Monday 27 May 2019

How Does Farage Parlay This?

Fair play to the lad - it's a remarkable achievement, right enough.  But Farage, newly-tinted hair and all, has long protested his only interest** is Brexit, an end in itself.  So what does he do next - even if only to secure that end?
  • Stand back and let a chastened new Tory leader finish the job?
  • Stand back and watch another year of Parliamentary paralysis and general can-kicking?
  • Sit back and mint some more euro-dosh? 
  • Make a serious effort to build a viable grass-roots party, fit to contest a GE?
  • Actively attempt to suborn the Tories via a reverse takeover?
  • Engineer R2, on the grounds Cummings can win it again?
  • Engineer a Corbyn government, as a prelude to a poujadist uprising?   
  • Resign himself to (and actually rather enjoy) being in a perpetual state of *disgust*?     
  • [ your suggestions below ... ]
I'm just interested, really.

ND

_______________
** apart from going large in the USA, that is

29 comments:

Timbo614 said...

He won't sit back or stand back, they (him and Cummings) did that last time it's a case of "We won't get fooled again!".
He has already demanded involvement in the talks.

Given the turmoil there does seem to be the opportunity to have further impact and make inroads. Will he choose to? I have no idea.

Interesting times...

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure Farage and Cummings get along particularly well.

Anonymous said...

Tim Shipman said Cummings has nothing good to say about Farage. And even less good things to say about Bone.
He thought they were very poor quality and were the reason twenty years of arguing for Brexit had got nowhere.

hovis said...

My bets are on at least making the noises if not the moves to make TBP able to fight a GE.

E-K said...

Tragedy is that UKIP was on the road to being a viable party before he left it.

MyWhateverAnnoysNDName said...

ND didnt like my comments recently but I'll continue in the same vein nonetheless.....

What should Farage do?

Farage should calm the fuck down and retreat. Thats what Farage should do.

The worst case scenario, for him, is that a new Tory leader is elected and calls a snap election. He is nowhere near ready for the cut-and-thrust, media intrusion of a GE.
He should slink away, hoping for the inevitable October delay, to give himself time to create a coherent manifesto. There is no way the media will give him or his hotch-potch conglomerate of free-markeeters and commies a free ride in a General Election.

Whatever Tory leader is elected is royally fucked too as they cannot allow an October exit.... far too risky for the Real Power in Britain - The Rentiers - those who extract value by the sleight-of-hand-method of pretending to add it.
Bad form.
Dogs Dinner.
Not How Things Are Done.
Boris' impending divorce has been hightlighted in todays newspapers and God Knows a man in this situation would be rinsed out. So heavily affected by his personal situation that he has not the energy to Run For Office.
And so Boris drifts away.
Smart Man.

What Uber-Right coked-up, narcisstic idiot, would stand and fight for the Bag-Of-Shit that is Prime-Minister-Who-Delivers-Brexit?
Nobody with any sense, so a General Election it is.

Tory UK is foist upon its own petard - a defining moment; a sort of #Armagammon

andrew said...


The Brexit Party....
Farage has tried to be an mp 5 times. Once people look beyond Brexit it seems that they don't see much reason to vote for him.

Cummings indeed thought Farage was just unprintable - and a big negative effect on the leave vote.
https://dominiccummings.com/2018/06/11/on-the-referendum-27-banks-russia-conspiracies-and-vote-leave/

"But for their [his colleague's] actions that day, Vote Leave would have been destroyed, Farage and Banks would have run the official campaign with Bill Cash as legal adviser fighting with DD to be on the Today programme, Boris and Gove would have gone on a long holiday rather than flush their reputations down the toilet, Remain would have won 60-40 and Osborne would today be scanning the horizon for the right moment to take over before the 2020 election.

I imagine nige will spend the rest of his life explaining how things would have been better if they had left the EU 'his way'

I hope to hear more of Cummings. There is much that needs to be done.

Raedwald said...

There's a saying over here -

"If you want to Lead the Austrians, find out where they're going and go in front"

I have great faith that all this political turmoil is actually part of a positive process in which the British nation organically periodically determines where it's heading. The mess in Westminster is just the political class trying to keep up. The fates of the individial actors - Farage, May, Corbyn - are all really irrelevant. We will use and discard them as part of the process of change.

I do have enormous faith in the myriad ranks of the British people. We're far more sophisticated collectively than any politicin would ever credit. And that includes allowing the poor dears in SW1 to imagine they're in the lead.



James Higham said...

Get the popcorn in and observe.

E-K said...

Raedwald - Far more sophisticated than credited ? I'd say far less nasty than credited.

Yet again we have (face it) a mainly white and semi educated population rejecting a BNP-like party (UKIP with EDL/Yaxley-Lennon), supporting the formation of a whole new, purified one in six weeks - and still winning a vote on the EU !

Where is the praise for the reasonableness of our people ? No. All we hear about is *populist* this and *extremist* that and "it was the LibDems wot won it..." so we can ignore Brexiteers again.

Then there are the 60% that didn't turn out who were quite relaxed to sit at home whilst Art 50 is still in play, hardly EU supporters then and certainly not extremists. Nige should be claiming them for himself too.

But where is the thanks and the praise for this ? Not just from the BBC (who still think we're all racists) but from our "Burning injustices" Prime Minister who keeps stirring the shit pot against us in order to foment trouble and hatred against us by telling black people that they are living in a deep southern US state circa 1950 or Sth Africa apartheid.

"Country divided" they say, "we must re-unite" they say (meaning not leave the EU.)

Have you noticed that it is only EU/Blairists who say this when they lose a vote ? Whenever they win I do my democratic duty, I shut up, put up and wait to the next elections to try to change things.

I round up by saying this.

Our country, our people's strength has never been in our sophistication - it has been in our humour, which is a form of highly fluid intelligence, a way of seeing things tangentially, something which the Germans (for all their very real sophistication) didn't get in WW2. We also have our sense of fairness and openness to the best of new culture and ideas (though I'm unsure where gangsta rap fits into this), we are also fair and inclusive, unlike the way the BBC likes to depict us in its dramas.

This and a low threshold in settling for less will pull us up from any adversity and sets us apart from the Continent which is spawning very real right wing forces, where, once more we have rejected them.

Sackerson said...

I think he should stay on the case until we are definitely out. After that, it's for the people to decide what kind of country they want.

Timbo614 said...

To expand my first comment: I didn't put Farage & Cummings in the same room. When the referendum was won though Leave disbanded and Farage "retired". Both sat back to let the process complete. That can now be seen as an obvious mistake.

MyWhateverAnnoysNDName's name gave me a giggle tho' this morning, I await ND's riposte!

Nick Drew said...

water off a duck's back, timbo

M*N seems to have missed my agreement with his SF analogy

he didn't miss the fact that this scenario doesn't gladden my heart

decnine said...

Watch the Peterborough by election. Not long ago, Peterborough looked like a fairly easy Conservative gain. With TBP in play, Labour may not hold Peterborough, but the chances of Conservatives gaining it look slim. TBP will split the Conservative vote.

Nigel's message to the Conservatives will be: the next General Election will be a night of Peterboroughs unless you people deliver Brexit and then make the UK a runaway success outside the EU. After Brexit, what will Remainers have to vote for?

They will be cut flowers in a vase. Latter day Jacobites, longing to be penned up in a sheep fold that no longer exists.

Jan said...

Listening to Nige after the result, I thought he was itching for a GE and it was a case of "bring it on". Likewise Ann Widdecombe who says it like it is. Nige was saying he'd got a lot of businessmen ready and waiting.....

Interesting times indeed!

andrew said...

I do find it rather odd that the putatively "left wing" commentators in the MSM concentrate on Farage the individual and attack him personally.

A more marxist (well, my interpretation) pov would look at stagnant wages, low growth, growing relative inequality and alienation since '08 - and the feeling nothing is getting better (historic forces and class issues).

And since '16 nothing has changed - and this is what still confuses me; why does anyone think another referendum will produce a different answer?

As things stand I dont think the cons would win Peterborough even if TPB were not there, though one has to ask what is Lab for?

This is what we need BoJo for: he is funnier that Farage, probably likes a drink, doesn't smoke, and is not reviled by quite as meany people.

Anonymous said...

"stagnant wages, low growth, growing relative inequality and alienation since '08"

Male real median full time wages were lower in 2016 than they were in 1997. I've only gone back that far. Look at the AVERAGE GROSS WEEKLY EARNINGS datasets ("UK Median Time Series") 1997 - 2016.

In the US male median wages were higher in 1971 than in 2014.



Raedwald said...

"stagnant wages, low growth ..."

Except for the 1% natch - the tip of the elephant's trunk.

Of course, billions have been raised out of absolute poverty in China, India etc whilst the C2DE cohorts in the developed world have stagnated economically and have paid for it. The point is, no-one ever asked them. No party ever had a manifesto that offered Globalism as a policy choice. And now, quite understandably, across the developed world, the Gilets jaunes, the MAGAs, the Brexiteers, have woken up and are doing something about it.

The irony is that the beneficiaries of Globalism - the agile, educated metropolitan elites, the ABs, the Thornberrys, Starmers, Ummummaas, media and patrician elites, many of whom claim to be 'socialists', are actually viscerally opposed to curtailing any aspect of Globalism or Supranationalism.

Funny old world.

hovis said...

@Raedwald: Indeed and when challanged they will say how the world must be a better place as Globalism has improved things just look...and then lie with aggregates and averages. Of course they think themselves so clever and humanitarian, but never ever want to pay any price themselves. They deserve to meet Procustes and feel the actuality of their worldview and logic.

E-K said...

Decnine - Nigel's message to the Tories is this:

"Stop trying to impress the BBC and reconnect with your voters."

Not only did Nige get ignored by the BBC, they were hostile to him. Because of this dramatic win it signals that Tory voters are not listening to the BBC.

The Tories need to choose who is more important. (The Tories don't get their votes from the BBC.)

Anonymous said...

I'm amazed the smarter Remainers(and EU) haven't played a more strategic long-term game, like you'd expect from China.

Whatever Brexit deal is signed, it will always be massively easier to integrate back into the EU than withdraw further.

Knowing and accepting this, why wouldn't the remain side accept a fairly hard Brexit - just hard enough to get enough softer Brexiteers on board to get it through.

Then when the next recession hits, use the media mouth piece to draw the comparison that we weren't in a recession before we'd left the EU - so leaving must have been the cause and use that as the case for further integration, small steps at a time.

Time it so each step happens as we are coming out of the recession and they could then point to how rejoining the EU is helping our economy.

Anonymous said...

"The Tories need to choose who is more important. (The Tories don't get their votes from the BBC.)"

Does the taxpayer still fund the Guardian, via job adverts? I seem to recall Cameron said he would stop it.

In the 80s, at the height of Thatcher, the Wednesday "Society" Guardian was the size of the Sunday Times, crammed with social work ads.

Nick Drew said...

anon @ 8:11 - agreed: several commenters (incl Kev, IIRC) have suggested that by the end of this piece, if the EC plays its cards right we'll be adopting the Euro and the whole nine yards

Judging by the cretinous HMG conduct of negotiations to date, this is an entirely plausible scenario

andrew said...


I have no objection to the (solvent parts excl france of the) eurozone adopting the pound.
The other way round will not be happening. The city will see to that.

The current (surprisingly good) state of the economy provides ever more indications that the govt does not really count for much anymore.
It has the power to cock things up, but little to make things better.
Not least because making things better is really hard.

It is still not beyond belief that there will be R2 and we vote to stay, but the chances of it happening are a million to one and no, the martians are not landing either.

Once we have left, how does any sane person think the EU would want to have us back?






Nick Drew said...

Andrew - the EU would want us back trussed and bound: in rhe euro, with our military etc handed over, committed to huge payments and acceptance of "refugees", etc etc. They have plans for everyone.

Anonymous said...

The rulers of the EU may want us back for the same reason that the rulers of China want Taiwan back -- the desire for power over as many people as possible.

Don Cox

E-K said...

Well... they also want us back to demonstrate that no-one should dare leave and to give us a jolly good rutting from behind.

The whole six inches (per Nick @ 10.39) ... or two in the case of Micron.

Thud said...

Nick,Kev, I've never been one for 'blood on the streets' etc as we are one of the worlds more restrained societies for all our faults but if things progressed as you believe they may the I'd imagine anything is possible if not probable.

Elby the Beserk said...

A thought on the side... just how long can any transnational government rule over a country where more than half the population want out? In this day and age...