The Brexit Party

I read that first thing this morning and hoped others would read it too.

Thanks Labaik for this.

It’s a long piece but it’s good of you to cut & paste. I promise I will read it later and get back to you later today - we are going out now.

However, this is is an illustration of why I like NF and why, I’m my opinion, he is so popular. He can certainly think on his feet because he knows the workings of the EU ....

He was in Merthyr Tydfil, canvassing pre the EU elections. A German television reporter asks whether a vote for the Brexit Party will jeopardise the millions of pounds invested by the EU in towns like Merthyr Tydfil. Farage shoots back: “Whose money?” The reporter: “The European Union’s.” Farage replies: “Oh does it grow on trees? It is our money.”

Mr Farage is the personification in the UK of a phenomenon being witnessed right across Europe. It is described as populism but is more a reflection of frustration and anger with the way things have been done up to now and a demand that they should be done differently.

You can’t 
tell people 108 times that we are 
going to leave on March 29, as Mrs May did, and then fail to deliver. The Brexit Party say they will make a contract with the British people – and honour it.

Farage is the Pied Piper playing the popsong 'NationalismOK" and luring away the abandoned children

I do hope that those who support Farage read this and come back with a sensible debate and not just soundbites, which get us nowhere.

labaik thank you

It is a mistake to overstate his “white working-class” base — UKIP included plenty of professionals and managers — but he has wooed many older, white workers, remote from the center of financial power where he built his career. Some were ex-Labour voters in manual jobs. His offer to them is that, in a society of dog-eat-dog competition, they will not have to compete with foreign workers. This is why the liberal press’s muckraking about his racism and far-right connections, by itself, generally doesn’t work. Far from impeding Mr. Farage, racism is his ticket to success. It puts him on the same side as his poorest voters.
With Parliament deadlocked and the Conservatives nearing their death throes, Mr. Farage has spotted an opportunity: a new political model, inspired by the Five Star Movement in Italy. A “digital platform” that harnesses the free labor of its “users,” allowing them “participation” through content-sharing and online polls, rather than rights. Parliamentary democracy is slow at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Such platforms, however, introduce volatility to the system. Dropping UKIP, a traditional membership party, he launched something like a venture capitalist start-up, with crowdfunders rather than members, and a chief executive rather than a leader.
Hence, the Brexit Party. Unlike older party models, it doesn’t invest in lasting infrastructure. It is nimble-footed, expert at gaming social media — the stock market of attention. It won the battle for clicks, and made a killing in this election. Such online frenzies are akin to destabilizing flows of hot money, forcing legacy parties to adapt or die. But when Parliament is so weak, its legitimacy so tenuous, they can look like democratic upsurge.
That may be Mr. Farage’s ultimate triumph. The quintessential City trader and apostle of cutthroat competition, he is exploiting our democratic crisis to remake politics in his own image.
Richard Seymour, an editor at Salvage magazine, is the author of the forthcoming “The Twittering Machine.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

The resulting stalemate, combined with an election in which the main parties barely campaign, presented Mr. Farage with an easy target. And thanks to his success, there is enormous pressure on the Conservatives to deliver Brexit in October, deal or no deal. Boris Johnson, likely to replace Mrs. May as prime minister, is now pledging to do just that.
The Brexit Party’s campaign was a one-man show. While it has a sophisticated digital strategy, the party has no members and no manifesto, and none of its candidates were democratically selected. It offered only one policy: a “No Deal” Brexit. Its rallies focus on star performances by Mr. Farage, introduced with thundering motivational music. He is a gifted communicator, verbally dexterous, with a sense of humor.
Like many English reactionaries — including Mr. Johnson — he speaks in a nostalgic, “old world” register. He doesn’t talk about taxes or privatization. He talks about unfairness and loss, about the sovereignty supposedly ceded to Europe, immigration and elite cosmopolitans. And he names a placebo solution within reach: Brexit. The great escape. It’s a powerful antidepressant.
It is ironic that Mr. Farage appeals to people who are besieged by precisely the kind of volatile financial capitalism that he champions. He is, like President Trump, that paradoxical figure: the capitalist populist. He made his money as a City trader during the boom years of the 1980s, reveling in its adrenaline-fueled, heavy-drinking culture. He is the Gordon Gekko of British politics. It’s striking, to those who care to look, just how much his agenda is about class interest: He opposes extended maternity leave, raising the minimum wage and reducing the retirement age — anything that inconveniences his nouveau riche confederates. If he had his way, many of his supporters would be working harder, longer, for less money, with less protection. That, indeed, is his Brexit dream: Singapore on the Thames.
Even his racism is class-bound. Mr. Farage’s problem is not just with immigrants, it seems, but with poor immigrants especially: those from Eastern Europe, or Muslim countries, or those with H.I.V. He has said he would be uncomfortable with Romanians as neighbors, but he married a woman from Germany. He hates the European Union because its moderate social legislation and free movement defy what he thinks is a Darwinian cultural ecology through which some rise and others fall.

I can do it in sections for those that don't like links...but it could take some time....LONDON — Nigel Farage is the British crisis in human form. His party, the unambiguously named Brexit Party, which is hardly a party and didn’t exist six months ago, won nearly a third of the British vote in the recent European Parliament elections, putting it in first place and driving the shattered Conservative Party into fifth. Long underestimated, Mr. Farage has done more than any politician in a generation to yank British politics to the hard, nationalist right. He is one of the most effective and dangerous demagogues Britain has ever seen.
With his last political vehicle, the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, Mr. Farage took an assortment of Tory retirees and a smattering of ex-fascists and other right-wing cranks, and welded them into a devastating political weapon: a significant national party. That weapon tore such chunks out of the Conservatives’ share of the vote that the party leadership felt compelled to call a referendum on Europe — which it then lost. Mr. Farage declared victory and went into semiretirement as a pundit.
Now, almost three years after the Brexit vote, he’s back. His timing could hardly be better. After a “lost decade” of declining living standards and flat wage growth, trust in Parliament and the news media is at rock bottom. The Conservatives are disintegrating; Prime Minister Theresa May is on her way out of office, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority for her Brexit deal. She failed because, rather than seeking cross-party consensus, she tried to placate her own hard right and prevent voters from abandoning the party — again. Unable to do so, she has simply hardened public opinion.
A poll in April found that given a choice between remaining in the European Union, and leaving with no deal, 44 percent of Britons support “no deal.” The vast majority of these voters previously supported the Conservatives. But since they are the party of business, they can’t seriously contemplate leaving without a deal. Nor can Parliament.

Apologies for doing a dreaded link but it won't let me copy and past the article. I would appreciate it if Farage supporters would take the time to read it and would tell me what they think....

www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/nigel-farage-brexit.html

Oh varian

“The damage that could be done ....” ❗️
Depends which experts we listen to.

And all the talk about ‘unicorns’ is so repetitive now!

No, I was never insulted and in the past, on some of the threads I explained why I voted Leave. Not a problem.

But to be asked ad nauseum is irritating! Not going there again. I’ve moved on.

?

Leavers love to say we've insulted them by asking if they knew what they were voting fore in 2016. The fact is hardly anyone had any idea of the many complex issues which we can now understand if we chose to pay attention.

I doubt whether even 1% of Leave voters gave a thought to the question of the Irish border, let alone the huge complexities of international trade. Yet they parrot "we new exactly what we voted for - we voted to leave the EU", which is about as meaningless as "brexit means brexit"

How many of these people have the first idea of the damage that could be done by a "no-deal brexit"? That scenario was never even hinted at three years ago as the liars of the Leave campaign promised we would leave with a great deal and negotiation would be quick and easy because we held all the cards.

It is time for those who were so deceived to wake up, to start paying attention to the truth, to see how the reality is so different from the unicorn promises, and stop parroting these lies.

Urmstongran Although the "The Brexit Party" overtook UKIP's 2014 vote, it was mainly achieved by a cannibalisation of UKIP votes. It wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as the right-wing press has enjoyed making it out to be. It wasn't very much of a "swing to Farage" in the end.

I think we should also be careful about reading all these votes as votes for a "no deal" Brexit. Give a leaver a simplistic answer and it seems many of them will go for it. Whether they actually want all that goes with "no deal" is another thing altogether. The "The Brexit Party" didn't have any detail in their manifesto, well they didn't have any manifesto at all did they? This means that anyone who supported any sort of Brexit could have voted for them.

It seems to me that the "Tories who cannot wait to grasp the crown" would be mad to assume they have to go for a no deal Brexit. They have already lost members - that is probably the best way to lose even more and push up their average age up even further.

Exactly WhitewaveMK2

I thought the "The Brexit Party" had an equal number to another party in the EU Parliament and really if you are planning to leave, why does it matter?

Is it part of the biggest group? I thought that mattered most.

You can take the man out of UKIP
But you can’t take UKIP out of the man

Just to say more people signed the Revoke Article 50 petition than voted Brexit!

Well he has definitely talked the talk, time will tell if he walks the walk!

Oh come on Urmstongran, he just picked up the UKIP vote plus a little bit more. A rose by any other name....

Never mind the totting up of supposed ‘similar votes’.

Farage’s party is now the largest in the EU Parliament - I would say that is quite a victory in 6 short weeks!
?

Here's the link again:

lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/05/my-euro-election-post-vote-poll-most-tory-switchers-say-they-will-stay-with-their-new-party/#more-15953

Yes I've seen those bar charts deciding Con & Lab belong to one or the other groups and I disagree because we cannot assume that all their votes wanted one or the other.

Both varian and I have posted, on different threads, a link to the Lord Ashcroft poll of 10.000 people which gives percentages of Leave and Remain voters who voted for Labour and the tories. It works out at roughly 2 thirds of Labour votes were from Remainers and 1 third from Leavers. The tory figures were the other way round. So, not complete 'assumptions'....

varian I think we know why they do it, don't we? Shame they don't have anything to contribute to rational debate other than their boredom. Especially

Mycat & Urmston - for how long has NF been campaigning against the EU? Answer - a lot longer than the 3 years since the referendum. So, I don't think us Remainers will be giving up any time soon - for all the reasons that have been spelled out on GN on many, many occasions.

It's difficult to see why anyone would keep posting on a subject they find boring. There are plenty of other threads.

Perhaps ‘Plough through’ would be more apt