Rightwing demagogue Nigel Farage wants to go back into the British Parliament

Nigel Farage is at the moment a zombie figure of the British far right. His biggest success - a highly dubious one - came when he was leader of the pro-Brexit UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) and wound up pulling the Tories (Conservative Party) to an anti-EU position. Britain voted in a referendum for Brexit in 2016, and Britain formerly exited the EU in January 2020. It famously turned out to be a lot messier than it advocates pitched it to be.

Now Farage is trying to leave zombie status behind by running for MP (Member of Parliament) from the Clacton district. He was Reform’s leader 2019-2021, and three days ago (June 3) he became the official leader again. (1)

Farage was also known for banging the xenophobia drum in the context of campaigning for Brexit, which also persuaded the (theoretically) center-right Tories to embrace that theme and frame it in a culture-war/nationalist context:

No one did more than Farage to create the conditions for Brexit, nor did more to undermine the post-Brexit settlement. Why has he come back? Why would he risk humiliation by losing in Clacton, Essex? Because he relishes the game of politics, delights in the outrage he causes and means what he says: the Conservatives have betrayed their voters and the country. The UK’s borders have become more porous, not less, and Rishi Sunak can do nothing about it. Annual legal net migration is double what it was in 2016 (330,000) when David Cameron failed to persuade voters to choose Remain and therefore the status quo. The truth is for many Brexit voters – especially working-class Labour voters who abandoned the party in 2019 – the status quo was already intolerable. Many believed they had nothing to lose by voting out and much to gain. “We’ve got to get our country back,” Farage told them. And people heard him because they felt something had been lost: control. Worse than this, they felt disrespected, scorned and ignored by metropolitan liberals, as I discovered when I visited faraway Brexit-supporting towns while writing my book, Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England. [my emphasis] (2)

Saving Britain from those scary immigrants was, of course, a major selling point for the Brexit campaign. It’s not the only thing that didn’t work out like magic in the way Farage and other Brexiteers expected.

Britain is also part of the much-touted Super Election Year of 2024. Britain’s general election comes in less than a month, on July 4, which of course is also American Independence Day. (They aren’t participating in EU Parliamentary elections of June 6-9 because, you know, Brexit.)

Even the more successful moments of Brexit bringing reduced immigration weren’t exactly what many of their voters had expected: “

Net EU immigration is 70 per cent below its 2016 peak of 280,000.11 Since EU nationals came for work, the cutoff of this supply led naturally to a shortage. In November 2022, 13.3 per cent of businesses reported labour shortages, which translates to 1,187,000 job vacancies. (3)

An economy that depends heavily on immigrant labor takes steps that suddenly reduces the immigrant labor supply – and it causes worker shortages! Who could have ever guessed?

The government claimed that the labour shortages had nothing to do with Brexit, because other countries had them. This is nonsense. As is the case with inflation and stagnant economic growth, Brexit made problems that exist elsewhere worse in the UK. Businesses themselves had no doubt. In autumn 2021, 46 per cent of transport and storage, 40 per cent of administration, 39 per cent of education, 31 per cent of hospitality, 28 per cent of health, 23 per cent of retail and 10 per cent of construction businesses cited a lack of EU workers as the reason for unfilled vacancies.

It could not have been otherwise. Migration rules designed to exclude low-skilled workers exclude low-skilled workers. The government admitted as much when it rolled out a bespoke visa for seasonal agricultural workers, designed to ameliorate, but not eliminate, shortages in this sector. The government urged agricultural firms to automate (one of its favourite words) and employ British workers.15 As no British worker wants to work in agriculture, the result was empty supermarket shelves up and down the country.

After insisting for a year that the UK needed no low-skilled workers, the government capitulated and made social care workers eligible for the ‘skilled worker’ visa from 15 February 2022, although their pay is below the required threshold. (4)

Again, who could have guessed?!?

And what has Nigel Farage learned from this experience? Patrick English of YouGov observes:

“It’s important to maintain the distinction between Ukip and Reform. One thing that’s very prominent is, of course, Nigel Farage is no longer talking about Brexit, and that was Ukip’s sole purpose. The switch has now gone to focusing on immigration and British cultural values. It is a different party, but a lot of its supporters and all of its base will be very similar.” [my emphasis] (5)

Notes:

(1) Hagopian, Alicja (2024): Nigel Farage could win Reform UK as many as four seats at general election, says YouGov. The Independent 06/04/2024. <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-reform-yougov-poll-prediction-b2556460.html> (Accessed: 2024-06-06).

Cowley, Jaon (2024): The seismic radicalism of Nigel Farage. New Statesman 06/05/2024. <https://www.newstatesman.com/editors-note/2024/06/the-seismic-radicalism-of-nigel-farage> (Accessed: 2024-05-06).

(3) Hansen, Randall (2024): Immigration and the Brexit Catastrophe: Empire, Citizenship and Ignorance-Randall Hansen 2024. The Political Quarterly 05/2/8/2024. <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13410> (Accessed: 2024-05-06).

(4) Ibid.

(5) Hagopian, op. cit.