In the Nottinghamshire market town of Arnold, famous in the county for brewing and stockings, Trumpism has arrived.
It all began when two Reform UK councillors representing Arnold North let slip they were “not happy” with the proposed reorganisation of local government which would create an enlarged Nottingham Council. (Bear with me, this does get more interesting.)
The councillors revealed the Reform group which runs Nottingham Council were backing the plan, and if they didn’t go along with it they faced suspension.
Local news outlet Nottinghamshire Live reported the story in a very straight manner with rights of reply offered to all those involved.
The headline soberly reported: “Reform UK leader advising councillors to back Nottingham expansion that some are ‘not happy’ with”. It was never a story likely to break the internet.
But break Reform’s supposedly steadfast allegiance to freedom of speech it did.
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For now, according to Natalie Fahy, editor of Nottinghamshire Live and The Nottingham Post, the county council’s Reform leader Mick Barton has banned its 41 councillors from all contact with the news outlet. The party’s press officers have been instructed to take the titles off press release lists and not invite it to events. Neither Reform nor Barton has yet commented publicly on the ban.
Now this could simply be dismissed as the act of one more petulant politician throwing his weight around. And yet, it feels like a precursor of so much more to come if Nigel Farage and Reform continue their march upon our local councils – and, who knows, perhaps even our government.
As editor Fahy says: “This is a worrying sign of, potentially, things to come if Reform wins the next election. What you’re seeing here in Nottinghamshire is probably a microcosm of how it will be across the whole of the UK if Nigel Farage becomes prime minister. You are just going to see this kind of shutting down of questioning.”
For this isn’t just Reform taking a leaf out of the Trump playbook – it’s transcribing the whole monstrous tome.
Trump has built his popularity on conflict with the mainstream media. It started with constantly dismissing the “fake news media” as “corrupt” and an “enemy of the people”, and encouraging crowds at pre-election rallies to jeer at the press pen. In office he has frequently called on social media for journalists to be sacked, and unleashed a stream of lawsuits designed to bog down news organisations in costly and time-consuming cases and, chiefly, to neuter their future content.
Many have cravenly settled, fearful of big costs and making an even bigger enemy of the White House. The Associated Press agency continues to fight its ban from presidential briefings due to its refusal to adopt Trump’s name – the Gulf of America – for what has been the Gulf Of Mexico since the 1550s.
Pennsylvania Avenue really doesn’t seem so far from Mansfield Road, Arnold after all.
Nigel Farage too regularly speaks of “fake news” regarding stories with which he does not agree. He has attacked the BBC and said Reform in government would “campaign vigorously to abolish” the license fee. He has also attacked Channel 4 for a documentary he described as “scandalous election interference”.
And at the Reform UK conference at the start of this year Reform MP Lee Anderson told those gathered: “We don’t need mainstream media, we’ve got social media and GB News.” Another speaker attacked the media, adding somewhat sinisterly: “Some of them are in the room tonight.”
Only two months ago Farage falsely claimed journalists were involved in a protest outside a Reform UK event in Aberdeen.
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It is wrong to think such clashes with the media are simply an unfortunate by-product of the relationship between populist leaders and a mainstream media attempting to report realities. The truth is these clashes are a much sought-after lifeblood for the populists.
Only by visibly demonstrating themselves in opposition to a “liberal elite” media are they able to sustain their schtick as the “plucky outsider” who is telling it to people straight. It also ensures the attention they crave. And it causes sufficient confusion in the minds of the public that when the real misdemeanours take place (which they will) then no one is certain what or who to believe.
Nigel Farage has been asked to intervene in the Nottinghamshire Live stand-off. Maybe he will – but only after sufficient outrage has been generated, and he has squeezed every ounce of populist sentiment from the situation.
The fact that Nottinghamshire Live is no outpost of Islington-style elitism is irrelevant; Reform just needs to create the perception that it is.
Reform – or, to be more accurate, Nigel Farage – has made huge headway on social media speaking directly and (supposedly) authentically to the public in a way which has left most political opponents behind. Of course he has benefitted hugely from an algorithm which rewards outrage and vaporises nuance. He and his followers believe they no longer need the mainstream media.
The worrying thing is, perhaps they do not. But the British people do.
For while there is little national sympathy for our media with all its imperfections, it is a far better option than the alternative: politics without a watchman to hold the goings on in Arnold and everywhere else to account.
The Nottingham Post has been in operation since the 1870s, the decade in which free speech advocate John Stuart Mill died. In his 1859 essay “On Liberty”, Mill wrote: “In any argument there are only three possibilities. You are either wholly wrong, partially wrong, or wholly correct – and in each case free speech is critical to improving or protecting those positions.”
The Reform councillors of Nottinghamshire would do well to remember it.
Alison Phillips is a former editor of the Daily Mirror
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