Farage Rides Again

And will likely win a seat as an MP for the first time

Nigel P Farage
The man they love to disparage
As he captures working class rage

[See update at end]

Over in Blighty there’s a general election campaign going on which everyone expects to be more or less an extinction event for the governing Conservative party after the votes are cast on Revolting Ex-colonial Day (aka July 4). Despite being an unreconstructed Thatcherite, I have to say I hope it is every bit as bad as the pollsters predict.

Low tide at Frinton-on-Sea (the posh bit of the Clacton constituency), a metaphor for Tory fortunes?

Up until last weekend it looked like the election would be a fairly simple Labour - Conservative battle in most places with Labour winning most, even in Scotland where the SNP was dominant last time around. But there was always the fear the Reform UK party (founder: Farage, N.P.) would siphon enough votes away from the Tories to make them lose more even if Reform failed to get any seats itself, despite the unexpected early general election announcement seeming to catch Reform by surprise.

Then on Monday Farage announced he was going to stand for a seat himself and really put money and effort into the Reform UK Party for this general election and I pretty much guarantee that the Tory party strategists all went “Oh $expletive!” Quite possibly any Labour party ones who can look beyond July 4 did so too because Reform with Farage as an MP is likely to be a major thorn in the side of the next government.

So the question is will he make a difference? I think so.

First, Farage is highly likely to win his seat in Clacton. [Update Survation agree]

I can talk reasonably knowledgeably about the constituency since it is where my parents lived. The area was where UKIPs first MP (Douglas Carswell) had his seat and it voted heavily LEAVE in the Brexit referendum. The electorate has one of the highest proportions of retired people in it (retirees like to go live by the seaside) and despite its relative proximity to London contains one of the most deprived areas of the country - Jaywick. These people are the ones that the London elites of all political stripes routinely disparage (working class, white, patriotic, 1 ea) and they have been poorly served by the Tories during and after COVID. They are in fact pretty much Farage's target market for his message that none of the main parties (Tory, Labour, Lib Dim) care about them or their interests. They've been hammered by inflation, they have seen zero benefits from immigration and minimal from Brexit as a whole and they think the whole LGBTWTFBBQ is toxic and the NetZero greenery stuff as simply making them even poorer because they cannot afford either to replace the existing (gas) heating systems or buy new electric cars. Worse they can see the enormous off shore wind farms sitting there rusting and rarely generating any power.

The current Tory MP, Giles Watling, won his seat in the post Brexit general election because post Brexit UKIP lost its raison d’etre and he won again in 2019 against next to no opposition because UKIP decided not to field a candidate. To my knowledge he’s a nice enough guy, but he has made almost no waves as an MP and he lives in Frinton, which is the posh bit of the constituency. Farage will be kicking off his campaign at Clacton pier which is not at all posh, but is quietly patriotic in its way.

Clacton Pier, 11 November 2023

I think he’ll win.

That leads to the question of whether Reform UK will get any other seats? I expect so. Reform have been consistently in the 10-15% range in regional and national polls recently though it is hard to get accurate seat by seat polling data (plus the campaign has only just got going). Quite possibly they’ll win a seat on the English channel (Dover perhaps?) or at the working class Londoner end of Essex. I’m guessing that the party will win some of the seats that Boris turned Tory in 2019 for the first time ever (or at least since WW2). These places in the former labour heartlands have been ignored as Labour turns itself into the party of middle class bureaucrats and right-on woke luvvies.

If Reform can turn its 10-15% of the electorate into a few seats (as in perhaps a dozen, ideally double that) then it may end up being the third largest party in parliament after Labour and the Tories. There are some assumptions here. The first is that the Lib Dims remain a null entity (they had 11 seats in 2019). The second is that the SNP crash and burn in Scotland. This seems likely given the first past the post system and the SNPs general unpopularity in Scotland - but in 2019 they won 48 seats (80% of the seats in Scotland).

Anyway if Reform UK gets more than a couple of seats they are going to have a platform to put out their view of Britain which is going to be hard for the MSM and co to ignore or claim to be “far right”. Not that they aren’t already trying: Farage already caused fainting couch shock by saying that some Muslims “loathe British values”.

Said shock is ridiculous because the statement is self-evidently true, Muslims have literally said they want to establish a caliphate and that the rest of the country are infidels which is absolutely a loathing of British values. He’s also torn into the Tories about their complete failure to solve the immigration crisis and that’s an opinion shared by a large fraction of the UK population - including, it should be noted, the descendants of previous waves of immigration. Presuming Reform UK gets enough seats and vote share, having Farage putting those viewpoints across regularly is going to cause the globalist elite all sorts of upset and that can only be a good thing.

It isn’t clear to me whether Reform UK is willing to take other non-mainstream positions. For example will they try to tap into the anger at the Wuflu restrictions and vaccine mess? will they point out the idiocy surrounding NetZero? Or the Trans mania?

So far they seem to be sticking to immigration and not trying to dilute the issue. For the current general election that is probably not a bad strategy, but I hope Reform and Farage will start to raise these other issues once they have seats in parliament.

Update: here’s his campaign launch

One of my concerns mentioned above (that he would only talk about immigration) appears to have been addressed - he is willing to talk about the trans thing too:

Farage had some crowd pleasers in his speech, from declaring that ‘A women can’t have a penis’ to accusing the Tories of betraying voters’ trust on migration: ‘They opened up the borders to mass immigration like we have never seen before’.

Reform UK’s championing of women (vs transwomen) may end up gaining then some surprising support. JK Rowling is certainly not a natural Reform UK supporter, but as this spectator piece notes, on this issue at least she and Nigel Farage agree and that stands in sharp contrast to the waffling/trans-pandering from both Labour and (some of) the Tories.

Shortly afterwards he went to have a drink in the Wetherspoons at the top of the cliff above the pier where he spoke. As he left ‘spoons some entitled young female thing milkshaked him.

(Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

That probably did him more good than harm and she was promptly arrested. The Sun’s report on the incident suggests that the police did her a favor in arresting her because at least one Farage supporter was considering giving her some “wall to wall counseling”.

Also of interest. Guido reports that thanks to Farage standing perhaps half a dozen Tory candidates including one current Tory MP are considering moving to stand for reform in their constituencies. If it happens that’s going to cause (more) shockwaves.

It should be noted (as this Critic piece does) that Farage seems to be taking a leaf out of 1990s Canadian politics:

Perhaps the best allegory for the Tory Party’s current predicament is that of Canada circa 1993. In that election, unpopular Conservative incumbent Kim Campbell faced a devastating defeat, losing all but two seats. To her left, Campbell faced the boring but competent Liberals and to her right, the insurgent Reform Party (sound familiar?) led by long-time agitator Preston Manning. Division on the right gifted the Liberals thirteen years in government; the Conservative Party that eventually came back into power in 2006 was a fusion of the old Progressive Conservative Party and Manning’s Reform. Those who find comfort in historical patterns would do well to brush up on their late 20th century Canadian political history.