So this is what people mean when they say “Uniparty”. They mean supposed rivals reading from the same corporate script. They mean political parties behaving more like a cartel than separate democratic entities. They mean parties abandoning even the pretense of competition in order to hunt in a pack. That’s what I see in the political class’s haughty refusal to stand in Clacton – an act of sinister collectivism that grates against every principle of democracy.
The chattering classes are having a good old laugh at Nigel Farage
The chattering classes are having a good old laugh at Nigel Farage. His triggering of a by-election in his own constituency of Clacton has descended into “farce”, they crow.
One by one the parties said they wouldn’t stand in this “stunt” by the sea. Labour, the Lib Dems, the Tories, the Greens – all of them, in a tinny chorus of groupthink, washed their hands of the Clacton contest. It looks like it will be Nige vs Count Binface, to the childish glee of every Radio 4 comedian and Remoaner on the internet.
Well, I’m not laughing. I think the parties are behaving abominably. Their choreographed retreat smacks of moral cowardice. This is a collective abdication of the first duty of a party, which is to contest elections, to disseminate ideas, to try to win the hearts of voters. The parties think they’re getting one over on Farage but in truth they are grossly insulting the good people of Clacton, whose views and votes they clearly couldn’t give a toss about. They are cruelly depriving these working-class seasiders of choice. It is obscene.
To call the by-election a “stunt” is outrageous. It’s an election, in which the people of Clacton will be called upon to exercise the citizen’s highest duty – to choose a representative. By-elections happen for all sorts of reasons. MPs die, they resign, they get caught with their pants down. The reason for the by-election is immaterial – it remains a by-election, a solemn contest for a seat in the greatest law-making chamber on earth. To sit out such a clash, to write it off as a “stunt”, is a betrayal of democracy.
Farage’s intentions are clear. He wants to rob the media classes of the power to determine his fate and return that power to its rightful exercisers – the electorate. He is elevating the people of Clacton above the breathless scandal-hunters of SW1. The by-election boycotters are doing the opposite. They’re implicitly saying they trust Parliament’s backroom commissioners more than the people of Clacton. They want their Oxbridge pals in the media, not those oiks by the sea, to be the final judges of Farage and his behaviour.
We need to be clear about how unprecedented this is. Many are comparing it to when David Davis triggered a by-election in 2008 over the Labour government’s authoritarian anti-terror legislation. It’s nothing like that. Only one party refused to stand in that by-election on the basis it was a “stunt”: Labour. The Lib Dems didn’t stand because they supported Davis’s message. They took the by-election very seriously indeed, throwing their weight behind Davis. Loads of other parties stood, including the Greens and the English Democrats.
What’s happening in Clacton has no historical parallel in our kingdom. It represents a violent ripping up of the democratic playbook. For every party to act in moral concert with the aim of humiliating another party – this is new, and it is wrong. High on their own supply of moral vanity, they think they’ll be remembered as rebels who stuck it to Reform UK. In truth, history will record that they cravenly vacated the field of democracy, preferring bitching from their high towers to shoulder-rubbing with the little people of Clacton.
People are saying Farage is paranoid. If he is, can you blame him?
People are saying Farage is paranoid. If he is, can you blame him? It feels to many of us that the anti-Reform crusade has crossed the line from democratic scrutiny into something darker. Mud is being slung from every quarter now. From much of the media, from the silver-spoon radicals of the activist class, and now from all the other parties. It feels like we are witnessing the real-time forging of a cross-party cabal of Reform blockers: influential people jealously devoted to the thwarting of populism on these isles.
It’s the simmering classism of the Clacton mockers that is most annoying. Watching plummy London leftists squeal over a possible Count Binface victory is enough to make you gag. Clacton is a real place with real people. These are struggling people of the working class, who voted for Brexit and are concerned about successive governments’ abandonment of Britain’s borders. Their town is not a moral playpen for smug outsiders to act out their haughty disregard for Nigel Farage. Show some respect, for the people of Clacton and for England’s hard-won democracy.
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