By admin 
Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.
Read more Politico Owner Axel Springer Gives Prize to Far Right Billionaire Peter Thiel
This summer, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage’s bubble is very publicly bursting in the U.K. in the face of an extraordinary financial scandal.
In April, the media reported that Farage, a member of parliament since 2024 for the east English constituency in the town of Clacton, had over the past years accepted a “gift” of 5 million pounds (roughly $7 million) from a cryptocurrency billionaire, Christopher Harborne. It subsequently came out that he had also accepted significant contributions, including use of a luxury London townhouse, from another cryptocurrency figure, George Cottrell, who served prison time in the United States on money laundering charges. Compounding the sin, Farage didn’t declare these gifts to parliament, as required under British law.
Faced with a parliamentary investigation that will likely find Farage in violation of parliamentary rules, and that could ultimately expel him from Parliament, Reform leadership tried to get a jump on the process by claiming that Farage was the victim of a massive “deep state conspiracy”; and rather than wait for Parliament to suspend or expel him he opted to resign from Parliament before the investigation was complete, triggering a by-election in his constituency. His aim was to run for re-election in that by-election, campaigning on a vox populi (voice of the people) message against the supposed elites conspiring against him and his supporters.
The plan quickly backfired. As soon as Farage resigned from Parliament, all the other major parties united in declaring that they wouldn’t participate in the Farage stunt. In fielding no candidates to run against him, they left the field open to perhaps the strangest, most eccentric figure in British politics, a comedian and perennial joke-candidate in by-elections who goes by the name of Count Binface (his real name is Jon Harvey). This man is as bizarre as his alias would suggest; he campaigns, with a metal trash can covering his head, on such issues as “nationalizing” the singer Adele, capping ice cream prices, conscripting people who use speakerphones on public transport to serve in the military, and banning video-assisted referee reviews of fouls in football games.
In normal by-elections, Count Binface routinely conjures up a few dozen votes. This time around, however, with Binface being the only candidate running against Farage, Reform’s opponents have realized that there is a golden opportunity to inflict the ultimate humiliation on the populist MP. While there aren’t local polls out of Clacton yet, national polls suggest that a majority of voters don’t accept Farage’s justification of his financial “gifts” and that much of the British public would be overjoyed to see Binface win.
In consequence, there is now a full-court effort to rally Farage opponents to Binface’s side, in the hope that, come August, Farage could be unseated, or at least given a serious run for his money, by the least serious figure in British public life.
If Nigel Farage does, indeed, plummet from the political heights at which he currently resides, it will be a political earthquake. Farage has been a central figure on the British populist right since 1993, when, as a young commodities trader in London, he started the UK Independence Party. UKIP, as it became known, was basically a one-trick pony, campaigning relentlessly to take Britain out of the European Union, and to re-establish what Farage believed was the country’s lost sovereignty.
It took 23 years of increasingly divisive, oftentimes deeply misleading rhetoric, but in 2016, with British politics fracturing around the issue of the EU — in particular the freedom of movement that allowed residents of member states to live, work, and claim benefits throughout the entire union, as well as common regulatory structures put in place by Brussels — Farage and the right wing of the governing Conservative Party managed to get the prime minister to agree to hold a referendum on whether or not to stay in the EU.
Farage, who, like Trump, is far wealthier than the vast majority of people who support his nationalist message, played a central role in the Leave campaign. He perfected a man-of-the-people, faux-populist message, sprinkling in endless bromides about sovereignty, about protecting English culture and heritage from immigrants, and about reclaiming local control from faceless European bureaucrats. Playing on the increasingly irrational political environment, he produced manifestly false data on how much money the U.K. was sending to the EU, and how much it would purportedly save in exiting the union. And, when challenged on this data, he ridiculed experts and their knowledge.
On June 23, 2016, a narrow majority of voters sided with the Leave campaign, and, as they say, the rest is history.
Read more Trump Administration Slashes Visa Lengths for Students, Journalists
For the past 10 years, Brexit-era Britain, suffering chronically low economic growth rates and oftentimes struggling to fill vital jobs that used to be filled by migrants from other EU countries, has been a scene of unending political chaos. Successor governments, Conservative and Labour alike, have tried and failed to navigate the poisonous economic, political, and foreign policy environment that exiting the EU has created. With Keir Starmer’s recent resignation and his replacement by erstwhile Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham, Britain will now have had seven prime ministers over the past decade — a specter of political dysfunction that more closely resembles post-World War II Italy than the U.K.-of-old.
Throughout this decade of chaos, Farage has been a central figure. Post-Brexit, he reinvented himself as the leader of a new party, the Brexit Party. A few years later, he reinvented that party under a new name: Reform. Since 2024, he has represented Reform in parliament, having won election with just over 46 percent of the vote in an economically depressed, strongly pro-Brexit eastern English constituency in the town of Clacton.
His message has been quintessentially hard-right populist: opposed to any “soft” Brexit negotiations with the EU; against immigration from non-EU countries; in favor of creating a British version of Trump’s ICE deportation machine; and pushing right-wing positions in Britain’s culture wars. Farage has, in recent years, defended the roving racist gangs who have attacked hotels housing asylum seekers, and sought to capitalize on social media conspiracies about policing codes allegedly treating non-whites better than white suspects. Time after time, he has adopted Trumpian tactics to denigrate his opponents and to stoke popular rage against vulnerable groups.
For most of the past two years, in a splintered political environment — one in which the traditional Big Two parties, the Conservatives and Labour, have seen their popularity crater, and in which the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, and Reform have all increased their support — Reform has led national opinion polls. It has attracted disillusioned Conservative Party politicians to its ranks, and has positioned itself as the repository for many erstwhile Labour and Conservative voters’ discontent. In local elections this past May, Reform picked up more than 1,000 council seats around the country.
Boosted by the U.S. administration, and backed by oligarchs such as Elon Musk, Reform has been riding high. As Keir Starmer’s popularity imploded, there emerged a real possibility of Reform going from having 8 out of Parliament’s 650 MPs after the 2024 election to having between 300 and 400 MPs after the next election.
Like Trump, however, Farage has a weakness for personal aggrandizement and profiteering off of his public role. Unlike Trump, Farage looks likely to pay a high political price for his corruption. Reform’s rise was rapid; if a scandal-plagued Farage falls, as opinion polls suggest he could — surveys show that incoming prime minister Burnham is far more popular with voters than is the Reform leader — the party’s demise might prove to be equally quick.
If that happens, the effects could ricochet around Europe. For decades, Farage has been at the forefront of an anti-EU, anti-progressive alliance of populists. Those populists have been riding high recently; Giorgia Meloni, head of the Brothers of Italy party, is the Italian prime minister; the perennial National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen is polling ahead of her rivals in her campaign to become France’s next president — despite recently being convicted of embezzlement and misuse of public funds; and in Germany the far right AfD, with vociferous support from Elon Musk and the Trump administration, is polling ahead of the other parties in a splintered multi-party system, a truly shocking situation in a country that still has a living memory of the horrendous damage far right nationalist government can inflict. In many other European countries, too, far right parties are surging.
Yet, as in the U.K., these parties aren’t securing anywhere near majority support. Their route to power lies in taking advantage of a fractured political environment, and in successfully preventing alliances from taking root that could block that path. In Italy, Meloni managed to thread this needle; in recent elections in France and in Germany, however, the post-World War II cordon sanitaire, in which non-fascist parties created informal alliances to prevent the far-right from returning to power, has held. In parliamentary elections in 2024, the National Rally was predicted to win power in France; instead, a broad coalition of non-fascist voters managed to defeat it. In Germany, where the AfD, at 28 percent, is now topping the polls, large rallies have been held in recent weeks by coalitions of anti-fascists.
Over the next couple of years, nothing less than the post-war European project is at stake. The supranational strengths of the EU would be damaged beyond repair should far right governments descend on Germany and France. And the consequences to Britain would be equally stark should a far right Reform government take power near decade’s end.
Clear majorities of European voters reject right-wing extremism. Yet the fractured nature of modern politics is providing a potential path to power for parties such as Reform, the AfD, and National Rally. That’s why the events in the U.K. in recent weeks have a significance beyond simply a local political scandal. For if Reform fails, as Farage’s travails make quite possible, it will show that, even in such a roiling political environment, the populist right’s support may not be as durable as it currently seems.
Read more Florida Farmworkers Exposed to Scorching Heat and Pesticides