An Honest Day’s Work

Ben Wildsmith

A friend of mine, who works for an English local authority in the parks department, was hauled up before a disciplinary meeting this week accused of making a political post on his personal Facebook page during an election campaign.

I can only imagine the whitening of his knuckles, gnarled as they are by decades of remorseless labour, when an HR operative, who wouldn’t know a cultivator from a pogo stick, explained that political silence was stipulated by his terms of employment.

For we human resources, the PAYE chumps so hopelessly stuck in a 20th century mindset that we still believe in working for a living, that’s the way it is.

If we are lucky enough to have a proper contract of employment, it is opaquely laden with potential reasons for our dismissal.

Employers are empowered to stalk our utterances and monitor our behaviour in and out of the workplace. If they want rid of us, they will find a way.

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Spivery

Not so for the beneficiaries of Ripoff UK, which long ago codified rewards for spivery at the expense of working people.

As surveillance culture has intruded into the home life of anyone with a job, deregulation and the normalisation of Johnsonian amorality have made the UK ever more fertile for a parasitical class of unproductive liars.

This week, we learned that Nigel Farage, Arthur Daley’s coat on Oswald Mosley’s back, is trousering £97 000 a month for his show on GB News, plus another four grand for his newspaper column.

This would be a profoundly depressing statistic if all it denoted was the public appetite for his millimetre-short-of-the-line divisiveness. The truth, however, is far worse than that.

Neither his show nor his column has enough drawing power to justify that level of remuneration. He is the beneficiary of old-school patronage, whereby the wealthy tip the scales of national discussion in their favour by purchasing visibility for those who will do their bidding.

Feudal practices

It is, ironically, antithetical to the ‘free market’ principles that Farage poses to hold sacred. The historical roots of his place in British life lie not in Friedman and Hayek but in the feudal practices of the Medieval aristocracy. Compare the grand families of Europe with American corporations and you’ll find the precedents for Farage in the arts and the church.

Alarming as Farage’s media ubiquity is, it has become far more dangerous with his election to parliament. I doubt even he would expend much effort persuading us that the driving ambition behind his candidature was to become the public voice of Clacton-on-Sea.

His constituents know that and those who voted for him were content to be of use. The implications of Farage’s elevation to representative politics lie not in his potential to influence policy, Labour’s majority is too wide for that. Rather, he is in a position to make the news he discusses on his show.

Every outrageous speech he gives in the House will become fodder for his GB News appearances. In turn, remarks by him and guests on the show will create enough unrest as to require parliamentary discussion.

Outrage

In subverting the roles of journalist and legislator he can create a perfect loop of outrage that will generate ever more money for him, and political heft for those who pay for it.

The courts have continued this week to send a powerful message about rioting and online incitement. Keir Starmer, by facilitating this, has succeeded in showing a muscular attitude towards the boundaries of acceptable debate in the UK.

Locking up the dregs of society, however, is low hanging fruit. If we can be prosecuted, or lose our jobs over social media posts, then a way can be found to purge British public life of Farage’s dangerous pantomime.

If the HR team at the House of Commons is struggling to find a rule upon which to string him up, perhaps they should ask the Westminster parks department for advice.

It may well be that what passes for democracy in the UK is already doomed, but if the government has ambitions of reviving it then it needs to pass legislation regarding outside media roles for MPs, and it needs to do so quickly.