The main effect of multiparty politics on Britain is seemingly to replace two useless parties with five of them.
This local election campaign has demonstrated a vast spread of practical and moral failure.
Watching it play out against the backdrop of the Iran crisis has been a sobering experience. Around the world you see profound, generation-defining jeopardy. And in the face of it, what do we get?
An anti-elite party led by a man who pockets millions from foreign backers. A progressive party led by a man who wants to emulate populism rather than defeat it. A governing party led by a man who is unwilling to govern. And an official opposition led by a woman with no judgement or seriousness whatsoever.
The revelations about Nigel Farage’s finances over the last few days have been significant. We once wondered how the Reform leader could afford to go back into politics in 2024, given he previously said he was “skint”. Well now we know. A secret £5 million donation by Christopher Harborne, a mysterious billionaire based in Thailand, who also goes by the name Chakrit Sakunkrit. He holds a 12 per cent shareholding in the Tether cryptocurrency.
A year later Farage’s policy agenda promised to make Harborne – or Sakunkrit, or whatever he calls himself now – an even wealthier man. The Reform leader pledged to use a new crypto assets bill to launch “a crypto revolution”, including a massive reduction of capital gains tax on crypto transactions from 24 per cent to 10 per cent and the establishment of a bitcoin reserve in the Bank of England. A spokesperson for Reform has said Harborne’s donation was a “personal unconditional gift” and that Farage’s decision to stand for election as an MP was “entirely unrelated”.
People will deploy countless arguments to make us stop looking at this. Cynics will say that the media won’t cover it. Professional pessimists will say that it won’t make a difference because his die-hard supporters don’t care. In actual fact, it was journalists at The Guardian who broke the story. It was journalists at the BBC’s News at Ten who produced a full package on it last night. And much as his loyalists might not care, wavering voters are in fact affected by this sort of thing – and it’s wavering voters who make the difference between being an upstart party on 25 per cent and a winning party on 35 per cent.
Farage isn’t an insurgent. He behaves like a minister at the fag-end of the last Tory government. And while he does so, Green party leader Zack Polanski also harks back to the recent past, acting like a tribal loyalist during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. He’s now faced weeks of drip-drip mini-scandals involving anti-semitism in his party. One candidate posted an image of an armed man wearing a Hamas headband with the slogan: “Resistance is freedom”. Another shared a post with the text: “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.”
Both these candidates have been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred online. The Green party has initiated its own investigations into other candidates, but it has been painfully slow to respond.
Those looking to Polanski to provide a lead have been disappointed. His initial response to the terror attack last week was to criticise the police for how they made the arrest. He has supported a motion saying that “Zionism is racism” – an abysmal muddle-headed statement about an entirely valid and defensible political belief, no matter whether you agree with it or not. And this week he has deployed the classic virtue-protection mechanisms of the Corbyn era: Knee-jerk defensiveness and complaints of conspiracy. “When you see the relentless attacks from other parties on the Greens across the media remember this,” he wrote on X. “They’re trying everything in their power to stop us.”
Many progressives have been so starved of leaders willing to articulate their values that they instinctively kick back against Polanski’s critics, but by God this isn’t good enough. Polanski prides himself on being a left-populist, as Corbyn was. And it is precisely for this reason that he has no answers to our problems. He is unwilling to talk of trade-offs, or compromises, or technical reality. He is just another people-versus-the-elite ideologue, whispering self-interested myths and nonsense into the ears of voters.
Then, in the background, now almost an afterthought, the three main parties, reduced to cameo status.
Labour has no story to tell. What has it done with its time in power? Who knows. What will it do with the remaining years? Unclear. What are its values? Hard to tell. Is it the party of Ed Miliband’s progressive climate change initiative or Shabana Mahmood’s nativist anti-immigration programme? No-one can say. It is a rudderless administration, a dinghy in a stormy sea, lacking mast or sails or captain, being pushed wherever the waves take it.
What about Kemi Badenoch? The Tory leader is a Twitter sock-puppet account where a leader of the opposition should be. Her decision-making stature is non-existent. Her plan is undiscernible. She has no account of what has gone wrong in the country and no assessment of what is happening in the world. She is a gotcha-merchant, a product of the social media age, a sneering quote tweet in human form, utterly useless even at the things she is best at.
And then there is Ed Davey. It is sometimes possible, if you squint hard enough, to dimly admire him. But he is ultimately exactly what he looks like: a politician of the benign early 2000s in the Death Race dystopia of the 2020s. He is warm and soft-around-the-edges and proficiently calibrated. He has toned down his antics and pranks.
But he is also – perhaps he has forgotten this – the leader of the Liberal Democrats. It is a party whose name outlines the precise set of values which are in danger of becoming extinct and yet he is unable or unwilling to outline a liberal vision for the future. He is operating in an era of massive discontent against the main parties and yet he is seemingly unable to capitalise on it.
The point is not that our political leaders have deteriorated. They haven’t really. We’ve been stuck with really poor levels of political leadership for decades now. The point is that, as geopolitical events have become more severe, the gap between their abilities and the requirements of our era has become astonishingly vast.
These elections have felt like we’re watching a school play in the middle of a battlefield. By Christ, we deserve better than this.
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