Before I say anything at all, let me say that Nigel Farage is a very bad man who tells lies and that there are big questions about where his funding comes from. I have no qualms in joining the daily stream of hate justifiably directed towards him.
So why is he so popular? It's the thick people who like him:
the one central thing he says is true. People voted three years ago for something they have not got. There is little need for you to tell me the thing they voted for was impossible or undeliverable; we have spent three years having that explained to us by remainers, running on facts and reason, outrage and a generalised despair at the huge leave vote. One side has reason and tolerance, and the other only incoherent feelings: they were using Brexit as a vehicle for racism, culture wars, yada yada yada. They can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them.
Some people have even ventured out of London, practising the new anthropology in which the strange tribes of Lincolnshire or Sunderland are observed. You don’t have to go that far, though. In London, 40% voted leave. When vox popped, they say contradictory things; hard remainers respond that they are old and don’t understand anything. They live in the past and Farage is a shyster. Wow.Puzzling stuff -- Moore being ironic? Using irony to say things she knows are really unjustifiable?
To counter Farage, more needs to be done. Picking him apart on political shows doesn’t work because it’s just the establishment, which we are told hates ordinary people anyway...These concerns are revealing of a collapsing [Parliamentary] system, which has been in stasis for three years and which does not know how to represent these bad 17 million people, who have done the very bad thing....It is in this void that Farage operates. He does not want Brexit. He wants this permanent anger; he wants people to have no trust in the government, in the NHS or in civil society. He is dangerous because he wants to create demands that cannot be met.
I don’t need reminding that Farage is as establishment as they come, but what’s cracking apart the two-party system is this basic demand that political representation be more direct, local and accountable...When Scotland demanded more direct democracy, no one seemed to listen. [ScotNats are in the same camp as Leavers then? Except Scots nationalism is OK but not English?] When everyone saw London pulling so far away from the rest of country, no one seemed to care.
Seemingly contradicting herself, unless I have misunderstood her use of the indirect discourse form she might be employing in the first part:
The mindless repetition that Brexit means Brexit is countered only by an equally insane argument, that is it is only ever a metaphor for something else: usually austerity, racism, apathy.
Moore remembers some earlier fashionable zeitgeisty stuff to replace all this sad binary name-calling:
What we are living though is a simulation of politics. When the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard...The system is borked [me neither -- I found this in the online Urban Dictionary: 'To have totally fucked something up. Usually by doing something stupid. Specifically used to describe technology that is broken.'], we can all see that, but we have to pretend it is real, that it is powerful and that it knows what it’s doing. Populism rushes to fill this vacuum...We can beat down Farage only with honesty and a desire for genuine renewal, with a vision of the future and by telling the truth in a way that cuts through. [Baudrillard would have a laugh at that old stuff about truth and vision in Moore's simulated concerns, and predicted the same fate for them as for any other sermons or political snake-oil puffs -- disappearance into the black hole of 'public opinion' that is the result of exhaustion, despair and mass apathy]
So -- go on then -- convince us with honest visions of the future. Oh dear -- this is the final mouse-like paragraph:
We all got stuff wrong. No one party can sort this out. Farage doesn’t even want to. He wants permanent outrage and discontent. And he gets it on a daily basis. Stop talking about protest votes or thinking that protest belongs only to your side – that’s Corbyn’s mentality. We should all be protesting that this parliament is no longer functioning or currently able to deliver any form of representative democracy. The symptoms are morbid. But this could be the beginning of something better. Imagine that.
Cue John and Yoko. Fade to silence until the deadline for the next column.
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