The danger of Farage: the next Tory leader will chase his voters, policies and attitudes [View all]

[muriel_volestrangler]

I hadn't thought of this until now - it looks highly likely that the next PM will be chosen in an atmosphere of "I agree with Nigel". Very worrying.

Farage has a long history of stalking the porous borderline between mainstream conservatism and the far right. When he took over Ukip in the late 1990s, he saw the chance to transform Alan Sked’s eccentric fringe party into a clearing house for far-right ideas while also making inroads into the europhobic Tory base. Yet he has always been careful to disclaim the outright fascists and ethno-cranks: when asked to distinguish between Ukip and the Brexit Party, he claims ‘no difference’ in policy but a great one in personnel. It also has a new structure, highly geared to media intervention, stripped of many of the cumbersome integuments of old parties – branches, internal democracy, committees, middle layers – and centred on a charismatic leader. (The same digital structure distinguishes the new far-right campaigners from their predecessors.) The ultimate prize is not the elevation of a minor schismatic right-wing party, but a conservatism rid of the insipid pieties of Cameronism and bearing Farage’s reptilian grin. A betrayal myth – according to which all parties, but especially the Conservatives, are in dereliction of their democratic responsibilities – allows him a far greater opportunity for legitimation than Ukip ever provided.

How do you defeat him? It’s dangerous to think there could be a secret trick that will bring him down, like pouring water on the Wicked Witch of the West, but allowing some ideological air into a room currently muggy with pandering might help. The billboard campaigns and the milkshake throwing both recognise that Farage represents a particular kind of politics, worth naming and fighting against, and that in all the technical, legal and procedural arguments around Brexit, the political and ideological can get lost. The Conservative Party is unlikely to inoculate itself against the influence of the headbangers before the election of its next leader; whoever that turns out to be will largely be a creature of Mr Farage. Whichever route the Labour Party eventually takes through its uneasy relation to Brexit, it will have to press the Tories on their capitulation to the far right. Until then, I’ll take a strawberry shake, please.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/may/milkshakes-and-other-disagreeable-anointings