Turns out Nigel Farage isn’t PM. Imagine! This is all part of his Operation Restoring Justice policy, another three-word plan that has echoes of Brexit (Take Back Control) and the widely shared online consensus that there is, literally, one rule of law for the elite and another, harder, less equitable law for others (two-tier Kier).
Both these markers of agitation were bubbled hard by Farage, and both are counter-establishment at their core. You can pull your hair out at this and shout about how ill-conceived and unanchored in reality they are, but the reality of the situation doesn’t matter so much here.
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What does play is Farage’s intuitive sense of where public disillusionment rests and how he can position himself in the middle of it as political saviour. He can offer a reductive grand plan, narratively bold, detail-light, and he immediately leads the national conversation. He is somebody who WILL GET THINGS DONE.
The only things that thwart him are those in power, other politicians, the judiciary, that damnable woke blob, the pesky fact Reform only has four MPs. Being unable to actually do what he says isn’t a problem. It simply means he has all of the megaphone and none of the responsibility.
However, there is a reality that could be dealt with. The opposition to migrant hotels and to migrant numbers has an underlying part to it, the part that led, in many ways, to Brexit. It remains unresolved. The economy is stagnant, jobs are increasingly hard to find, things are more and more expensive, rents are rocketing and available housing stock is not coming along.
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A good number of people still feel they have been cast aside and that there is little new opportunity for them. (Of course Brexit was supposed to deal with this but, leave that aside for just now.)
If you’re on the edge and you’re told again and again that people on the make are coming and taking the bread from your mouth, all the while with their feet up in glitzy hotel baths while playing happily on their £1,000 phones, you’re going to feel resentment. And on they come, and on they come, in small boats.
The way to counter is not to pursue and fester the resentment and explain how you’ll punish those to be resented more, which seems to have been embedded in Labour thinking in recent times.
Instead, Labour must find a way to invest and offer a brighter future so that people like Nigel Farage can’t blame those in need for spoiling things for those on the fringes.
If the grand plan for growth and positivity is more attractive than the alternative, it’s got a chance. If not, the resentment will just grow and grow. I know this sounds simple and reductive, but it seems to be the way to grab attention.
Perhaps the government has been getting this ready over the last few weeks of the summer break. Let’s see…
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Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.
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