Nick Cohen reviews Nigel Farage’s campaign biography and finds yet another “get me I’m an outsider” phony.
Farage is an attack dog who poses as an underdog. He’s the small-minded man who pretends he’s the friend of the little guy. He writes as if he were a dissident in a dictatorship: a lone and persecuted voice, who has suffered for telling truth to power. The results are occasionally hilarious. The BBC and press are always out to get him, even though most of the Conservative press supports Ukip’s policies, and the BBC never has him off air.
They promote him, but they don’t cuddle and squeeze him.
Farage’s vainglorious anecdotes are accompanied by a long, low moan about how he could have made “an enormous amount of money” if he had not chosen to leave the City and enter politics. So relentless is the self-pity, so often does Farage play the victim card, that there are times when this book feels like the Home Counties equivalent of a martyrdom video.
Hasn’t he read the memo? He’s supposed to be thick-skinned and resilient. A thick-skinned resilient outsider underdog.
C’mon, Ophelia, you know only women are required to be thick-skinned. Women and minorities, not “underdog outsiders” who happen to be part of the mainstream. They are allowed to be thin skinned because they are the real victims, the ignored victims, victimized by not being allowed to victimize others, or by just being asked to follow rules of civility. That’s true victimization, right there.
My favourite headline (and subsequent article) for a long time, in The Independent:
All Nigel Farage did was construct a party against meddling foreigners, and for some reason it seems to have attracted racists
I must say “Free Thought” seems very similar to every other media thought on this topic. Just for emphasis, a commenter bravely matches your Guardian with his Independent.
Of course Mr Farage is a Bad Man because without open borders “the economy” would suffer aka an employer would have to pay higher wages. From that single fact all else flows.
“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”
And closing the borders will see the bourgeois moving the jobs to where the cheap labour is like they did before Europe moved its economic zone eastward.
Of course you can remedy the collapse in the labour market by closing the borders to imports because that worked out well in the 1930s.
My main concern with our open borders is north western Europe is stripping countries like Spain, France and the former soviet states of all the young entrepreneurial people who really should be given the chance to make their home economies succeed. I’d like to see the jobs spread out a bit more and the borders kept open.
But the point of Farage and his bourgeois backers isn’t closing the borders to Europe , its to get rid of the “burdensome” regulations that trading within Europe demands, stuff like gender discrimination, fair treatment, unionisation and health and safety laws that hurt their profits.
My guess is that as soon as we were out of Europe, the borders would be re-opened to cheap immigrant labour who didnt have any of the protections Europe gives, and the domestic population would be expected to compete on price.
“And closing the borders will see the bourgeois moving the jobs to where the cheap labour is like they did before Europe moved its economic zone eastward.”
Ah yes. I can just see all those coffee shops and food processing plants moving to Guangdong. If you haven’t noticed, today’s service jobs aren’t very easy to move. You can’t stack Morrisons’ shelves from Cracow.
Isn’t it odd that as the left social agenda has triumphed (e.g. a Tory PM supporting Hope Not Hate and introducing gay marriage), so the left economic agenda has been utterly defeated? Within living memory a worker on below average wages could still afford to buy house, raise a family. If his kids were bright they’d get free university education. All gone now. In fact you’d almost think there was some kind of inverse relationship.
I think the anthropologist Peter Frost nails it :
“In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project: on the one hand, jobs are outsourced to low-wage countries; on the other, low-wage labor is insourced for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as in the construction and service industries.
This two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of capital. Business people benefit from access to lower-paid workers and weaker labor and environmental standards. Working people are meanwhile thrown into competition with these other workers. As a result, the top 10% of society is pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else, and this trend is taking place throughout the developed world. The rich are getting richer … not by making a better product but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor.”