Is Nigel Farage plotting yet another comeback?
Prof Matthew Goodwin, one of Britain’s leading academic commentators on the partly connected worlds of Brexit and civic nationalism, published an article this morning speculating that Nigel Farage – former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Brexit Party, and seen as a main architect of Brexit – is planning a return to front-line politics.
It’s easy to see why Farage might be tempted back into the political limelight. Despite his referendum triumph in 2016, his Conservative rivals in the pro-Brexit camp – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and their backroom guru Dominic Cummings – took far more of the credit and political benefit. Johnson remains for the moment Prime Minister, Gove is among the potential candidates to succeed him, and Cummings (despite his own acrimonious exit from the corridors of power) probably sees himself as kingmaker in the next Conservative leadership contest.
Meanwhile Farage failed even to be elected an MP, and is now a television presenter for the often risibly inept GB News.
There are only two decent reasons to be in politics: either to win, or to make a serious and consistent contribution to an ideological legacy that one day might win. Farage has done neither, and that failure probably annoys him.
This week’s latest of many scandals that might just sink Boris Johnson will simultaneously add to Farage’s temptation. Is there a gap in the political market?
The short answer is yes, there is a political vacuum on what some would call the ‘right-wing’; but no, Nigel Farage is no longer the man to fill it.
In the Brexit era, Farage’s parties could be all things to all voters, with their ideological hollowness and opportunism disguised by an overriding focus on Brexit.
Yet behind all the populist banter, Farage and his inner circle were and remain essentially sub-Thatcherite libertarians. Their ideal post-Brexit Britain did not involve anything resembling racial nationalism, but rather a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ built on low taxes, a smaller state, and continuing mass immigration to hold down wages.
The Reform UK party which Farage helped create is very obviously based on that type of ‘free market’ ideology, which has little or no appeal to most of the northern working-class who voted for Brexit in 2016 and in large numbers for Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019. That’s one reason why Reform UK has failed so badly, and though Farage would certainly be a more charismatic leader than its president frontman Richard Tice, he is unlikely to make any dramatic difference.
If Johnson really is finished, the short-term winners will be the Labour Party, not Reform UK or any other Farage party. And the long-term challenge to the political establishment will have to come from a racial nationalist force rising from the ashes of the BNP, not from the remnants of UKIP and the Brexit Party.
Shattering Conservative defeat opens up British politics for 2022
The Conservative Party suffered one of its worst ever defeats at yesterday’s North Shropshire by-election. Liberal Democrat candidate Helen Morgan easily won a seat that had only once before (in 1904!) returned a non-Tory MP.
For racial nationalists, the importance of this result is that it surely marks the end of the Boris Johnson era. Two years ago Johnson’s Tories won a landslide mandate to “get Brexit done”, and as recently as May this year they were still achieving extraordinary levels of support in White working-class areas, winning support from many voters who should be the natural targets for any credible racial nationalist party.
All that is now over. While the last three parliamentary by-elections have been in traditionally Tory rather than “red wall” constituencies, polling evidence is clear that the Boris magic has gone.
And this North Shropshire by-election confirmed our analysis in H&D that the old Farage movement – the old UKIP and Brexit Party vote – is also finished.
A fortnight ago in the South East London constituency of Old Bexley & Sidcup, Farage’s political heir Richard Tice – leader of the Reform Party (a rebranding of the Brexit Party) – spent a fortune but could still only poll 6.6%.
Against an even more weakened Conservative Party yesterday, Tice’s candidate Kirsty Walmsley lost her deposit, polling only 3.8% despite being a personally credible and energetic candidate with strong local roots.
The other candidates from the civic nationalist spectrum encompassing hard Brexit, anti-woke but ‘non-racist’ views, combined with anti-lockdown / anti-vaccination politics, predictably polled insignificant votes: 1% each for UKIP and for Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party (whose candidate was Fox’s deputy Martin Daubney); 0.2% for the Heritage Party (a UKIP splinter led by a half-Jamaican); and 0.1% for the Covid-sceptic, anti-vaccination ‘Freedom Alliance’.
This result’s message for racial nationalists is clear. The era of Brexit-dominated politics that benefited first Farage, then Johnson, is now over. Covid-sceptic campaigns are an electoral dead end. Britain is now open for a return to real politics in 2022, and racial nationalists will have no excuses if we fail to get our act together.
Further analysis of the British political scene from a racial nationalist perspective will appear in the January 2022 edition of Heritage and Destiny.
Civic nationalism’s last stand fails in Bexley by-election
The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) changed British politics under Nigel Farage’s leadership. Despite the British electoral system preventing Farage from ever winning a Westminster seat, electoral pressure from UKIP forced Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum, and Farage’s campaign skills played a large part in the narrow victory for ‘Leave’ at that referendum.
Yet UKIP never built anything like a proper infrastructure of branches and activists. Its members (indeed almost all of its councillors) were a ragbag of contrarians and cranks, without a coherent ideology beyond Euroscepticism.
Eventually UKIP split in several directions: its most anti-immigration faction (containing a few good racial nationalists but unfortunately at leadership level obsessed by Islam) created the For Britain Movement, led by Anne-Marie Waters. Multiple other splinters ensued, and as in every party split the majority of members simply gave up.
The main successor party to UKIP was the Brexit Party, what remains of that becoming Reform UK, launched by Nigel Farage (who has since given up party politics in favour of broadcasting) and now led by Farage’s ally Richard Tice.
The leader himself was Reform UK’s candidate at a parliamentary by-election yesterday in Old Bexley & Sidcup, on the outer borders of South East London. Richard Tice and his party spent a fortune on their campaign, mobilising their entire London activist base.
Moreover they were up against a weak Tory candidate and a (temporarily at least) weakened Tory Prime Minister. The constituency was strongly pro-Brexit, and the election took place right at the moment when the government’s Covid strategy, until now seen by the vast majority of voters as broadly successful, seemed to be wobbling.
Yet Reform UK’s last stand fizzled out. At least they avoided the sort of joke vote that their handful of local candidates have polled. Tice saved his deposit and finished in third place: but it was a very distant third place indeed, 6.6% (1,432 votes). The seat stayed fairly safe for the Conservatives, though their majority over Labour was slashed from 18,952 to 4,478.
To put this in perspective, this constituency was never especially strong for the BNP even in that party’s glory days, but even the BNP – with a mere fraction of Tice’s financial resources – polled seven hundred votes more, though a lower percentage, 4.7% (2,132 votes) here at the 2010 general election.
Needless to say, Tice’s various rivals for the civic nationalist vote fared even worse yesterday: Elaine Cheeseman for the English Democrats polled 1.3% (271 votes); John Poynton for the rump UKIP 0.9% (184 votes); and the mixed-race. ex-UKIP, ex-GLA member David Kurten – leader of the Heritage Party – just 0.5% (116 votes).
Of the eleven by-election candidates, Kurten was the most outspokenly anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown, Covid-sceptic. His joke vote should be a sobering influence on those in the broader nationalist movement who believe that Covid conspiracy theories can be politically fruitful.
More seriously, Tice’s Reform UK campaign – despite spending a fortune for a pretty miserable return – just about avoided disaster and might keep his donors interested for a while longer. Racial nationalists have long known that the UKIP legacy would have to fade away before our own movement could have any realistic chance of renewing its electoral impact at the level of the 1990s and 2000s, let alone anything more ambitious than that.
Tice’s failure was a step in that direction, and we can safely predict an even worse result for the assorted candidates of civic nationalism in a fortnight’s time at the next parliamentary by-election in North Shropshire.
For us the message should be: get our own ideological and organisational house in order. We no longer have the excuse of an unbeatable civic nationalist obstacle on UK ballot papers – and there is no insuperable anti-White conspiracy. Both in electoral politics and in the broader cultural struggle, our future and the future of White Britons is in our own hands.
