![]() ![]() Remember, Farage started life as a metal trader in the City. How did they do it? Farage: a willing gambler with other people’s money So, a one-issue political party with only one parliamentary seat has forced a referendum on that single policy issue. ![]() No small thing when you consider that Labour got 9.3m votes and the Conservatives 11.3m. Easy to dismiss as frog-faced, spittle-foamed loons, but UKIP won 12.6% of the votes in the 2015 election (meaning 3.8 million people voted for them – for scale, that’s more than the combined population of Birmingham and Greater Manchester). So Cameron made his faustian pact: a referendum to appease the Eurosceptics in his party and save his own neck. You see, he didn’t realise that most of the new UKIP supporters didn’t care about the EU (not in any sense of sovereignty or economic trade terms). Cameron was worried about losing his job, so he made a monumental miscalculation. They were terrified that UKIP support would cost them the 2015 General Election. The effect: the remaining hard-right within the Tory party (and there are many, many) turned the heat up on Cameron. And UKIP harnessed their impotence and their anger at being ignored and it fed them on a heady mix of fear (the immigrants are taking what’s rightfully yours) and hope (here’s your chance to wrest back control). Eh? They cared about how shit they felt their lives were, how left behind they felt. They didn’t care about Britain’s membership of the EU. And in hundreds of pubs, and working men’s clubs and Sun readers’ comments, the pissed off white working classes agreed with him in droves. Never photographed without a pint of beer in his hand, Farage made UKIP into the straight-talking, no nonsense, “I’m not afraid to say what’s wrong with this country” party. So Farage reinvented UKIP as the party for the white working man. He’s an ambitious guy and was not content to be seen as a no-mark. We just let the EU do its thing.īut when Farage took over the UKIP leadership for the second time in 2010, he changed tack. Sure, The Express or The Sun would sometimes fill a slow news day with a headline about the EU stopping us having curved bananas, but none of us cared. A party that appealed to the blue-rinse, bonkers brigade element of the Conservatives and to no-one else at all.īecause no-one actually cared very much about the EU. A party that for the first 15 years of its existence was so far on the right-winged fringes that they had to draft in permatanned daytime smooth-talker Robert Kilroy-Silk to get any attention whatsoever. Here is a party set up for a single purpose – to get Britain to leave the EU. You have to hand it to UKIP and (its now former leader) Nigel Farage. Here are the questions I’ve been asking myself and anyone else who will listen: Question 1: How did UKIP get to set the agenda? So I’m going to channel my disbelief and anger and write down my take on what’s happened. I’ve been through all the emotions in my range. We have opened the mother of all Pandora’s boxes. A protest, yes, but one which leaves you starving and withered. They have, either unwittingly or two-fingeredly, set in motion the equivalent of a hunger strike. The EU referendum, has, for many, many people who voted Leave, got fuck-all to do with the EU and everything to do with a more general sense of unfairness or resentment. And please share this as widely as you can. This post is TLDR, so feel free to skip to the end to find out how you can help. I feel an urgent and overwhelming need to fix it. The past few weeks have made me want to smash The System into pieces too tiny ever to knit back together. As long as The System mainly left me alone, then I left it alone too. I didn’t bother engaging with The System. I felt that The System was both too complex and horribly over-simplified full of people that I didn’t care for. I understood, sometimes in broad terms, sometimes in detail, how The System worked. I always felt that both were very separate from me as an individual. I have always shied away from politics and, more generally, economics. ![]()
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