The left likes to assume that if proportional representation replaced first-past-the-post as part of some grand constitutional reconfiguration, there would be a progressive majority at Westminster. As with so many of the fundamental questions of our time, the left should think again. Ukip won nearly four million votes at the 2015 general election but has only one MP. Under PR, the party would now have as many as 83 MPs, and just imagine what difference that would make to our already debased political discourse.
Big trouble in the Big Apple
Locked out of the House of Commons at successive general elections, Nigel Farage has instead been free to agitate and roam widely, an ever-welcome guest on flagship BBC current affairs programmes such as Question Time, which has become an unwatchable weekly shouting-fest. Even without the vote for Brexit, Farage would have been one of the most transformative politicians of these turbulent new times. He and his closest supporters, such as Arron Banks, the co-founder of Leave.EU and the so-called Man Who Bought Brexit, harried David Cameron into holding the referendum on British membership of the EU that will for ever after define him as a bungler.
Receiving a “lifetime achievement” prize at the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards on 2 November, Farage abused and ridiculed the co-host George Osborne and then promptly turned on the audience, shouting that they wouldn’t be smiling “when Donald Trump is in the White House”. Not for the first time in recent months, Farage was on the winning side – and didn’t he and his entourage, lads on tour intent on taking a chunk out of the Big Apple, look delighted during their audience with Donald Trump at the gaudy oligarch’s palace that is Trump Tower?
Straight talk
Having a personal meeting with the president-elect was another coup for Farage, who Fox News calls the “UK opposition leader”. No matter what you think of his politics, he long ago understood something simple about our rancid political culture: outrage pays. Social media have empowered any number of loudmouth cranks and belligerents. Trump won without the endorsement of any serious mainstream publication in the United States, but he didn’t need it: he had the support of the “alt-right”, anti-truth propagandists who have their own well-funded media outlets. Now, one of their most vocal champions, Stephen Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker and the executive chairman of the far-right-wing website Breitbart News, is Trump’s chief strategist.
Like Trump, Farage has a gift for straight-talking populism that resonates with the kinds of voters who have long since given up on conventional politics, or who are weary of – or were never reconciled to – liberal decency. I interviewed him in November 2014 at his modest offices in Mayfair and, afterwards, he and his then senior aide Raheem Kassam invited me for a drink at a nearby pub. Kassam is now editor in chief of Breitbart London. Having pulled out of the contest to become the next leader of Ukip, he was one of the gang at Trump Tower.
Both he and Farage smoke, so we stood outside on a mild day, drinking London Pride. It was fascinating to observe just how many people approached Farage. “Keep it up, Nige!” they said. “Stick it to them, Nigel!” I was struck by how relaxed he was, how at ease in his skin, as he greeted his admirers. He later told me that Ukip could win 15 seats at the election. That did not come close to happening, of course, but now he is savouring greater victories as the new right-wing nationalism sweeps the West.
Battle of ideas
The academic Paul Stott has published a thoughtful blog on Lapidomedia, an online centre for religious literacy in journalism. “Explanations for the disillusionment of working-class voters with the Labour Party are fashionable and numerous,” he writes, then goes on to list some of them. “There is a further explanation,” he adds. “The left has embraced an Islam whose world-view is anathema to many working-class people in Britain, of any religion or none.”
I spoke to Stott. He is concerned not just about Islamism but about Islam. “All shades within the Labour Party are reluctant to recognise Islam as an ideology and as a rival ideology,” he told me. “Islam is presented as a design for living. But if you try to debate this with Muslims, people become uncomfortable. The Labour Party has a very passive approach towards religious actors who wish to claim space and claim territory.”
He says that the left is losing a battle of ideas because too many liberals fail “to realise a battle of ideas is going on”. In Britain, Stott says, “We have an increasingly secular majority and an increasingly religious minority – and that won’t end well.”
Out of the past
The Today programme’s Sarah Montague asked Bernie Sanders if he thought that Trump was a fascist. Sanders equivocated but it was an apposite question. Last week, writing in haste because of an absurdly early print deadline, I compared Trump to a “neo-fascist”. Stephen Brasher, our long-standing subscriptions manager, who knows as much about political history as anyone on the NS, disagreed. “He doesn’t have his own militia, for a start,” he said.
So what are the defining attributes of Trumpism? I’d say ultra-nationalism, populism, nativism, protectionism, hatred of immigrants and socialists, the cult of personality and chauvinism. Now ask yourself what defines neo-fascism. Both John Gray and the historian Niall Ferguson suggest that Trump’s “populism” recalls the late 19th century, another age of globalisation and mass migration, more than it does the 1930s. According to Ferguson, “In the 1880s, as in our own time, the political result of stagnation was not fascism but populism.” So if Trump is not a fascist, how should we describe him?
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This article appears in the 16 Nov 2016 issue of the New Statesman, Trump world