More anti-Farage stuff as Brown channels Poldark

The Guardina wheels out G Brown, former PM, to attack Farage via a tired metaphor of the Battle of Britain. Brown is famous for not noticing a mic was still on and calling an anti-immigration Labour voter a 'bigoted woman': 

There’s a new battle for Britain: resistance to Nigel Farage 

After last Thursday, what is now at issue is far bigger than Brexit: it is a new battle for Britain. This is a battle against intolerance, prejudice, xenophobia and the manufacture of distrust and disunity....The new division in British politics is between the patriotic majority – tolerant, fair-minded, outward-looking and pragmatic – against the Faragists, who will follow Farage wherever he goes. The dogmatism and divisiveness of their them-versus-us nationalism has more in common with the Le Pens, the Salvinis and the Orbans, and of course the Trumps and Putins, than with the enduring values of the British people.

Farage is out to hijack British patriotism: to whip up a politics of division and hate; weaponise it by deploying the language of betrayal and treachery; and target, demonise and blame immigrants, Europeans, Muslims and anyone else who can be labelled “outsiders” or “the other”.... Farage wants to undo the very anti‑discrimination and equality legislation that protects minorities. He would set back gender equality, promising, for example, to end the right to maternity pay. And instead of honouring the Brexit campaign’s promise of £350m a week to the NHS, he would demolish it by means of US-style private insurance.

Well yes -- Farage's only role is as a token of Leave sentiment. I tactically voted Brexit Party at the local elections, but would never support him for Parliament. And it is tragic that Leave populism is being focused by right-wing groups -- soggy liberals like Brown (big fan of the EU's neo-lib Bologna reforms in HE) are to blame. Back to Farage though -- above all:

instead of calling out no deal by 31 October as a catastrophic act of economic self-harm that runs wholly counter to the national interest, it has become a Farage-driven test of patriotism that a panicked Conservative party is obliging their leadership candidates to pass....It is time to draw a line that must not be crossed and to call on the patriotic majority – which includes millions who voted leave out of understandable economic discontent, and millions, too, who last Thursday voted for Farage – to speak up against this descent into the heart of darkness.

A return to the failed project to define Britishness that Brown tried to push in 2014, although some people think it was important in staving off Scots Nattery at the Indyref. The future is a a marvellous thing of social reform (he was Chancellor and PM and he didn't do that much), and some sort of PVCV after lots of campaigning:

if we are to restore the trust Farage is undermining, we have to address the very real problems that caused the Brexit vote. We have to deal with the fears surrounding immigration, sovereignty, the state of our towns – and high streets – and Britain’s now rampant poverty and inequality. For months I have been calling for us to go outside the Westminster bubble and hold region-by-region public hearings to seek out a new country-wide consensus in advance of a final vote by the British people. If we engage honestly with each other we will, I believe, find the British people far more tolerant and fair-minded, and less inward-looking and dogmatic than those who have suborned our patriotism, turned it into petty nationalism, and today dominate our politics with such disastrous results.

I like the promises of social reform, pursuing what I call the Poldark Illusion, that surly and rebellious peasants, when offered future support by the nobs, will lay down their sickles and happily go home to starve for a few more years. The whole thing reads like something for the initial referendum, pre-2016, when people still trusted politicians to do what they promised.