Opinion
Farage must be exposed as the charlatan he is 'again and again and again'
Martin Shipton
Those worried about the rise of Reform UK may have taken some crumbs of comfort from the fact that on Thursday the party lost two by-elections in seats it gained as recently as in May.
The losses in County Durham and Nottinghamshire were probably related to the fact that the previous Reform councillors resigned within a week of taking office.
In Durham, the ex-councillor didn’t realise - and no one it seems had told him - that he couldn’t simultaneously be a councillor and a council employee, while in Nottinghamshire the councillor who quit hasn’t offered a coherent explanation for his decision.
In each case, the cost of the by-election was well over £20,000 - a gross waste of public money, as an ex-council leader said.
The losses won’t, however, lead to any change at either county, given that Reform won landslide victories in both.
In Llanidloes, too, the Reform surge was just about fended off in a by-election that saw the Liberal Democrats retain by just six votes a seat its previous councillor had held for as many as 52 years.
But none of these counter victories can be hailed as a triumph for progressive politics.
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Laughable
There are still many people in Wales and England who are prepared to vote for what is a highly dubious outfit whose claim to represent the interests of ordinary people is laughable.
Richard Tice, Reform’s oleaginous deputy leader, announced this week that the employer’s pension contributions made by the 10 councils the party now controls will be slashed.
This is hardly surprising, given that Reform’s MPs voted against the Labour UK Government’s law to extend workers’ rights.
There is something peculiarly unpleasant about a party that laughs at its own often poorly paid supporters by putting them very firmly in their (lowly) place.
Before looking at Nigel Farage himself, it’s worth considering the type of person who is attracted to the idea of becoming a Reform candidate. In recent days I’ve written a couple of stories about the party’s chosen standard bearer in a Cardiff council by-election that’s due to take place later this month.
While Cardiff isn’t the most fertile territory in Wales for Reform, the election is taking place in the predominantly white working class ward of Llanrumney, many of whose residents would match the optimal Reform demographic.
The rapidly selected Reform candidate, known affectionately as Sidney, has a website for the company he runs called ERA Film Studios. To read the descriptions of Sidney and his largely film-related business activities - although they do stray into professional wrestling territory too, of which Sidney is said to be both an exponent and an entrepreneur - one might believe him to be a cinema mogul akin in his significance to motion picture history as a pioneer like DW Griffith.
There’s much portentous material to be read and it’s not a surprise that one of the words that pops out of the pages of verbiage is “Egomaniac”.
All kinds of grandiose claims are made for the company and what it has supposedly achieved already. One statement chosen at random says: “ERA Film Studios is rapidly emerging as a pioneering force in the realm of AI-driven music, pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation.” There is much more of the same.
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Credulous
A credulous person would be taken in, and doubtless there are many in Reform’s Cardiff branch who have been.
I would, however, point them in the direction of Companies House, whose physical presence is in Cardiff but whose data on all registered companies can conveniently be accessed remotely. A company search on ERA Film Studios reveals that the company has just one employee - presumably Sidney himself - and that it hasn’t traded since being founded in 2008.
The grandiose claims made by Sidney “King” Malik are, it seems, a fantasy devised by his own self-worshipping imagination.
He has an account on X which he uses to regurgitate Reform propaganda dedicated to the aggrandisement of Nigel Farage. On July 4 he reposted a message from the White House that said: “On this Independence Day, we honor the courage of our Founding Fathers, the patriots who forged our freedom & the heroes who’ve defended it for 249 years. UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IS BACK - BOLD, PROUD AND FREE.”
Sidney has refused to answer any questions about the discrepancies involving his business. Presumably he hopes people won’t notice or won’t care if they do. It’s Trumpian in its arrogance and corrosive to our democracy.
Something disturbing and strange is underway in our society. Many people are being swept along a far-right path without understanding the implications of what they’re doing.
It reminds me of the absurdist play Rhinoceros, by the Romanian-French dramatist Eugene Ionesco, whose work I studied at university. Everyone was willingly turning into a Rhinoceros. One interpretation of the play is that it’s a metaphor for the rise of fascism in the 1930s. That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but more subtly it seems to me that it’s about establishing new kinds of conformism and pressuring people to become adherents. When everyone else in a friendship group says they’re going to vote for Reform, it can be difficult for many people to disoblige. Peer group pressure allied to social media pressure can be very powerful.
This is why it’s so important to expose Nigel Farage as the charlatan he undoubtedly is.
European Parliament
The first time I saw him in the flesh was in the bar of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where one lunchtime many years ago I was interviewing Eluned Morgan, who at the time was an MEP. At first I heard Farage rather than saw him. I asked Ms Morgan, who she then was, what was the source of the noise. She told me it was Farage and his sidekicks in Ukip. They’d certainly made themselves at home in an institution they purported to hate, taking over the space as if it belonged to them and loudly asserting their right to ascendancy.
There are quite a few stories from his time in the European Parliament where he and his party got into trouble with the authorities over their attitude to public money. They’re easy to find on the internet. One, dating from January 2018, that I quickly found is headlined: “Nigel Farage has MEP salary docked to recoup misspent EU funds”. It begins: “Nigel Farage is being docked half his monthly MEP salary after a European Parliament investigation alleged he had misspent public funds intended for staffing his office.
“The former Ukip leader, who recently bemoaned being ‘53, separated and skint’, will lose €40,000 (£35,500) in total, the Guardian has learned, after European Parliament auditors concluded he had misspent that amount of EU funds.
“Financial controllers have been investigating the role of Christopher Adams, who was hired by Farage to work in the European Parliament as his assistant.
“Auditors suspended Adams’ contract last year, because they were not convinced he was working for Farage on European parliamentary matters. Although paid as Farage’s assistant, Adams was also the national nominating officer for Ukip, where he was described as one of the party’s ‘key people’.”
Carping
Such stories are evidence of a cavalier approach to the spending of public money, and doesn’t sit well with Farage’s constant carping about money wasted in the public sector.
Since being elected MP for Clacton last year, he hasn’t scaled down his paid-for activities outside Parliament. If anything, he’s taken on more.
In April the Guardian revealed that Farage had got a 10th job, making £25,000 (AU$52,000) as a commentator for the Rupert Murdoch-backed Sky News Australia, with the MP telling the channel that Britain is “going downhill”.
The paper reported: “The Reform UK leader has a portfolio of gigs on top of his role as an MP, including a £280,000 job advertising gold bullion, a £4,000-a-month column for the Daily Telegraph and presenting for GB News, which has paid him more than £330,000 since July.
“His other jobs include giving speeches, social media work on Google, X and Meta, and selling personalised videos on Cameo, which has made him £125,000 since the election. In total, he is approaching £900,000 in outside earnings.”
Prime Minister
This is the man whose party is currently leading the polls in Britain. At this stage you’d have to say he has a pretty good chance - thanks to the First Past The Post electoral system - of becoming Prime Minister in four years time.
However much people may be disillusioned with Britain’s two alternating parties of government - in fact they’re disillusioned with neo-liberal policies - why would anyone be tempted to vote for such a transparently self-seeking charlatan?
He - and his party followers like Sidney - needs to be exposed again and again and again.
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