Farage Ready to Launch New Brexit Party?

Buried in the pages of the I last week – I’m afraid I can’t quite remember when – was the news that Nigel Farage, the quondam Fuehrer of UKIP, is preparing a new party ready to fight for a proper Brexit. Or rather, what he sees as a proper Brexit, which is properly going to be quite different from most normal people’s idea. Farage declared that people were disappointed in the government’s handling of Britain’s departure from the EU, and he had a new party almost ready to enter the next election to fight for something better. The new party had nearly 7 million pounds of funding as well as legions of candidates ready to field.

This piece of earth-shattering non-news was reported in a small article dwarfed by much bigger reports of the government’s and Labour’s actions and policies on the same and facing page. Which is probably why it doesn’t seem to have caused much sensation. I haven’t really been looking for any news about it, but I haven’t seen anyone else on the blogs I usually follow, including Mike, talking about this latest promise to revitalize British politics.

And I’m not surprised. We’ve been here before. Remember all those years ago round about 2004 when Robert Kilroy-Silk announced he was a launching a new party to campaign against foreign immigration and demand Britain leave the EU? Which I think had the backing of Joan Collins, now living in France. Kilroy caused immense anger with his bigoted remarks about foreigners in general, and specifically about Arabs and Muslims. This in turn gave the British public immense amusement when a couple of rightly offended Muslims poured ordure over him as he was filmed opening his mouth to spout xenophobic bilge and leading questions. For all the outrage and controversy Kilroy caused, his party went absolutely nowhere. It fizzled out, and vanished without a trace. The same is likely to happen very soon with UKIP, and is almost certain to happen with the Fuhrage’s new outfit, whatever the former Kipper generalissimo may say to the contrary.

Farage, one of his books was titled Flying Free, departed UKIP claiming that it was now too racist for him. But under Farage the party was hardly a haven of multicultural tolerance and gender equality. It contained more than its fair share of racists and former members of the Fascist right, as well as homophobes, Muslim-haters and anti-feminists, if not out-and-out misogynists. And there were claims that Farage himself was just as bigoted, going right back to the time he was a public schoolboy. Anti-racists, LGBTQ activists and feminists didn’t just protest his party, but also him. Like on one occasion when a group of the above, including Muslims and drag queens turned up at a pub in which he planned to have a lunch time pint and began protesting against him. Which included the Muslims praying to show that they were no threat to anyone and were the victims of his and his party’s prejudice. Farage’s party won’t be treated any differently, if it every launches. Which is a very good question.

UKIP was always a single issue party. It stood for Britain’s departure from the EU. Other policies, like the bigotry and racism were simply additions, although I’ve know doubt that to many Kippers they were fundamental reasons for their joining. But the fundamental issue at UKIP’s core, its very raison d’etre, was simply Brexit. And that was achieved, more or less, when the Leave campaign won. The referendum was called by the Tories, who were then re-elected as the governing party – unfortunately – and who then began the consequent botched negotiations and stupid, self-interested politicking that has produced the current mess. UKIP had been given what they primarily wanted, and were shut out of the whole process. As a result, they started to decline. Rapidly.

And it’s because they’re irrelevant that Kipperfuehrer Batten has now lurched even further, or just most obviously, to the far right. He’s taken on veteran islamophobe, former BNP member and jailbird Tommy Robinson as his advisor on Islam and prison reform, Tommy Robinson, and right-wing YouTube personalities Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin because he thinks they’ll bring in more members. The unnamed Kipper official, who tried to dissuade Benjamin from joining in the leaked audio recording told him that they wanted Robinson in, because he was likely to bring with him also several thousand of his followers, who would take the whole process of campaigning and leafleting seriously. Unlike, it has to be said, Sargon, who was personally uninterested in actively campaigning for the party except for the content on his blog, and whose followers showed how seriously they took real political activism by getting smashed in a pub and shouting ‘Free Kekistan!’ out the window at passing cars. Sargon, Dankula and Robinson are notorious bigots, and I’ve put up a video of one, non-racist Kipper railing angrily against their joining, who made it very clear that Batten had destroyed the party for him and he wanted to leave. And somehow I don’t think for a moment that he’s alone.

Batten undoubtedly is going to lose members. But before the Kipper leadership resorted to appealing to extremists, they tried a more moderate approach. A year or so ago they were also claiming that Brexit wasn’t being delivered properly, and issued their demands for their view of how it all ought to be done. And no-one was remotely interested. Hence, presumably, Fuehrer Batten’s decision to try recruiting people even more openly extreme than many of the existing members. It’s a desperate tactic to halt the party’s dwindling membership and prevent its decline into total irrelevance and obscurity.

And I predict the fate of Farage’s proposed new party will be absolutely no different. Always assuming it ever gets launched, of course.

And speaking of electoral irrelevance and obscurity, what happened to this new, shiny centrist party that Blair was backing and which was supposedly ready to launch? You know, the one that was supposed to have rich corporate donors, and which was ready to accept all the right-wing Blairite Labour MPs ready to defy Corbyn and depart en masse from the party? The exciting new party that was later revealed to have no real policies and a miniscule membership, which got even smaller before it was ever launched when one of its disgruntled founders picked up his ball and walked out. It was supposedly all set and ready to go early last year, if not before. But now it’s February 2019, and we’ve not heard a dicky bird from them since. Though the right-wing Labour MPs are muttering once again about departing. But not, apparently, to that new party, which seems to have died the death before it ever got going.

Pretty much as we can expect Farage’s party to do.

Tags: 'Flying Free', 'I' Newspaper, 'Leave' Campaign, Blogs, BNP, Brexit, Carl Benjamin, Conservatives, Corporate Donors, Count Dankula, Feminism, Gays, Gerard Batten, Islamophobia, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Collins, Labour Party, Mark Meechan, Misogyny, Muslims, Nigel Farage, Prisons, Public School, racism, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Sargon of Akkad, the Rich, Tommy Robinson, tony blair, UKIP, Youtube