The Legend that is ‘Nigel Farage’…

I first start listening to Nigel Farage back in 2008 and he was certainly saying the exact things that I and many other people were thinking at the time, and he was certainly spot on about you could not fit a fag paper between Labour and Conservatives. I had witnessed first hand, Tony Blair turning Labour into the old Tory party. By 2010 I had signed up to be a member of UKIP because I could see the party certainly had the potential to burst that Westminster Bubble and knew that is exactly what needed doing. Nigel was an inspiration to many and even back then he had managed to get people once again interested in Politics… at a time when most of the nation had simply become politically lethargic. 

I started attending conferences and it turned out that we both had the same internal nicotine clock, so we often ended up chatting whilst having a quick cigarette and he was genuinely WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). I thought his only flaw at the time was he was a bit of a technophobe and in the early days never really understood the importance of social media in politics, though he certainly soon learned just how important and dangerous it was. Then in 2012 UKIP got a lucky break, the media made the massive mistake of making UKIP the underdog when two foster parents were sacked for being UKIP members and this actually gave UKIP the springboard it needed… the media had forgotten why us Brits thought ‘Eddie the Eagle’ was a legend and that we Brits will always side with the underdog, it is the British way. The media tried counteracting their mistake by smearing UKIP as racists, xenophobes, etc and Cameron called us a bunch of ‘Fruitcakes and Loons’ but the UKIP momentum had started and as the conference crowds got larger, Nigel became more and more proficient at motivating the crowd to get the message out to the many. Of course with the help of many others such as Godfrey Bloom who was the master of media manipulation and those of us who knew how social media worked started campaigning loudly on Twitter, Facebook, etc and UKIP became a formidable force in British politics. 

So much so that in the EU Elections of 2014, UKIP became the first party other than Labour or Conservative to win a national election, with 4.4 million votes they won 24 seats to the EU Parliament and that put the fear of God into Westminster, especially the Conservatives. Personally, I believe it was that win that sealed the EU Referendum because it was the only way the Cameron could counteract the ‘Rise of UKIP’. Unfortunately, UKIP did not have the knowledge or experience to handle that success and this is when Nigel Farage made his biggest mistake. No doubt he could see UKIP were not handling the success and thought he would bring in others that could but if anyone were to ask me what I thought was Nigel’s biggest flaw I will always say his uncanny ability to pick the wrong people around him, well that was certainly the case from 2014 – 2016, I sincerely hope he learned from that mistake. 

However, in 2016 we had the EU Referendum and Leave actually won it, much to everyone’s surprise really, including my own but I would say June 23rd 2016, was undoubtedly my best ever day in politics. I had actually left UKIP by then because the NARPs (Newly Arrived, Rapidly Promoted types) were intent on killing UKIP off by basically turning it into just another establishment party for career politicians, which was actually the type of party that UKIP were supposed to be against but unfortunately they were far more concerned with their own ambitions to ever realised that they were in fact killing of what was a breath of fresh air in British politics.  However, Nigel had succeeded in what he had set out to do though I think he knew in his heart that UKIP was by this time broken beyond repair and that probably had a lot to do with why he stepped down as leader. 

When I left the party, not long after we won EU2014 because I could see the party heading in a direction I had no wish to travel, the membership was around 46,000 but the factions that had been created within were all after replacing Nigel and soon the membership started to drop. Nigel was off doing his own thing with LBC and Trump and UKIP just went from one embarrassing leadership campaign to the next. In fact, from the moment Nigel Farage stepped down as leader I cannot think of a single positive thing UKIP did in regards to Brexit and when eventually Gerard Batten became the leader, the party was in a complete mess, even many of the faction instigators had thrown the towel in and Gerard adopted a party with a rather large black cloud over it because of the Jane Collins defamation case. I suppose much of Gerard’s strategy for the party was based on the financial dire straights the party was in but the simple fact is by taking the route he chose he did make UKIP unelectable. By this time the membership had more than halved and they were certainly short on candidates, which I could see by the numerous by-elections throughout the UK that have been held over the past three years with no UKIP candidate standing. In the local elections this year, there were 163 council seats in the North East and UKIP stood just 8 candidates. So ‘Deadman Walking’ was a bit of an understatement and undoubtedly Nigel could see this and no doubt decided that forming The Brexit Party was a far better option, a totally new party in British politics and I know that he attacked UKIP but that was simply politics, for him to stand any chance of success with a new political party, of course, he had to distance himself from UKIP and the easiest way to do that was to turn on them. I tried to explain this to Kippers throughout the EU election campaign and also pointed out that by attacking Nigel and his new party they were only putting people off and creating ‘Non-Voters’, unsurprisingly, that only resulted in them then attacking me for pointing out what was blatantly obvious. Needless to say, in EU2019, UKIP actually worked against Brexit and for me, that is unforgivable. 

So Nigel Farage with his new Brexit Party went on to win EU2019, surpassing UKIP’s success of 2014 and becoming another party to win a national election other than Labour and Conservative, both of which were lead by one man…

‘The Legend that is Nigel Farage’

It is an unarguable fact that Nigel will go down in political history as one of the most influential politicians of our time and yet UKIP, still licking their wounds, will simply not admit that and as far as I am concerned and I am sure many others think the same, UKIP are now finished, they obviously have no real understanding of politics. They can try to blame whatever they like but the truth is the campaign method they used for EU2019 was the final nail in the coffin and though I did campaign to get them votes in the EU Election, that is something that I will not be repeating. I simply knew that with the PR system the most Pro Brexit candidates could only be returned by getting both UKIP and Brexit Party placed 1st & 2nd, at least I tried. 

As for Nigel Farage and The Brexit Party, I wait with interest to see their policies but I will not be displaying a Brexit Party logo anytime soon because the party structure seems to me to be much like the EU and I do not believe that will change British politics in the way it needs to be changed. At the moment it feels like it would be just replacing the Tory party with another Tory party using the same top-down structure of all the other establishment parties and also one of Nigel’s other flaws in UKIP was to get rid of anyone the media targeted with smears and that only ever qualifies those smears which makes them stick. As Albert Einstien said, change does not come about by doing the same thing over and over and I believe that to change British politics for the better, we need to change how a political party actually functions. 

So I do honestly wish the very best of luck to the political legend, Nigel Farage and The Brexit Party but unless they get a very good ‘Spin Doctor’ and stop throwing people like Michael McGough, Noel Matthews, etc under a bus, I do strongly suspect they will simply continue swapping 3rd and 4th place with the LibDems… I do hope he proves me wrong though and I will certainly watch with interest. In the meantime, I will continue on with Engage in my attempt to change how political parties work. We might even manage to influence the other parties in our efforts…