A Reform ‘Civil War’ seemed like an entirely avoidable disaster.
JUPPLANDIA
In Britain, the large percentage of the country looking for sane and traditional policies, for some version of the tackling of vast debt, corruption and insane ideology that is occurring under the bold and pragmatic 2nd Trump term, are in for a long wait.
The British political figure who over the last 20 years in the UK has established a reputation as a superb campaigner and a determined opponent of Establishment and Globalist policies is Nigel Farage. Farage is the only UK Populist to have become a household name known even to those who don’t follow politics. He is credited with being the man who forced the Conservative Party to call a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, and the man without whom Brexit would not have occurred.
Today, Farage is the most powerful figure in the Reform Party, a third party challenger to the Establishment Labour, Conservative and ‘traditional third party’ Liberal Democrats. Reform have been leading in recent polls with both main parties deeply unpopular and with the Labour Parties huge electoral victory being more a consequence of the absurdities of the British first past the post system and the collapse of the Conservative Party with a split of the ‘right wing’ vote between the Conservatives and Reform, than it ever was an endorsement of Keir Starmer and his party.
In recent days, however, something of a civil war has erupted in Reform ranks, threatening their recent polling success. Back in November former co-leader of Reform Ben Habib quit the party, citing the undemocratic and unprofessional structure of the party and Farage’s refusal to delegate and develop a front bench of recognised leaders. Now the internal party divisions (which we should consider pretty ridiculous to exist at all when the part only has 5 MPs) have broken out even more fiercely. Muslim Chairman of the Party Zia Yusuf, with Farage’s strong backing, has reported another senior figure, Rupert Lowe, to the police for an alleged ‘hate crime’ incident.
This comes after Lowe became very popular with younger and grassroots supporters of Reform by taking a tougher line than Farage on multiple key issues, and after Lowe had publicly criticised Farage for being a ‘messianic’ figure while wondering if he would actually be able to deliver the kind of changes Reform voters want.
The details of the row between Zia Yusuf and Rupert Lowe remain unclear, with some suggesting a physical confrontation and other descriptions seeming to be little more than Lowe raising his voice (several months ago) in an argument with Yusuf. Britain’s laws are however now so draconian, and our police and courts so obsessed with protecting certain categories of people, and so likely to deliver politicised verdicts from our own corrupt judges, that any such referral to the police becomes very dangerous for a figure like Lowe.
One would think that Yusuf and Farage would be aware of the damage internal infighting does, given the fact that Reform in part only exists because of the Conservative Party inability to contain such feuds and divisions and present a united front. Voters despise disunity and chaos and don’t lend their vote to parties engaged in obvious infighting. Calling the police into such a dispute, again given the highly political nature of British police today, is either an act of gross incompetence or an act that could only be explained by some genuine significant crime.
Most people would say that hurty words are not worth throwing away all of your chances of forming a government in the foreseeable future.
Before we talk about Farage individually though it’s probably fairest to point out the differences that exist between the British situation and the US one. Hopes that Farage would be able to be a British Trump (just like an earlier populist hope that Boris Johnson could have taken on such a role) may be unrealistic not just because of the personalities or betrayal of these figures, but because Britain is in a lot more trouble than the US was, generally speaking.
So let’s be honest about those broader elements first. At best we are now in the position that MAGA were in at the start of the stolen Biden term. But really our position is worse than that in multiple ways:
- Even at its worst the US had a majority of people who were sane and simply wanted their leaders to deliver a decent economy and prioritise US citizens.
- Trump and the MAGA movement gradually broke the Uniparty stranglehold and returned one of the main parties to its voters. No such change has occurred with the traditional main party of the Right in the UK. This means that change or return to sanity starts from a weaker position than it started from in the US.
- The US has a federal system and is a huge nation. The advantage of that is that Governors who want to do so have a lot of ability to protect the citizens of their State from an insane administration, a wildly corrupt system and a federal government acting against their interests. State rights and powers still offer the ability to create centres of sane policy and decent rule. The UK doesn’t have that-councils and local politics have very little ability to resist a central government that is malign or insane. The small size of the UK means that radical central government policies have a devastating and unavoidable impact everywhere.
- The powers of a Prime Minister are more limited than those of a US President. This contrasts with point 3 above, but is devastating in combination with it. What it means is that a Prime Minister with a large majority can do virtually anything as an elected dictator, because it is his government acting and it’s got the supposed endorsement of Parliament. He can’t issue sweeping executive orders but he doesn’t need to-just that Parliamentary majority allows him to force through any legislation no matter how damaging or insane and he has huge leeway to simply decide vast spending on a whim. It’s even harder for the next administration, if it’s saner, to reverse these things unless it too has a huge majority. A sane PM following an insane one cannot write Executive Orders to remove insane policy and spending. The PM before him could have spent money on anything and it’s actually even harder to halt or recover than it is in the US with corrupt judicial opposition to reform. What we have in the UK then is a system in which its even easier for a malign administration to do malign things, and even harder for a benign administration to subsequently reverse them.
- The UK version of the Deep State is older, more entrenched and even more removed from the interests of its own people than the US Deep State. It simply has more practice in ignoring the wishes of the majority of the public and delivering its own managed decline or deliberate destruction policies instead. The British Civil Service is an older and more cunning version of the US permanent administrative State, while perversely being better at subverting elected leaders also makes their activities less obvious. Many British people refuse to see that Britain even has a Deep State or that entities like the Foreign Office have long been as partisan, activist, corrupt and malign as any US body.
- The alternative media ecosphere is much weaker in the UK than in the US. If you are talking of outsider narratives (both those that are true and those that are false) and responses to events, most British people never even encounter them. We have no equivalent of figures like Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson, let alone Alex Jones. Russell Brand has a large number of online followers, but doesn’t shift the political needle (he didn’t when supporting then Labour leader Ed Miliband, he doesn’t now as a figure questioning Establishment lines). The percentage of the UK population aware of and following even successful alternative voices (people like Sargon of Akkad/Carl Benjamin for instance) is tiny. Alternative media in the UK hasn’t broken through the same way it has in the US. Consequently mainstream media even with declining figures and sales remains much more powerful and many more people are brainwashed with purely Globalist interpretations of events.
- The UK has an unwritten constitution. Many of the elements that were formal, from Magna Carta to the Common Law to the English Bill of Rights, have been gradually ignored, considered obsolete, and superseded by subsequent formal legislation that ignores traditional protections for the British citizen. So even while England invented many of the elements of holding the powerful to account these have long since atrophied without the formal support of a written Constitution. Americans who have seen even their written and rather clear version frequently ignored will understand that ancient laws long since abandoned, or even older traditions no longer respected, have little protection save the decency and honesty of modern leaders. Leaders who possess neither decency nor honesty ignore unwritten limits. Respect for unwritten rules only works with people who probably don’t need written ones, and definitely doesn’t work with modern Marxist Progressive Globalists who despise their own people.
- The British class system still has a powerful effect. Almost every topic divides on class lines, and the people holding power are almost invariably from middle class, university indoctrinated backgrounds where they have in both the family and wider social spheres and their educational experience received nothing but Globalist viewpoints. The people most harmed by these policies and views, the white working class, have the least access to power and influence of any demographic in the UK. While the US also has an entrenched rich class serving their own interests, it does have overall more social mobility than the UK.
- Britain has a much larger Muslim population proportionally speaking, than the US. The British Labour Party has heavily aligned with the Muslim block vote, with Labour NPs in much of the parties urban and northern centres now dependent on Muslim mosque organised activists and voters. It is the Muslim block vote thar keeps Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan in power. But all across the country the Muslim ‘community’ is much more politically engaged, demanding, active and involved in quid pro quo corruption, lobbying and intimidation than the native British are. The British Labour Party and police are now effectively a kind of British Muslim Brotherhood, including to the extent of supporting terrorists, allowing intimidation of Jews and white Britons, and introducing Islamophobia laws which are Muslim blasphemy laws. Ilhan Omar and the like have not been quite that successful in the US.
- Britain is not blessed with Donald Trump or Elon Musk. We have no equivalent to these figures, and the importance of these two men alone is enormous. What they supply is independent billionaire resources prepared to do good, which is an absolute requirement to counteract the vast networks of power built by NGOs and the theft of State spending, and to counteract the aligned spending of destructive billionaires like George Soros or Bill Gates who both fund and receive funds from those corrupt NGOs and activist companies and organisations founded with misappropriated and stolen State spending. In Britain, almost all the money is still controlled by those who want Britain to fail or who are profiting from its failure.
To be fair to Farage then, who doesn’t have the independent wealth of Donald Trump let alone Elon Musk with which to fight, who is dealing with a sometimes much more brainwashed electorate (64% of British people are rabid supporters of the Ukraine War who told pollsters that Trump was unacceptably rude to Zelenskky) and who is doing so in the context of a nation already more broken and destroyed than the US, saving Britain or Making Britain Great Again is a harder task even than the task that faced Donald Trump.
But, with all that said, Farage’s behaviour is itself deeply concerning. He should be well aware by now of the urgency of the task. He has the Trump and Musk example of what works and what is necessary both for victory and for worthwhile policy following victory. And he has the Conservative Party collapse as an example of what doesn’t work and what disastrously fails.
These are like bumper rails in a bowling alley, the guards that let very small children bowl successfully. It should be easy to use MAGA success and mainstream Conservative failure to tell you what people want and what set of policies offer an attractive alternative to mainstream Globalism. Despite the media brainwashing on specific pay-op campaigns like COVID and Ukraine, the British public still want things like real borders, lower taxes, spending money at home instead of abroad, and concentrating on our security, peace and identity rather than on wars or crazy ideology. People still want the potholes filled in, the rubbish collected and the streets safe by day or night. And the mainstream doesn’t do those basic things anymore.
Even the trajectory of Boris Johnson had an obvious lesson. When he was Populist, he was popular. He broke the Red Wall and secured an 80 seat majority. Him and his party would still be in power if they had governed as Populists-if they had delivered a real Brexit, defied EU threats and bullying, not done a shoddy deal, and then even more importantly defied Globalism on COVID and Ukraine. If they had just put Britain first, they would still be in power. Instead Boris either buckled or was broken, was either always insincere or always at heart a coward. He went from loved to loathed because he went from Populist to Globalist.
It’s not as if Farage did not have enough pointers, is it?
At first he seemed to play it right. Reform surged as the only viable alternative to Establishment Globalism. A few other decent parties were just too tiny to ever grow. But Reform had built enough momentum to be a serious contender. At the election they got 14% of the vote. That sounds minimal…but Labour only got 19% of the real overall vote. Before the internal fight, Reform were 2% above Labour and more than that ahead of the Conservatives. At the last election they got over a 100 2nd places and their vote has grown since then. This was a third party with a chance of finally getting strong enough to break that psychological barrier ‘I won’t vote for them because they can’t win’.
At the same time Labour since ‘winning’ have governed as an even more self hating, Muslim controlled, war hungry, authoritarian Marxist Globalist nightmare than even their critics feared they would be. Labour have attacked pensioners, farmers, and everyone who objects to the murder and rape of children. They have imprisoned people for thought crimes while releasing violent criminals. They drove an innocent grandfather who called them corrupt to suicide with an unjust imprisonment. They are throwing billions and billions away on Globalist insanities, and wrecking the energy infrastructure of the country with Net Zero. The economy is stagnant. People are genuinely struggling. Energy prices are the highest in Europe. And the government is led by people with zero charisma and zero understanding of real lives and real people.
Despite the successful brainwashing of the country via mainstream media on Ukraine, most other Globalist positions are widely despised, especially on immigration levels. There are plenty of open goals to score in by attacking Labour vigorously, and even the Ukraine narrative could be pushed back against by sharing facts the public aren’t hearing from other sources.
There is no easier task than defeating the British Labour Party. All Farage needed to do was behave as he did on Brexit, and ruthlessly mock and destroy the Establishment positions. Stay true to what people thought you were there to be.
But what has Farage done while Reform have surged to over 200,000 members (bigger than the Conservative Party) and over 20% of the vote (bigger than the Labour Party)? He’s risked it all by fighting a war within the party and by refusing to share control of the party and develop and respect other leaders.
He’s attacked Tommy Robinson, a move that infuriates people who might vote Reform while never having any chance in hell of persuading or assuaging the kind of people who hate both Reform and Tommy Robinson. It’s a move apparently driven mainly by snobbery, which gains no votes and alienates those who might vote for him.
He’s praised Keir Starmer, when people who would vote for Reform, and even many others, want honest opposition, not cozy consensus around failed and despised leaders who lucked into office because their predecessor was even more despised.
He’s supported the Establishment line on Ukraine, which might please a few wet Tory conformists of the Polite Right (British versions of the American RINO) but doesn’t please anyone else. Again, the Ukraine fanatic is primarily a Labour voter, and would never vote for a Farage Party anyway.
He’s seen the example of Trump, and since Trump’s spectacular victory telling him that unashamed Populism that isn’t afraid of being called names can and will win, he’s done the opposite. He’s been conformist and cowardly. He’s followed mainstream media talking points. He’s attacked people he should support, driven out people he needs, and elevated people like Zia Yusuf who are a lot less popular than Habib or Lowe and seem to have an ulterior agenda.
Where Trump has been honest and bold on borders and deportations, Farage has been weak and unconvincing, doing little to attack the continued flood of migrants into Britain, while claiming that any level of deportations is next to impossible to achieve. The line he offers here is exactly the same as the two main parties-we can’t do it, it would be racist, we don’t care what you want, and Diversity is Our Strength. That’s not what anyone wants from a supposed Populist alternative to that failed consensus and that policy of disaster and lies.
Precisely when even many immigrant communities are just as fed up of these lies and these policies as ethnic British voters are, precisely when it would be the easiest thing in the world to follow Trump’s example and gain support for it, Farage is being weak in the way he has always been especially weak. He’s prepared to condemn EU bureaucrats, but not British ones and not that shared policy of open borders which millions of us detest. And he’s been pathetically weak on wokeness and on Islamic crimes for a very long time.
The sad reality is that Farage now has an established pattern. He creates, joins or builds a genuinely strong new force which attracts all of us sick to death of Marxist Globalist rule. He poses as a genuinely Populist figure, a defender of those the Establishment harms. And he is, for a time, a brilliant campaigner. He builds every group he joins, it has to be acknowledged. On Brexit he was the most gifted campaigner the UK has seen since Churchill. But it worked because on that one issue he was utterly fearless and utterly contemptuous of the Establishment line and the figures he was fighting. On everything else, though, those instincts seem to abandon him.
On everything else he refuses to share the limelight with others, and jealously destroys anyone else in his new party who becomes well known. He insists on total control, and then doesn’t really do anything with it. Each time the movement he builds looks like it’s really getting somewhere, it implodes. He helped build UKIP. It was growing. It was winning. Then there was the usual infighting, the expulsion of rivals, followed by Farage himself leaving. The party left behind has been broken, and all the promise squandered. The Brexit Party gets set up, in a short history has its own expulsions, then becomes Reform.
And now the UKIP template of Farage getting it wrong just when it was going so well is repeating with Reform.
Any true campaigner would have been well aware of just how disastrous involving the police in an inter-party shouting match would be. Never mind the absurdity of a country where hurty words are criminal offences. It’s even more absurd to not know, as an adult, how to have an argument and not call the police. It’s even more absurd, as a canny political operator, to gift that disaster to your enemies at the point where you are just beginning to overtake them in the polls and just beginning to look like a serious opposition who could govern the country.
Forget that they only have 5 MPs. With a 2% greater drop in the Conservative vote, or even with an electoral pact with the Conservatives, they could easily have been the 2nd largest party in Parliament already. Only massively negative impacts from the first past of the post system made their millions of votes ineffective because they were too widely spread and not concentrated in ways that gain seats. But people have to know that, and people have to think you can win.
The most basic part of that equation is not publicly calling the police on each other like a domestic couple who get drunk and knock each other about. It’s criminally stupid, more than it’s actually likely to be criminal. again to be fair, there are others involved, but Farage is the main man.
Now Trump may have had famous spats with Republican rivals….but was he ever dumb enough to call the FBI?
So it’s only one of two things. It’s a level of political unprofessionalism and naivety that is astounding. Or it’s deliberate self destruction. It’s a pattern of drawing hope and votes towards a banner, building an army that wants real change, and then throwing the banner down in the dirt at a crucial point so yet another battle is lost.
Britain’s task to save itself was already harder than saving the US. To the delight of their enemies and Globalists everywhere, Reform have just made it harder for themselves if they really do want to fight and win before Britain no longer even exists anymore in a form that any of us would recognise and like.
This article (Is Nigel Farage Controlled Opposition?) was created and published by Jupplandia and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: sputniknews.com
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