How they Broke Britain by James O’Brien, WH Allen, 2023
Chapter 5. Nigel Farage.
The author generally eschews criticising people for things they cannot help, like their personal appearance. But his skewering of Farage seems entirely justifiable since this is how he chooses to appear (he actually prefers wine to beer when he is not on camera but that is not the populist image he is after). Perhaps the best of the author’s trademark disparagements here is of Farage as “an opportunistic, lying, racist grifter”. “He effects the demeanour of a mildly sozzled City Gent, dresses like a city-dwelling social misfit’s idea of a country squire” whilst reassuring people that it is “fine to be discomfited by the nationality of their neighbours.”
Like Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, Farage is a scion of an immigrant family, and his wife is German. The only political status he has achieved is membership of the European Parliament, an organisation in which he believes Britain should never have taken part. O’Brien uses these and other data to great effect, pretty much pinning Farage down and tearing him apart in an interview, most of which is reproduced in the book and is also available here:
O’Brien also directed me to this website:
UK think tanks and campaigns rated for funding transparency | openDemocracy
It grades think tanks by the degree to which their funding is transparent. Some of those in the lowest category E, just sound nasty but it was an organisation called “Migration Watch” that caught my eye. Their thrust is that immigration, especially from Africa and the Middle East, poses a security risk to the UK. This is based in part on certain key ‘findings’. One is that “Nearly 80% of charges related to terrorism in the UK since 2001 are connected to international terrorism.” This seems to me utterly meaningless. Terrorism tends to be ‘international’ in some sense. Another is that “In the 2021/22 period, 94% of those arrested for terrorism-related offences were male, a significant statistic given the high proportion of male migrants arriving illegally across the English Channel.” I am no statistician, but this seems to me a disgraceful although no doubt deliberate misconstruing of the nature of cause and effect, an obvious logical fallacy (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
Farage went to school at Dulwich College. A teacher and a fellow pupil recall a boy with neo-fascist views and behaviour (making him a prefect was thought by most to be a terrible mistake) who took part in a group which sang Hitler youth songs as they marched through a quiet Sussex village late one night.
Ironically perhaps, Farage’s faux bumbling persona, the “I’m just a regular guy trying to do the right thing and nothing is ever my fault” bombast, is to me reminiscent of no one so much as Boris Johnson.
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