The growth of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party has been extremely frightening to watch. We may not want to think it, but many in the country are deeply disenfranchised from the Westminster establishment, and want Brexit ‘over and done with’. They voted for for something, therefore they want it delivered. Brexit may well be the gross national soliloquy that has destroyed Britain’s political respectability, but democracy certifies that the government must enact the decision that the country supported. We all want a second referendum, but without one Brexit cannot be discarded. The consequences for trust in democracy in Britain would be very harmful. There is no way around this disturbing fact, and the Brexit Party is exploiting the fragile nature of Brexit antagonism.
George Orwell wrote that “If Liberty is anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” This admirable maxim can be voiced to both sides of the Brexit debate, to both the Brexiteers living in John Betjeman’s ‘Eternal Safety Zone’ or to Remainers unable to accept the result of a democratic vote.
This utterly demoralising situation makes the European elections even more important. Farage’s band of rebels scream their creed of a new Peasants’ Revolt against the ‘liberal elite’ and proclaim that they are able to speak for working people. The familiar faces of Farage and the ultra-reactionary Ann Widdecombe reminded me that this is a very far-fetched idea. The party claims to be a group determined to keep democracy alive, but Farage has been opposed at the ballot box seven times. The idea that democracy is being tarnished is also very evidently nonsensical, Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union and a deal has been agreed with Brussels. The Brexit hardliners are refusing to countenance compromise and in doing so endanger their sacred project. The Prime Minister’s Brexit deal is the closest they are going to get to their original aim, but the cry of ‘betrayal’ at every proposal apart from the unicorn no-deal solidifies the case for their permanent residency in cloud-cuckoo land.
One of the hallmarks of an extremist politician is their connections to shadowy organisations. Jeremy Corbyn has been consistently and rightly called out for his links to terrorist groups; his calls for ‘dialogue’ distinctly in opposition to his rejection of talks with Western powers. Farage is the same, he pretends to be the opposite of Corbyn, yet his tactics are always the same, and exposed by his dubious supporters. Whether he is supporting the dictatorial and conspiracy theorist Viktor Orban as the “future of Europe” or cosying up to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the Trump-backing ‘Ted’ Malloch.
The ends to which any extremist will go to in the pursuit of their aim explicitly displays the way in which the former moral boundaries of this country’s politics have been so effectively torn down. Farage is able to present himself as a kind-hearted man of the people, despite his public school and City baker past. In this fallacy he is common among the populists who have swept the Western world, the image of a flawed character who espouses the prejudices of many to enhance their political game. No matter how outlawed, no matter who flawed, the zealot can succeed in British democracy if he presents himself well.
So how do we respond? The Remain campaign has been hopelessly split in the last few months; but the message of the Lib Dems is getting through to the electorate, the recent local elections results showed that in their clearest form. ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ may not be a line reminiscent of Puskin, but for many it is the clearest opposition to the mess that the Tories have created yet seen buy the party. I for one will not publicly present a ‘Stop Brexit’ banner out of a window, for the reasons I outlined above.
The clear failure of Change UK – The Independent Group to make a real mark (or any change, for that matter) on the political scene thus far shows that for many the Lib Dems still represent a sensible, pragmatic centrist position. The European elections should show this, with the Tories currently floundering underneath us in the latest polls. The failure of Jeremy Corbyn to present a principled, truthful or workable Brexit plan would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. With the government in such chaos, Labour’s inability to create a commanding public lead shows that a gap is still open for radical centrist politics. The Lib Dems should exploit this gaping hole in the public’s political needs. First, Farage and his gang of hypocritic zealots need to be vanquished.
* Patrick Maxwell is a Liberal Democrat member and political blogger at www.gerrymander.blog and a commentator at bbench.co.uk.
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32 Comments
How do you define a “democratic vote”? Is the correct counting all that matters? How about: a comprehensible, specific question, unambiguously spelled-out consequences, a adequate quorum, truthful campaigning, legal campaign-financing?
Arnold, surely it is for each individual voter when they come to vote either postally or at the ballot box to decide whether they have been asked “a comprehensible, specific question, unambiguously spelled-out consequences, a adequate quorum, truthful campaigning, legal campaign-financing?” and vote according, presumably if in their considered opinion the answer is yes then that is good enough is no then presumably they would vote to peserve the status quo?
The last thing the party should do is to give Farage the oxygen of publicity. Ignore the man and campaign in a positive and constructive way. That’s something Sir Nicholas Clegg failed to do.
You say “One of the hallmarks of an extremist politician is their connections to shadowy organisations”. I think we could argue that Facebook is such a shadowy organisation, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank could also be so regarded.
I’d also avoid attaching the terrorist label to Mr Corbyn. It’s simply echoing a Tory tabloids’ smear – counterproductive – and maybe one day you’ll need to do business with him.
I can recommend the article in today’s Guardian about the Weimar Republic, the centenary of whose birth is this year. Perhaps the motto might be; “Evil triumphs when good men remain silent”. Alternatively, Pastor Bonhoeffer’s famous words come to mind as well.
I strongly disagree with the statement that “The growth of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party has been extremely frightening to watch.”
For me, it has been good! I disagree with Farage’s policy prescription on Brexit. But anything that involves people in politics in an engaging rumbustious way is to be welcomed. Farage is not an undemocratic sub-fascist which seems to be the gist of the article. Of course any political cause needs its bogeymen.
We need to be as equally passionate and angry (well in a nice Lib Dem way!) advocates for our policies! not prim theorists. I am angry that we are destroying our planet, not getting all children well-educated, killing people because our NHS is not well enough funded, and not being “tough on poverty, tough on the causes of poverty.”
I hope that we will see Lib Dem politicians – old and new engaging these issues with a renewed passion as that’s been a little lacking up until now!
The test for all Lib Dems reading this is this. What will we be dong Friday week? Hopefully exhausted! But will we be back out on the streets still delivering leaflets and engaging with people? That’s the answer to Farage!
Typo? should ‘baker’ be baNker?
John Marriott rightly identifies the ultimate “bigger than Brexit” issue. The struggle to keep the UK in the European Union has to be seen as part of a wider struggle against the dark forces whose banishment from our continent was one of the reasons for the creation of the EU. The risk of a resurgence of Fascism is probably greater than at any time since the 1930s and 1940s. Within the UK sub-plot of the psychodrama is a dangerous realignment of the right – but the seeds of something more dire are being scattered across national boundaries. The struggle ahead will probably require Liberals (again across Europe) to be blunter than hitherto in naming evil, dehumanising forces for what they are. Let us indeed learn from Bonhoeffer!
Evil triumphs when you bend over backward too be nice to idiots. If telling the truth about their stupidity offends them, well tough, stupidity should never go unchallenged. Brexit is being driven by the over fifties, they want to return to their youth, well they can’t and they are being stupid believing they can. Before someone says, but I’m over 50 and I don’t believe that, well snap but we are in a minority.
John Marriott rightly identifies the ultimate “bigger than Brexit” issue. The struggle to keep the UK in the European Union has to be seen as part of a wider struggle against the dark forces whose banishment from our continent was one of the reasons for the creation of the EU. The risk of a resurgence of Fascism is probably greater than at any time since the 1930s and 1940s. A sub-plot of the Tory psychodrama is a dangerous realignment of the right – but the seeds of something more dire are being scattered across national boundaries. The struggle ahead will probably require Liberals (again across Europe) to be blunter than hitherto in naming evil, dehumanising forces for what they are. Let us indeed learn from Bonhoeffer!
frankie, I have come to a similar conclusion: “Make America great again”, “Make Britain great again” appeals to the nostalgia of a certain group. There is more to what these types of slogans are trying to do, but I do think an appeal to nostalgia is part of it.
Fergal Keane’s programme on South Africa (BBC4 15/5/19) has admissions and insights. He did not expect the corruption of the ANC government after Mandela, but the verkrampte in the Afrikaner government forecast that.
Guns were used in the so-called ‘homelands’ of Grand Apartheid. The ANC invaded without weapons, and took casualties.
There is mention of black on black violence, but not that an answer was regional elections. There were white people in the ANC, mainly communists. Cuban troops were ignored.
A picture of Desmond Tutu says nothing about the quiet acceptance of the mainly white congregation of a black Archbishop from England. No mention of a split in the Dutch Reformed Church.
Mandela used his trial to denounce the entire apartheid system and said he was “willing to die”. There is no mention of diplomatic pressure warning that execution risked civil war and sanctions.
There were NO pictures of Mandela in prison. Western magazines guessed.
He came out of prison when HE wanted to, hand in hand with his second wife, delaying media schedules of the entire world.
No mention of a white minority MP in the Afrikaner parliament for the Progressive Reform Party. The PM said “You don’t love me”. She said “I hate you”.
A verligte cabinet member pushed out his verkrampte predecessor, won a general election, providing five years for changes and negotiation, including with life sentence prisoner Mandela.
An innovation in the system of election by party list was the photograph on the ballot paper of the number one candidate. Mandela for the ANC. Many electors thought that they had voted for him to be President. In fact there was a parliamentary vote. International observers declared the elections free and fair.
Out of prison the ANC were unsure of whether Mandela had made concessions, so they made him ANC Vice-President, took him to Zambia and got to know him. The ANC President died. Mandela said “throw your weapons in the sea”.
Broadcasters should allow at least three hours.
“Ignore him and he will go away”, well that has worked so well. We can’t ignore him, because we think it is beneath us to converse with demagogues, they need to be smashed into the ground, because if you don’t they won’t ignore you and they will smash up the country we live in. We live in time that are not “nice”, being ” nice” isn’t seen as a virtue it is seen as weakness. Ask yourself this when did the Lib Dems get taken seriously again? The answer of cause is when they ceased to wibble on about compromises, forsook the plea to tagalong and said “Bollocks to Brexit”. If that upsets Brexiteers, well you can’t go through life scared of upsetting people, sometimes you just have to accept some people really should be upset.
Predictably, there are often groans when the context of any discussion on LDV becomes too technical for many on the question of Economics. And yet, we shouldn’t be too apologetic about that. The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, and the subsequent world war that followed, costing some 60 million lives, cannot be understood outside the context of the world economic crisis that broke out in 1929.
Prior to the crisis, Weimar Germany’s fascist movement was a marginal phenomenon, prone to street violence against leftists and Jews but, all the same, by and large politically insignificant. The Nazi Party received only 2.8 percent in the 1928 federal elections. Not a dissimilar figure to what we might have expected here at one time from the far right. This changed rapidly as the economic crisis deepened. The German government’s harsh austerity measures brought unbelievable suffering to the population. Unemployment skyrocketed from 1.2 million 1929 to 6 million in 1932. The rest, as they say, is history.
So contrary to recent popular opinion, a misconception fostered by conservative/neoliberal forces, it wasn’t the inflation of the 1920s which brought about the rise of Hitler. We should not accept, as an excuse for German imposed austerity on the EU, the German fear of inflation that almost destroyed their country. It wasn’t the inflation – it was the austerity of the 1930s.
So “standing up to Farage” has to mean standing up to the austerity economics of the European Union. Nothing less will do it I’m afraid. The question of whether we can best do that by staying in the EU or leaving is debatable. I’m not saying that it is totally impossible to significantly reform the EU but you’d have to be an extreme optimist to think that was at all likely.
Clegg’s error was to engage with Farage as a ‘legitimate’ political opponent. All this did was validate UKIP and its then leader. Clegg also wasn’t very good in the debates. The correct approach with the likes of Farage is to attack, but not engage, because we are not fishing in the same electoral pond as he is. We don’t need to worry about us giving him any more publicity, as he has too much already. Our aim should be to mobilize opposition to him.
As for “do[ing] business with” Corbyn, well at the moment that’s what the Tories are doing. It’s doing neither major party any favours. Corbyn’s links with terrorists are a fact, and cannot be explained away as “tabloid smears” or “seeking dialogue” (Corbyn doesn’t know the first thing about back-channel diplomacy). The Lib Dem position in the event of another inconclusive election result is no deal with either Tories or Labour under their present leaderships.
The Problem with Farage is that he mobilises leavers to vote who otherwise, with only Tories and UKIP on offer, might have stayed at home. His voters cannot be won by arguments: people who still want Brexit and no deal are immune to them. They must be neutralised.
The answer is maximum mobilisation of remainers. It does not look bad, and here Farage is also helping. The most important goal is to somewhere harvest as many Labour remainers as possible, ideally for the LibDems, but if they remain loyal to Labour, that’s better than them not voting at all.
Pity that many UK-MEPs will again be useless idiots. We can only hope that this non-party fails to align with Rassemblement National, Lega, PiS, Fidesz, AfD, etc.
The effect on UK-politics will be mostly psychological: the Tories are likely to become the no-deal Brexit party, but with a further eroded effective number of votes for such policy. Labour-votes will not count clearly in the remain-camp, but the policy-overlap with Tories will shrink further post-May, and will kill any soft-Brexit compromise without a PV.
And now it will become interesting: revocation and the WA are compatible with a PV, no deal is not. Being an illegal act of political, diplomatic, economic, security-, and social vandalism, the EU would not grant another extension to put this option to the people. The EU has seen enough of MPs ducking the hard questions and abusing the British people; this time, MPs must take full responsibility themselves. Besides, a no-deal Brexit can be quickly fixed after Nov 1 (by ratifying the WA, anyhow an unavoidable step in this scenario), but only if Parliament is free to do so, i.e. unconstrained by a public vote. I also find it hard to imagine that they would grant PM Johnson’s request for an extension to hold a GE. He has not made many friends abroad.
So the real options will be no-deal, remain, the WA, the latter two probably decided in a PV. Nothing will have changed.
@ Arnold Kiel,
“His (ie Farage’s) voters cannot be won by arguments: people who still want Brexit and no deal are immune to them. They must be neutralised.”
It’s odd that you should say that. Because in my experience, EU-ophiles, and you are probably the most EU-ophilitic on this blog, are the most impervious to rational argument themselves. We can explain, until we are blue in the face, just why there is a general rise of fascism in the EU as a result of the unnecessary imposition of austerity economics – but it’s all to no effect.
The EU is what it is. The rise of the fascists in no mystery. Take responsibility for Farage, le Pen, Salvini etc. They are your creation.
I doubt you will change. So, maybe we should take a leaf out of your book and advocate “neutralisation” of EU-ophiles and starting with EU apparatchiks?
@Peter Martin
You are right to say that the hyperinflation of the early 1920s did not lead to Hitler. Indeed, thanks to the efforts of politicians like Gustav Stresemann, inflation was largely beaten and economic progress was being achieved, before the Wall Street crash and the subsequent economic slump at the end of the decade saw a revival in the Nazi Party’s fortunes.
What really did for the Weimar Republic was the refusal of the SPD to engage after things kicked off, particularly between Nazis and communists, but also the famous ‘thirty four parties’ that the republic’s system of PR threw up, not unlike the situation in Israel today. It was to stop this situation recurring after the first West German Federal Elections of 1949 that the 5% ‘Sperrklausel’ was introduced for the 1953 elections.
To those who say that PR will produce Weimar style parliamentary chaos I would just say that, if ANY party can get at least 5% of the popular in a General Election, it deserves to be represented in Parliament.
I sometimes wonder whether Farage and his UKIP colleagues might have found themselves and their policies the subject of revealing scrutiny if they had achieved the representation in Westminster to which their share of the vote in recent General Elections might have entitled them under PR instead of being allowed to carp on the sidelines.
Alex Maxfie
Clegg’s error was to engage with Farage as a ‘legitimate’ political opponent. All this did was validate UKIP and its then leader.
Clegg’s key error was to say this about his argument with Farage:
“Farage wants to turn the clock back, he doesn’t like modern Britain, he wants to dismiss so many of the big modern features of modern life – I want to embrace them”
A disaster, because most people who voted for Leave did so because they want to turn the clock back. Ok, to a mythical golden era, but the Brexiteers play on this by claiming that’s what leaving the EU will give us.
People are unhappy because over the years the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. So, do you blame them for wanting to turn the clock back to reverse that?
Ask people in almost any job and they will say life has become more stressful and less happy than it used to be. This seems to be something to do with the obsession with competition in everything, claiming this is how to make things better, but it doesn’t always work like that. Clegg’s own insistence on supporting the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, in direct contradiction to the Coalition Agreement was support for more competition that now almost everyone recognises as a disaster – as we told him at the Party Conference that tried to stop him on this but he completely ignored us.
Privatisation and the reduction of funding to local government so that it has almost no power to anything these days, is all part of people thinking that we ordinary sorts have lost the sort of control we once had in how things were run. So “Vote Leave to bring back control” sounded very attractive.
The growth of inequality in our society started abruptly in 1979 and has continued ever since. So, are the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg the key opponents in politics today to how our country has been run since the 1979 general election?
Just maybe they are not, but getting support by blaming the EU for what has made people unhappy since then has helped them cover up the real reasons – aided on both sides by Clegg.
Nationalism is on the rise everywhere in response to anxieties about globalisation, immigration, and dilution of national identity.
We can see it in Russia and China’s reversion to the concept of a sphere of influence in former Soviet states and the South China Sea, in Trumps America First sloganeering and in Erdogan’s Turkey.
In Europe, far-right parties have risen in the Scandinavian high welfare state countries including Sweden (Sweden Democrats), Finland (The Finns) and Denmark (Danish People’s Party as well as in Europe’s strongest economies – Germany (Alternative for Germany) and the Netherlands (Freedom Party), in or outside the Eurozone – UK, Switzerland (Swiss People’s Party), Hungary (Fiddez and Jobik).
Even in Spain with its bloody history of facism and civil war the far-right Vox party is gaining ground. The BBC carried a report last night of a Spanish market gardener running for Mayor. He acknowledged that his business was reliant on migrant labour as Spanish workers would not take agricultural jobs, but was nevertheless running on an anti-immigrant platform.
When Gordon Brown was touting British jobs for British workers it resonated with many in labour’s heartlands. Such sentiments have long held sway in traditional socially conservative working class communities.
It falls to Liberals and Social Democrats to push-back against reactionary rhetoric whether it comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.
Peter Martin: Well it was the German inflation which brought on the harsh measures so you are just splitting hairs.
It seems that the vast majority of Conservative voters are Brexiteers so aspiring Conservative politicians have to take the same line unless they wish to lose their seats. How many of them actually believe in Leaving the EU, no deal etc ? Many of them said the exact opposite at the time of the Referendum. No wonder people have lost trust.
Boris Johnson seems likely to be the next leader as he does not believe in anything except his right to be Prime Minister and he looks like the only one who could beat Labour.
@ John Marriott,
“What really did for the Weimar Republic was the refusal of the SPD to engage after things kicked off, particularly between Nazis and communists”
I’m not quite sure what you mean by that but it’s true that the left generally made huge mistakes.
To say the system had failed was an understatement. Virtually the entire youth population was unemployed in 1932. Spending hours in soup kitchen lines became a daily reality for millions of Germans. The German population quickly lost hope in Parliamentary democracy and the system’s ability to improve their situation. Ordinary people tend not to understand macroeconomic theory too well. When they are without a job or a home, but they see someone from a different ethnic background doing relatively well, they don’t think in terms that the Govt perhaps should run a larger deficit!
The last federal elections were held in March 1933. Despite the Nazi repression, the KPD still received 13 percent, and the SPD 18 percent. The Nazis had not received an absolute majority, but were able to form a minority Govt. Previously, instead of forming an anti-fascist alliance, the KPD went in for the nonsense of concluding that the Social Democrats represented a form of “social fascism”. The KPD’s inability to distinguish between democratic, authoritarian and fascist expressions of capitalist rule proved to be its undoing.
The SPD were the political party that identified most with the Weimar Republic. They committed themselves to defending the republic “from attacks by both left and right”. The Lib Dems of their time? The SPD participated in a governing coalition with more rightwing parties from 1928 to 1930. From 1930 to 1932 they tolerated the authoritarian, right wing government of Heinrich Brüning as a sort of lesser evil opposed to the Nazis. Brüning’s solution to the economic crisis was austerity and deflation. He savaged the welfare state, raised indirect taxes and pushed down wages. Big mistake!
So, by that time they couldn’t present themsleves as offering any solution to the obvious disaster that was the German economy. Many former SPD voters sided with the Nazis in a straight choice between them and the KPD.
The easiest way of standing up to Farage is to quote his words back to him with a vicious verdict on them. He depends on people taking his words as gospel and uses sound bites that are easy to refute. We should point to a higher value system than the one he uses.
@ Joe B,
“……reactionary rhetoric whether it comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum” ???
It’s, by definition, impossible for reactionary rhetoric to come from the left of the political spectrum.
Look up the meaning of the word yourself in the Oxford Dictionary 🙂
SYNONYMS
right-wing, conservative, rightist, ultra-conservative, alt-right
blimpish, diehard, traditionalist, conventional, traditional, old-fashioned, unprogressive
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/reactionary
“Well it was the German inflation which brought on the harsh measures so you are just splitting hairs.”
One advantage of a huge inflation is that it rapidly reduces the Govt debt in real terms. Normally when a recession hits that’s what the neoliberals fret about as they endeavour to ‘cut back’. There was really no reason to do that and plunge the economy into deep depression.
The Nazi economists understood that. They wanted to rearm to fight another war and they had the wit to realise that if you have workers and you have steel then you can build tanks. If you have soldiers you can run an army. The money isn’t a problem, for a currency issuing government, if the productive resources are there in the economy. Pointing this out doesn’t make anyone a Nazi sympathiser! There were a lot of Keynesian ideas around at the time. It’s just a pity they were implemented by the Nazis as a form of military Keynesianism rather than the Socialists and Social Democrats as social Keynesianism.
We should learn from the past but by learning we shouldn’t assume we have the answer for the mistakes they made. The problem the Lexiteers have is they believe if the predecessors had just tacked a little this way or that Hitler and co would not have occurred, the answer is of cause much simpler, have nothing to do with them. Now Peter and co fail to understand this and assume that they are much cleverer and and can bend Farage, Johnson and Co to their advantage, they are wrong and their stupidity will come back to bite them.
As to Clegg, he came from a privilaged back ground and had much more in common with Cameron than me or people like me, neither had any understanding of the issues that concern the average Joe or Joette and more worrying had not an inkling that they didn’t. Both a waste of space, both caused much damage, all be it Cameron achieved more damage than Clegg.
The Brexit Party is simply a convenient focal point for leave voters to make a show of strength in the usually farcically low turnout EU elections foisted on the nation by a squabbling indecisive parliament. It’s a way of saying “Look , we should have left on March 29th, Get on with it”. Some Remainers are trying to make more of it than is there to drum up votes for The Sky Is Falling: The Director’s Cut (4K Special Edition) 2.0.
“We all want a second referendum, but without one Brexit cannot be discarded. The consequences for trust in democracy in Britain would be very harmful.”
Really? Brexit can in fact be discarded by revoking article 50. That would arguably serve democracy very well, for the 2016 referendum – which the public never asked to have inflicted upon them – was invalidated by proven electoral fraud. It is the willful failure to address that issue which is immoral and undemocratic.
In this EU election you can’t stand up to Farage. He has no manifesto for a reason; “Out means Out” is a simple message that unites ‘Leavers’ without any inconvenient details about what “Out” actually means.”Bollocks to Brexit” does exactly the same thing; it ignores any criticism of the EU and the 52% of those who voted.
Both slogans ask a yes/no question and, like most such simple questions, solve nothing.
Most of the UK population are unaware of the name of their MEP and would be unable to name any MEP; apart from Farage. When this election is over whatever is agreed in parliament will almost certainly be put to a confirmatory referendum and then, not now, will be the time for sensible arguments about the UK’s future.
@ frankie,
I don’t think anyone is suggesting Nigel Farage is another Hitler! At least I hope he won’t turn out to be quite so bad. Nevertheless, we have to ask if the creation of far right demagogues is something we can avoid.
My take is that there isn’t much, if any, difference between the different races or Nationalities. So we can’t just say that the 1930’s rise of the far right in Germany was something peculiar to Germany. Or even in Italy or Spain. Given the same set of circumstances there will always be a Hitler, or a Mussolini, or a Franco. So there is no point in just arguing that we shouldn’t vote for bad people. Or that fascism is an evil force and we should have nothing to do with it. Of course that’s true, but if the social and economic conditions for fascism and the rise of the far right are there, that’s what we’ll get. Period.
Ergo: Don’t create the conditions in the first place! If the rise of the far right in Europe is a problem change them. EU supporters and the EU PTB need to take responsibility for the problem they themselves have created. They should move to ‘drain the swamp’.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/01/will-far-right-triumph-europe-2019
Nigel Farage has dismissed a Brexit pact with Boris Johnson, claiming that he cannot trust him given that he voted for Mrs May’s deal.
I want a front row seat for this scrap between the two trustworthy or not, opponents.
@ Jayne Mansfield “Nigel Farage has dismissed a Brexit pact with Boris Johnson, claiming that he cannot trust him”.
The heavenly twins ? Snake oil salesmen the pair of them…… though they do probably tell the truth about each other. What I wonder would a fully trained psychiatrist make of their respective fragile egos. It would make an interesting case study.
@ David Raw,
Why waste NHS resources?
My preference would be to give Mr Farage the BBC airtime he has in spades but still whines about, in a debate with Mr Johnson, (a Farage /Clegg type debate on EU membership and their views.
I am sure that it would be fascinating viewing, incorporating their differing or otherwise views on honesty, trust, democracy, betrayal in politics’.
There must be a free slot now the Jeremy Kyle Show has been taken off air.