Nigel Farage is filling Britain’s truth-shaped hole. Honesty is the only way to drive him out

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/16/nigel-farage-truth-honesty-brexit-party

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Before I say anything at all, let me say that Nigel Farage is a very bad man who tells lies and that there are big questions about where his funding comes from. I have no qualms in joining the daily stream of hate justifiably directed towards him. But we have to accept it has not made him vanish into thin air.

Why is this? Quite simply, because the one central thing he says is true. People voted three years ago for something they have not got. There is little need for you to tell me the thing they voted for was impossible or undeliverable; we have spent three years having that explained to us by remainers, running on facts and reason, outrage and a generalised despair at the huge leave vote. One side has reason and tolerance, and the other only incoherent feelings: they were using Brexit as a vehicle for racism, culture wars, yada yada yada. They can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them.

Some people have even ventured out of London, practising the new anthropology in which the strange tribes of Lincolnshire or Sunderland are observed. You don’t have to go that far, though. In London, 40% voted leave. When vox popped, they say contradictory things; hard remainers respond that they are old and don’t understand anything. They live in the past and Farage is a shyster. Wow.

To counter Farage, more needs to be done. Picking him apart on political shows doesn’t work because it’s just the establishment, which we are told hates ordinary people anyway. The establishment parties, riven with hopelessness, cannot say anything with clarity. Labour and the Tories are in, out, shake it all about on Brexit, and hoping somehow either to cling on to power or just to take it. Their purpose is not to stop Brexit or deliver it, but to simply pretend they are still in charge.

As the Labour MP Mary Creagh said on Newsnight recently, the mood in the House of Commons is “end of days”. This end of days feeling is apparent in the endless arguments about the inability of our institutions to deal with reality, whether that’s the BBC or Westminster. These concerns are revealing of a collapsing system, which has been in stasis for three years and which does not know how to represent these bad 17 million people, who have done the very bad thing.

It is in this void that Farage operates. He does not want Brexit. He wants this permanent anger; he wants people to have no trust in the government, in the NHS or in civil society. He is dangerous because he wants to create demands that cannot be met.

For years, the left has seen itself as essentially anti-establishment. Thus all the dismay from this side that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer the insurgent, that the real insurgency is coming from the right. I don’t need reminding that Farage is as establishment as they come, but what’s cracking apart the two-party system is this basic demand that political representation be more direct, local and accountable. When Scotland demanded more direct democracy, no one seemed to listen. When everyone saw London pulling so far away from the rest of country, no one seemed to care.

The mindless repetition that Brexit means Brexit is countered only by an equally insane argument, that is it is only ever a metaphor for something else: usually austerity, racism, apathy. You cannot win back leave voters by telling them they have voted for a metaphor, for something unreal.

The result has been a parliament in limbo. Our ruling class has shown itself to be aimless. There is no new legislation. It does not know what to do with itself. Its inflexibility is reflected in Theresa May and Corbyn, who both fake triangulation and talk in vague metaphors. You cannot heal the divides in this country if you won’t look at the wound. Nor can you tell someone their pain is not real, or that they are not feeling it where they say they are. But you can keep it festering, as Farage does.

Our ruling class has shown itself to be aimless. There is no new legislation. It does not know what to do with itself

What we are living though is a simulation of politics. When the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote that the first Gulf war, of 1991, was not happening, he did not mean that atrocities were not taking place, merely that everything was an interpretation through the lens of the media. The same could now be said of Westminster. The system is borked, we can all see that, but we have to pretend it is real, that it is powerful and that it knows what it’s doing.

Populism rushes to fill this vacuum. The truth needs to be told to voters in ways that both Labour and Tories are avoiding . Their game is simply protecting their own power bases, which is partly what caused all this in the first place. They are fundamentally dishonest. I shed no tears for their impotence.

We can beat down Farage only with honesty and a desire for genuine renewal, with a vision of the future and by telling the truth in a way that cuts through. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” was never going to resonate emotionally for remainers. For many, something broke a long time ago.

We all got stuff wrong. No one party can sort this out. Farage doesn’t even want to. He wants permanent outrage and discontent. And he gets it on a daily basis. Stop talking about protest votes or thinking that protest belongs only to your side – that’s Corbyn’s mentality. We should all be protesting that this parliament is no longer functioning or currently able to deliver any form of representative democracy. The symptoms are morbid. But this could be the beginning of something better. Imagine that.