Senior members of the British government have switched tactics on attacking Nigel Farage and his poll-topping Reform UK party, repeating the “racist” or even “worse than racist” line amid their annual party conference.
After a recent pre-agreed party line attacking Nigel Farage personally as being on the side of paedophiles fell flat, the UK’s governing Labour party has kicked the bid to discredit their main political opposition up a gear, going all in on a racism narrative. While such attacks are hardly novel, Farage has generally been spared such accusations in the past, given his studious avoidance of race matters, and the quiet acknowledgement — no matter how begrudging — that he has played a real role in defeating actual racist politics in the country in the recent past.
After launching this approach over the past few days, the UK’s health minister kicked off Tuesday’s conference — the highest-profile day, with the leaders’ speech to delegates — with comments to morning media interviews doubling down on the narrative, and decrying “the poison of post-truth politics”, which he said Farage’s Reform pursues.
“We are in the fight of our lives”, Streeting said, stating politics is now not just a struggle for control of the government but “for everything we believe in”. In a namecheck to Britain’s ersatz-Chekists, Streeting told the conference they were engaged in a struggle for “hope, not hate”.
Speaking to Times Radio, reports The Daily Telegraph, Streeting cited Reform party communications, particularly from a by-election against Labour politician Anas Sarwar last year. Streeting reflected: “If that leaflet directed against a proud Scot of proud Pakistani heritage was not racist, then I don’t know what is. And, if Nigel Farage allows that to go out from his party, what does that make him?”.
While Streeting’s open-ended question left wiggle-room for interpretation, Home Secretary (interior minister) Shabana Mahmood went full-blast in remarks at a fringe event that followed her Monday speech. Unable or unwilling to outright accuse the Reform UK leader of actual racism, Mahmood instead said he was practising “worse than” racism by dropping what she said she’d detected as “dog whistle” messages to his followers.
She said, The Guardian notes:
I think Nigel Farage is playing the trick that I think he tries to play very regularly, which is he will say something that, technically he can say is not racist, but what he really knows is he’s blown a very, very loud dog whistle to every racist in the country.
That means he can always sort of claim plausible deniability and say: ‘Well, you know, technically, my policy on ILR, for example, looking at indefinite need to remain for people who’ve been in this country for many years,’ he’ll say: ‘Well, that will apply to white people as well as non-white people.’
Technically, that would be true, but he also knows he sent a very clear signal to every racist in the land that those who have made their homes in this country have come from other places, might one day have their status ripped off.
Offering evidence that this “little bit worse than racist” politics is having a real-world impact, Mahmood said her own family had recently been racially abused in Birmingham. This gave her sleepless nights, she said, and left her — a government minister who travels with an attendant police bodyguard — “sort of second-guessing whether I can go back to again”.
Whether the “racist” line of attack will land blows is yet to be seen. However, it has already created some difficulty for the Labour Party itself, as it bids to simultaneously paint immigration concerns as immoral while also trying to win back its former voters by vowing to be tough on migration. As already reported on this contradictory approach:
Devastatingly for the UK’s left — which as the conference season again reveals perceives itself as uniquely the guardian of truth and good faith in Britain’s politics — this expedition into the politics of border control has seen it immediately called out as hypocritical, including from its own fellow-travellers, given such policies are precisely what it otherwise calls racist.
Indeed, in a feat of spectacular timing, the Labour leadership launched a massive attack on Nigel Farage, his policies, and possibly his voters too for alleged racism for also proposing a crackdown in migrant arrivals which would, as promised, lead to arrivals having to leave if they didn’t meet similar tests. Dan Hodges, a Labour insider malcontent said that “having the Prime Minister blast an opponent’s policy as racist on Sunday, then getting the Home Secretary to announce the same policy on Monday” is “bonkers” and mad.
Reform’s Zia Yusuf also leant into the absurdity of the situation, ironically responding to Labour’s new-found interest in border control as “wow, properly racist”. Earlier, he had responded to Labour’s initial attack against his party’s policies: “Labour’s message to the country is clear: pay hundreds of billions for foreign nationals to live off the state forever, or Labour will call you racist.”
The imperative for such attacks is a powerful one; however, given the state of polling in British politics, Labour faces a choice of re-launching the party in the eyes of voters or electoral oblivion. As recently reported, Mr Farage has been projected to win the next UK General Election outright, while Sir Keir Starmer now polls as the least popular Prime Minister in history.
For the Prime Minister, this is not just a question of a potential future Labour defeat, but a personal one, given that his flatlining with the public seems to be fuelling internal Labour plots to launch a coup against him from the left.
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