Read more: Book review—Following Farage
On 23rd June 2016, 17,410,742 Britons voted to leave the European Union, with public anxieties and angers mounting in the Western democracies about many things. Deepening inequality, the lost sense of national identity and mass-migration are among them. And as various forms of reaction, benign and malign, come to the surface, the issue of what is “progressive”—amid the growing political confusion—also raises its head. Labour’s divisions, divisions which cannot be healed, are expressions of it.
With most established parties held in varieties of discredit, dissent is also increasingly volatile and unpredictable, as the referendum outcome revealed. This dissent is not only hard to pigeon-hole in conventional terms but is complex. For example, Greece’s “left-wing” party Syriza (under its middle-class leader Alexis Tsipras) could hail a “people’s victory” in the 2015 general election before turning to the “right-wing” party of Independent Greeks to help him protect a near-bankrupt country from what he called “national humiliation”; and then accepted most of the EU’s impositions that he had previously pledged to refuse. He had little or no choice.
Likewise, not much remains of old “left” and “right” reflexes when France’s Front National is said to be winning over gay voters scared of Muslim homophobia, or when a Corbyn can include concerns for “markets” in his would-be “socialist” appeal to electors. Indeed, with a collapsing Labour Party, ravaged by Blairism, at sixes and sevens over the main issues of the day, Europe included, the responses of Nigel Farage to today’s political, social and moral disorders were often more rational than those of his detractors.
Thus, when he described himself in the New Statesman in November 2014 as “not on the right or left” but as a “radical,” it pointed to a stance as valid as any in today’s confusion, and more comprehensible than that of the born-again Trotskyites now bringing down the Labour Party.
Certainly, if the remaining “socialists” in Britain really wanted to create “socialism” in their country—supposing it was possible, and it is not—then the least good option was to vote to “Remain” in the European Union. Indeed, the newly re-established Italian Communist Party, at its founding congress in Bologna in June, described the EU as “unreformable” and called the vote in favour of Brexit the “correct” one. There was not a whisper of that from Corbyn.
Nevertheless, it was no surprise that he could not bring himself to join Labour’s campaign for Britain to remain in a bureaucratic super-state, or super-market, masquerading as a “community,” its “parliament” composed not of accountable representatives of the people but of mere placemen and women. But his silence compounded Labour’s problems. For many in the party’s old heartlands were voting not for the “socialism” of Momentum’s wrecking cabal but for greater national independence, the very word “nation” a taboo to a Trot. They were also voting for the greater accountability of a (corrupted) political class to those who elect them, and for the ends which every civil society requires if it is to survive.
What are those ends? They are a sense of community, a reciprocity of rights and obligations, and (in a disaggregating world) social cohesion. And here, Theresa May’s first address on becoming prime minister revealed again that the political ground is shifting, once more in cross-party fashion. For she said—how truthfully is yet to be discovered—that she would be listening not to the “privileged” and the “mighty” but to those “working around the clock,” language which echoed Farage’s rhetoric before the referendum.
Old Labour’s grand Nonconformist ethic once espoused such ends. But the harm done to this ethic first by Blairism and now by Corbynism has left many of its traditional voters bereft and lost. And once again Farage got it right, describing Labour as “utterly disconnected” from a “very large part of its roots.” Conversely, Labour has got much of this wrong, as when a party enquiry under John Cruddas described it as “losing socially conservative voters to UKIP.” No, they were part of Labour’s bedrock.
Nor is UKIP’s radicalism to be simply written off as “right-wing,” “racist”, “Powellite” and the rest, despite its “Breaking Point” poster and some of its less savoury supporters. For its four million voters in the last general election, and the great host of “Leavers” in a referendum which was secured by UKIP pressure, were composed of individuals across the entire political spectrum, adding to the confusion within the mainstream parties.
Above all, in the very language of the appeal that Farage made to the British people—superficially regarded as the voice of base reaction and worse—there were many resonances of a deep current in English thought. In The World Turned Upside Down, a study of radical ideas during the mid-17th century English revolution, the historian Christopher Hill described “popular revolt” as an “essential feature of the English tradition.” In today’s version of it, it is a just revolt against supranational imposition.
Similarly, when Farage asserted in the name of “hard-working families” that “millions out there are not getting an even break” or when UKIP, brushing aside the constraints of political correctness, proposed that “immigrants should pay into the pot before they take out of it,” we heard the accents of a long-lost tradition of radical plain-speaking. Yes, there was “populism” in it, as in all popular movements. But it was not the populism of neo-fascism.
Indeed, the 17th-century Levellers similarly spoke up, without mincing their words, for the “oppressed people of England,” for the claims of “righteous labour,” and for “the poor that work” but “can hardly live.” Such condition was clearly the case of many, in a growing political void, who voted for Brexit, and Theresa May was right to allude to them also. And when Farage declared that “we’re going to have to stand up for our Judeo-Christian values,” it was again in true English Nonconformist style, centuries old. Moreover, when UKIP called for “limited controlled immigration”—to the horror of “progressives” —it should be remembered that their 17th century radical forebears had no qualms in referring to the “land of England” as the “land of our nativity.” They were patriots all.
The cricket-loving, non-graduate, beer-swilling Farage, in describing himself as “not personally wealthy,” “not particularly posh or non-posh” and as having “run a business”—while also saying that “there is more to this country than just being competitive”—was on to something deeply English with all this too. Despite his toff’s coat, his was the appeal of the (seemingly) “ordinary bloke” with experience of realities unknown to many of the professional political class; and he will doubtless be back on the scene in due course. It was also the kind of radical appeal beyond the reach of a Trotskyite-in-trainers, and had its own deep roots.
The 17th-century upstart Gerrard Winstanley, probably born in Wigan, was a bankrupt small-scale textile dealer turned labourer and revolutionary “Digger” of common land; Tom Paine, who espoused the cause of the American Revolution, was a Norfolk-born stay-maker by original trade; the leading Chartist, William Lovett, was variously a craftsman, coffee-house keeper and schoolmaster; and the 19th century dissenting liberal reformer Joseph Chamberlain—“Radical Joe”—was a Birmingham screw-manufacturer who came from a family of shoemakers.
Ahead of his times and (in some respects) of our times too, with a “deep sense of the value of local self-government” as he declared in June 1874, Brummie “Radical Joe” not only wanted old-age pensions but cheap train-travel for workers, and not only compensation for industrial injuries but loans to working people to enable them to purchase houses. So that when UKIP called for an end to tax on the minimum wage, or “GP surgeries in the evening for full-time workers,” or social housing for people “whose parents and grandparents were born locally,” or child-benefit to be paid “only to children permanently resident in the UK,” the accent was again familiar. Once more, it was the accent of blunt English free-thinking, like it or not.
“No to political correctness,” UKIP declared in this radical vein, arguing that it “stifles free thought.” Winstanley was of the same English temper in his hostility to cant. More than three centuries ago, he objected to “parrot-like speaking from the universities”—nothing much has changed there—and what he called the “verbal professors of freedom.” The radical message to our times, which UKIP’s Brexit campaign picked up, is clear: get down to brass tacks, speak from practical experience, talk Tom Paine’s “common sense” and tell the truth, whether about the condition of Britain or the nature of the European Union, something probably beyond the reach of Theresa May.
For those who, almost by reflex, detect “right-wing reaction” in this kind of thing, it should be remembered that the English radical tradition is not merely anti-establishment but essentially democratic, even ultra-democratic. The 17th-century Levellers objected to the “diseased government” of their times as they fought the rule of unaccountable powers. “Seeing the earth was made for us as well as you, we are resolved to be cheated no longer. Freedom is our portion as well as yours,” they declared. Instead they wanted a government “set upon our own foundation,” just as Farage spoke up not only for the transfer of powers from Brussels to Britain but “from Westminster to the people,” and as the Brexit campaign in part achieved.
In his wrongly derided (and script-less) statement to the European “parliament” after the referendum result, Nigel Farage again gave voice to a long radical tradition that is anything but “reactionary.” “What the little people did, what the ordinary people did, what the people who have been oppressed over the last few years and who have seen their living standards fall, they rejected the multinationals, they rejected the merchant banks, they rejected big politics. They said we want our country back, we want our fishing waters back, we want our borders back, and we want to be an independent self-governing nation.”
He was speaking to the thoroughly English desire to be “masterless,” as Christopher Hill put it. Far from being the voice of “little England,” as David Cameron disparagingly described it, he was expressing the same will as that of the 17th-century Levellers: to secure what Winstanley called “national freedom” from political and economic imposition. Or as the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough declared in the Putney Debates in October 1647 during the English Revolution, “that which enslaves the people of England [is] that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all.” So, doubtless, thought many or most of the 17,410,742.
And when free-born Farage, pint in hand, told his followers that “it’s about identity, about community, about commonality. We’ve made a terrible mess of it,” it was the truth. It was a truth once more of plain-speaking and squarely in England’s radical tradition, and probably beyond the scope of today’s Tory Party. But there are more of such truths to come, in Britain and beyond, with much unfinished business still to do, and with all the risks that it entails.
On 23rd June 2016, 17,410,742 Britons voted to leave the European Union, with public anxieties and angers mounting in the Western democracies about many things. Deepening inequality, the lost sense of national identity and mass-migration are among them. And as various forms of reaction, benign and malign, come to the surface, the issue of what is “progressive”—amid the growing political confusion—also raises its head. Labour’s divisions, divisions which cannot be healed, are expressions of it.
With most established parties held in varieties of discredit, dissent is also increasingly volatile and unpredictable, as the referendum outcome revealed. This dissent is not only hard to pigeon-hole in conventional terms but is complex. For example, Greece’s “left-wing” party Syriza (under its middle-class leader Alexis Tsipras) could hail a “people’s victory” in the 2015 general election before turning to the “right-wing” party of Independent Greeks to help him protect a near-bankrupt country from what he called “national humiliation”; and then accepted most of the EU’s impositions that he had previously pledged to refuse. He had little or no choice.
Likewise, not much remains of old “left” and “right” reflexes when France’s Front National is said to be winning over gay voters scared of Muslim homophobia, or when a Corbyn can include concerns for “markets” in his would-be “socialist” appeal to electors. Indeed, with a collapsing Labour Party, ravaged by Blairism, at sixes and sevens over the main issues of the day, Europe included, the responses of Nigel Farage to today’s political, social and moral disorders were often more rational than those of his detractors.
Thus, when he described himself in the New Statesman in November 2014 as “not on the right or left” but as a “radical,” it pointed to a stance as valid as any in today’s confusion, and more comprehensible than that of the born-again Trotskyites now bringing down the Labour Party.
Certainly, if the remaining “socialists” in Britain really wanted to create “socialism” in their country—supposing it was possible, and it is not—then the least good option was to vote to “Remain” in the European Union. Indeed, the newly re-established Italian Communist Party, at its founding congress in Bologna in June, described the EU as “unreformable” and called the vote in favour of Brexit the “correct” one. There was not a whisper of that from Corbyn.
Nevertheless, it was no surprise that he could not bring himself to join Labour’s campaign for Britain to remain in a bureaucratic super-state, or super-market, masquerading as a “community,” its “parliament” composed not of accountable representatives of the people but of mere placemen and women. But his silence compounded Labour’s problems. For many in the party’s old heartlands were voting not for the “socialism” of Momentum’s wrecking cabal but for greater national independence, the very word “nation” a taboo to a Trot. They were also voting for the greater accountability of a (corrupted) political class to those who elect them, and for the ends which every civil society requires if it is to survive.
What are those ends? They are a sense of community, a reciprocity of rights and obligations, and (in a disaggregating world) social cohesion. And here, Theresa May’s first address on becoming prime minister revealed again that the political ground is shifting, once more in cross-party fashion. For she said—how truthfully is yet to be discovered—that she would be listening not to the “privileged” and the “mighty” but to those “working around the clock,” language which echoed Farage’s rhetoric before the referendum.
Old Labour’s grand Nonconformist ethic once espoused such ends. But the harm done to this ethic first by Blairism and now by Corbynism has left many of its traditional voters bereft and lost. And once again Farage got it right, describing Labour as “utterly disconnected” from a “very large part of its roots.” Conversely, Labour has got much of this wrong, as when a party enquiry under John Cruddas described it as “losing socially conservative voters to UKIP.” No, they were part of Labour’s bedrock.
Nor is UKIP’s radicalism to be simply written off as “right-wing,” “racist”, “Powellite” and the rest, despite its “Breaking Point” poster and some of its less savoury supporters. For its four million voters in the last general election, and the great host of “Leavers” in a referendum which was secured by UKIP pressure, were composed of individuals across the entire political spectrum, adding to the confusion within the mainstream parties.
Above all, in the very language of the appeal that Farage made to the British people—superficially regarded as the voice of base reaction and worse—there were many resonances of a deep current in English thought. In The World Turned Upside Down, a study of radical ideas during the mid-17th century English revolution, the historian Christopher Hill described “popular revolt” as an “essential feature of the English tradition.” In today’s version of it, it is a just revolt against supranational imposition.
Similarly, when Farage asserted in the name of “hard-working families” that “millions out there are not getting an even break” or when UKIP, brushing aside the constraints of political correctness, proposed that “immigrants should pay into the pot before they take out of it,” we heard the accents of a long-lost tradition of radical plain-speaking. Yes, there was “populism” in it, as in all popular movements. But it was not the populism of neo-fascism.
Indeed, the 17th-century Levellers similarly spoke up, without mincing their words, for the “oppressed people of England,” for the claims of “righteous labour,” and for “the poor that work” but “can hardly live.” Such condition was clearly the case of many, in a growing political void, who voted for Brexit, and Theresa May was right to allude to them also. And when Farage declared that “we’re going to have to stand up for our Judeo-Christian values,” it was again in true English Nonconformist style, centuries old. Moreover, when UKIP called for “limited controlled immigration”—to the horror of “progressives” —it should be remembered that their 17th century radical forebears had no qualms in referring to the “land of England” as the “land of our nativity.” They were patriots all.
The cricket-loving, non-graduate, beer-swilling Farage, in describing himself as “not personally wealthy,” “not particularly posh or non-posh” and as having “run a business”—while also saying that “there is more to this country than just being competitive”—was on to something deeply English with all this too. Despite his toff’s coat, his was the appeal of the (seemingly) “ordinary bloke” with experience of realities unknown to many of the professional political class; and he will doubtless be back on the scene in due course. It was also the kind of radical appeal beyond the reach of a Trotskyite-in-trainers, and had its own deep roots.
The 17th-century upstart Gerrard Winstanley, probably born in Wigan, was a bankrupt small-scale textile dealer turned labourer and revolutionary “Digger” of common land; Tom Paine, who espoused the cause of the American Revolution, was a Norfolk-born stay-maker by original trade; the leading Chartist, William Lovett, was variously a craftsman, coffee-house keeper and schoolmaster; and the 19th century dissenting liberal reformer Joseph Chamberlain—“Radical Joe”—was a Birmingham screw-manufacturer who came from a family of shoemakers.
Ahead of his times and (in some respects) of our times too, with a “deep sense of the value of local self-government” as he declared in June 1874, Brummie “Radical Joe” not only wanted old-age pensions but cheap train-travel for workers, and not only compensation for industrial injuries but loans to working people to enable them to purchase houses. So that when UKIP called for an end to tax on the minimum wage, or “GP surgeries in the evening for full-time workers,” or social housing for people “whose parents and grandparents were born locally,” or child-benefit to be paid “only to children permanently resident in the UK,” the accent was again familiar. Once more, it was the accent of blunt English free-thinking, like it or not.
“No to political correctness,” UKIP declared in this radical vein, arguing that it “stifles free thought.” Winstanley was of the same English temper in his hostility to cant. More than three centuries ago, he objected to “parrot-like speaking from the universities”—nothing much has changed there—and what he called the “verbal professors of freedom.” The radical message to our times, which UKIP’s Brexit campaign picked up, is clear: get down to brass tacks, speak from practical experience, talk Tom Paine’s “common sense” and tell the truth, whether about the condition of Britain or the nature of the European Union, something probably beyond the reach of Theresa May.
For those who, almost by reflex, detect “right-wing reaction” in this kind of thing, it should be remembered that the English radical tradition is not merely anti-establishment but essentially democratic, even ultra-democratic. The 17th-century Levellers objected to the “diseased government” of their times as they fought the rule of unaccountable powers. “Seeing the earth was made for us as well as you, we are resolved to be cheated no longer. Freedom is our portion as well as yours,” they declared. Instead they wanted a government “set upon our own foundation,” just as Farage spoke up not only for the transfer of powers from Brussels to Britain but “from Westminster to the people,” and as the Brexit campaign in part achieved.
In his wrongly derided (and script-less) statement to the European “parliament” after the referendum result, Nigel Farage again gave voice to a long radical tradition that is anything but “reactionary.” “What the little people did, what the ordinary people did, what the people who have been oppressed over the last few years and who have seen their living standards fall, they rejected the multinationals, they rejected the merchant banks, they rejected big politics. They said we want our country back, we want our fishing waters back, we want our borders back, and we want to be an independent self-governing nation.”
He was speaking to the thoroughly English desire to be “masterless,” as Christopher Hill put it. Far from being the voice of “little England,” as David Cameron disparagingly described it, he was expressing the same will as that of the 17th-century Levellers: to secure what Winstanley called “national freedom” from political and economic imposition. Or as the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough declared in the Putney Debates in October 1647 during the English Revolution, “that which enslaves the people of England [is] that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all.” So, doubtless, thought many or most of the 17,410,742.
And when free-born Farage, pint in hand, told his followers that “it’s about identity, about community, about commonality. We’ve made a terrible mess of it,” it was the truth. It was a truth once more of plain-speaking and squarely in England’s radical tradition, and probably beyond the scope of today’s Tory Party. But there are more of such truths to come, in Britain and beyond, with much unfinished business still to do, and with all the risks that it entails.
