Hyping Farage

Has the New Statesman got a Nigel Farage fixation? It appears to find Reform's leader/owner beguiling. But there's more to it than that. Their coverage has gone from simply covering what he's saying and doing to (arguably) boosting his project. Before Christmas, the august Andrew Marr was asking, in all seriousness, if Farage could become the next Prime Minister. The latest podcast speculates about the ability of Donald Trump and Elon Musk to destroy him, as if Farage is a figure of equal social weight. And in the magazine since last June, we've had articles like 'Reform isn't going anywhere', 'Reform could haunt a Labour government', 'Reform is Labour's problem now', 'How dangerous is Reform to Labour?', and 'Will Reform win in your local council?'. It's one thing for the right wing press to big up Reform, and quite another for the centre left's magazine of choice to indulge it.

This latest entry in the sub-genre comes courtesy of George Eaton, who has set out to explain "why Farage is turning left". This follows comments Farage made to Politics Joe last week in which he said there was common ground between him and Jeremy Corbyn. They are both "anti-establishment" and critical of the European Union. He said Corbyn's critique of the EU was couched in oppositional terms to big business, a position he happened to share. Brussels is "good for big banks and big businesses and bad for everybody else. Well, he was pretty much right." What Eaton then supplies is evidence for Reform's "left turn" - water nationalisation (cos Labour won't do it), and protecting British steel.

Should Labour be worried? Judging by the panicky anonymous "red wall" MP quotes that accompany such pieces, some are bricking it. And of course they are. Finding a Labour parliamentarian who understands the people Reform attracts is as rare as a tin of Quality Street with a decent amount of triangles. As previously explained, there are hard limits to the extent Reform can become "pro-working class" and adopt left-sounding positions. And when such "policy" is taken on board, they're adjuncts and nice-sounding afterthoughts. Does anyone seriously believe that a Farage-led government would renationalise anything, especially when his City pals benefit handsomely from the private monopolies that own essential infrastructure?

The extreme right have form for tacking left when occasion demands. Reform is not a fascist party, but its antecedents were. The British Union of Fascists, the National Front, the BNP, all had "left wing" positions on economics. So did the interwar continental fascist parties, and when these outfits became governments they turned the state into a straightforward criminal enterprise. The "socialism" in National Socialism was for optics to compete with the socialism of labour movements and mass working class parties. The Nazis, for instance, nationalised nothing. In fact, they were pioneers of privatisation. But the fascists then and the extreme right now can appear "credible" on these issues, despite their record, for two reasons. Putting public distance between themselves and consensus economic opinion underscores their anti-establishment creds, as Farage noted. And second, it's because their core support faces left and right simultaneously. The petit bourgeois roots of the extreme right are riven with status anxiety, and fear being forced down into into the employee class, of having to work for someone else. Downward social mobility can be "caused" by workers demanding too high wages, or expecting entitlements like breaks, sensible working hours, and time off. They are never as reliable as the proprietor. Or workers as an organised collective might be expecting too much from the state, and demand higher taxes on businesses to pay for better public services. Or the petit bourgeois could be out-competed by big businesses who share their market, or screwed over on contracts or suffer late payments. Small business is, from their point of view, where the pathologies of labour and capital collide. They're pushed from pillar to post, and it's why the authoritarian programme of extreme right parties resonate with them. They offer a middle road that puts the two great forces of capitalism in their place and allows for stability. The cypher for that can be the great leader/charismatic personality, the nation, or a menu of tough-sounding promises that would restore order to the world (have you read the 2024 Reform manifesto?).

Therefore, talk of a "left turn" is meaningless. Extreme right parties swing this way and that with the weather. It's in the DNA of their core support, but the moves left are always rhetorical and subordinate to a specific set of political priorities.

The more interesting question is why the New Statesman and Labour Party politicians are hyping Farage when Reform will always pose more of a threat to the Tories. And, I'm sorry to say, the explanation does not lie in "genuinely mistakes" or cluelessness. It's a politics of handling expectations, of Labour not offering too much so politics (or, to be more accurate, class relations) are easier to manage. And one way of doing this is talking up the threat Reform poses the to sort of Britain Labour supporters would like to see. Invoking the threat of a demon opposition is tough when the Tories are bumping along the bottom, but with a comparably more dynamic and more extreme threat, a la Reform, some will stick to Keir Starmer and Labour for fear that something even worse than the Tories is in the offing. What the New Statesman and friends are doing is reminding us of this fact.

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