had a two-for-the-price-of-one political hit

Why couldn’t Starmer do it?

Why can’t he fight?

I am sure readers will reply that he cannot risk antagonising Trump. But such scruples did not bother Mark Carney, who won by standing up to a bullying America. Nor did diplomatic niceties prevent Elon Musk from personally attacking Starmer and coming close to inciting racist violence on the streets of Britain.

Everyone else is prepared to fight, except it seems that nice Mr Starmer.

Perhaps, as I am hearing Labour politicians mutter, that nice Mr Starmer is a little too nice for the rough business of politics.

A stronger defence of the government is that Starmer and Labour won’t recover until they lift the UK out of stagnation and bring real benefits to the mass of people in this country. And that, of course, is true.

But here we run into the second awkward fact about modern Britain which barely impinges on what passes for our national “debate”.

A clear majority of the country would vote to rejoin the EU. The benefits Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promised in the 2016 Brexit referendum have disappeared faster than breath on a windowpane.

Brexit pushed Britain into stagnation. And yet the politicians who misled the British public have never been held to account. On the contrary, even in opposition they continue to exercise a veto over national renewal, terrifying our supposedly progressive government.

Starmer and Labour dare not take them on because they are frightened of alienating elderly voters. The Tories dare not do it because they delivered Brexit. Right-wing proprietors dominate the press, and they won’t ask questions. And fear of upsetting the right has neutered the BBC.

If you think about it, Farage has pulled a brilliant trick – a modern Catch-22.

The bitterness and desperation Brexit brought encouraged voters to shift towards Farage and the radical right. Meanwhile the failure of our political and media classes to undertake their basic democratic duty and hold Farage to account for Brexit means that voters do not blame him for the bitterness and desperation his own Brexit engendered

Neat, eh?

How extensive the democratic failure has been since 2016 is worthy of a book in itself.

Take the case of the BBC, which the right has scared into silence.