Dear Editor
A recent letter said that Nigel Farage had shown “authentic leadership and vision” and I was somewhat confused by that. I note that the letter writer didn’t cite any examples of leadership that Mr Farage had shown and I suspect that this is because there aren’t any.
Read: Letters: “The only person showing authentic leadership and vision is Nigel Farage”
Nigel Farage became chairman of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in 1998 – a political party founded with the intention of taking the UK out of the EU.
To that end, he managed to gather enough attention that we had a referendum of EU membership in 2016 wherein leave won by 51.9%-49.1%.
Having finally achieved his goal, Nigel Farage celebrated by resigning as leader a couple of months after the referendum, removing himself from any position of power to help usher in the vision he had for the country, and started using the phrase “the great Brexit betrayal” to describe how others were thinking of implementing the policy for which he’d advocated for so long.
That’s not an authentic leader, that’s a dog who, rather than chasing a car without knowing what to do when he catches it, is merely running after the car and encouraging others to chase it so that it becomes their problem when they catch it.
Back in 2019, when Farage was leading the then Brexit Party (which he only did until 2021) Channel 4 raised concerns about its funding which prompted the Electoral Commission to investigate.
Nigel Farage responded by insulting both institutions (he said that the Electoral Commission was “full of remainers” and that Channel 4 were “political activists”) and barred Channel 4 from reporting on any Brexit Party events.
That’s not authentic leadership, that’s a child yelling “I’m not playing with you” after losing at a game.
The Times recently reported that 41 candidates standing for Reform UK are friends with Gary Raikes, a neo-fascist who claims to be the revival of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (source here).
Farage has downplayed the incident with a Reform UK spokesperson saying that those candidates “have views of their own and are as free to express them as anyone else.”
That’s not authentic leadership, that’s a timid five-a-side referee who refuses to rule on whether or not the ball’s out-of-play – and this newfound respect for freedom of speech is completely at odds with my previous example.
Compare that to the Green Party dropping candidates after accusations of antisemitism (source here) or the Labour Party expelling candidates after accusations of sexual harassment (source here) – both are clear examples of decisive leadership by political parties who don’t want to be associated with harmful rhetoric or actions.
While the author of the previous letter is fully entitled to their views (as are we all) I find their views bafflingly underdeveloped and their champion woefully lacking and inconsistent.
Under such leadership, Reform UK could only ever be a party that wish to be kingmaker but never wish to be king, no more effective than UKIP before them.
I think that any “Conservative voters, traditional Labour voters and independent thinkers” who find themselves considering voting for Reform UK should instead consider spoiling their vote as I can’t see any credible candidates that would align with their options.
Yours sincerely
James Long
Ashburnham Road, Bedford
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