In the wake of controversy over his call to repeal anti-discrimination laws, Nigel Farage handled himself with his usual fluency on Radio 4’s Today programme. Much of what he said was nonsense, but so were some of the responses he provoked from his critics. Ukip does not have a monopoly on kneejerk reactions.
Farage’s most disarming line came when he revealed that he made the comments last autumn – in an interview for a programme due to be broadcast on Channel 4 next Thursday – and had forgotten about them until they were “wilfully misinterpreted”, presumably by the show’s publicists who have now obtained front-page coverage in the Guardian and the Independent.
In the C4 interview with the former equality and human rights commissioner Trevor Phillips, Farage also complained that Islamist extremists posed an unprecedented “fifth column” problem for Britain, as a small minority who do not want to integrate but “hate us and want to kill us” and to impose sharia law.
Not sure he’s right about that (hasn’t he read Conrad’s Secret Agent?). Whether he knows it or not – I’m never quite sure – Farage is stroking unconscious prejudices here, ones he insists he has actively driven out of Ukip’s election campaign and candidates list.
But Thursday’s political response sidetracked that tricky bit of the interview and focused on the discrimination laws, on which greater mainstream consensus exists. Downing Street accused the Ukip leader of “attention-seeking” (not something it would ever do) while Labour said it showed “breathtaking ignorance”. Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, said it was “one of the most shocking things I have ever heard”, which suggests he lives a sheltered life.
Farage says he was celebrating the success of anti-discrimination laws – Labour introduced the 1965 Race Relations Act at a time of nasty and open (“No Blacks or Irish”) prejudice – and arguing that they are no longer needed to protect black and ethnic minority Britons. “This is not a black and white thing, I have made no comment on that at all,” he told another interviewer.
Yes and no to that. A lot has changed for the better since 1965, we can all see that, though virtually full employment and skilled industrial jobs aplenty are not one of them. The Guardian reported on Wednesday that young BAME workers have been worse hit by youth unemployment – young people are having the toughest time in the post-2008 recession, further reports again confirmed on Thursday. It reminds us that some groups are more vulnerable than others, especially in inward-looking cultures.
But no, Nigel insists he’s not talking about race in 2015, he’s talking about nationality – his way of flagging up the wave of eastern European migrants since 2004 (here’s some data from Oxford University), which has driven widespread unease and given Ukip its new status as the fourth national party. Is being hostile to Poles racist? Many would say yes, but it doesn’t feel the same to me as the stuff that was around in my youth.
Where Farage seems to be slipping completely into auto-pilot mode is when he starts on about ending enforced quotas – they are EU-driven, of course – and allowing over-burdened small businessmen (he’s right, they are over-burdened with paperwork) to “choose to employ a British person” if they want to, rather than feel obliged to employ a Pole.
“I am speaking up for the unemployed youth of Britain, both black and white,” Ukip’s star turn disarmingly asserts. It’s skimming the surface in the way that free-market ideologues do: get the state and its petty regulations out of the way and the market will sort things out.
It is close to what Farage, a former London Metal Exchange trader, really believes, but it conflicts with the fears of those supporters whose employment prospects have been hurt by global market forces.
“Free to employ people on ability,” is another phrase he uses that shows he’s not thinking very deeply – as usual. Ukip activists in areas such as eastern England where foreigners came to pick fruit and stayed complain that the newcomers work for less. The employers’ counter-complaint is that the locals won’t pick the fruit or work as hard.
“I tried to get locals working here, but they won’t so my staff are foreigners,” a small baker in Glasgow once told me. It’s a common enough sentiment. In cafes, hotels and restaurants all over Britain – even the poorer areas – as well as in other service industry jobs, we are all often served by foreigners of European background as well by assorted Brits.
The awkward fact is that even the most wholesomely unprejudiced employer hiring on ability and motivation may well pick a multilingual Polish graduate or someone from Ivory Coast (the Prudential insurance company did with its CEO and thrived). Would you employ Jeremy Clarkson if a Lithuanian petrolhead could do the job?
For a host of reasons the lightly regulated UK labour market isn’t working very well: there are plenty of jobs but many are unskilled and offer low wages and insecurity. They may tide David Cameron over the election, but don’t address long-term problems of fragile living standards and flagging productivity that will impoverish us all if we don’t get to grips with them.
In their differing ways, Labour and the Lib Dems are making some effort to address some of the worst failings in the coming election – though they are likely to be drowned out by the usual dross about taxes and the NHS. I don’t recall Farage ever speaking about productivity or skills shortages among young Britons (“black and white”), though I’d happily be corrected.
One of the attractive aspects of Trevor Phillips’s career, as head of the Commission for Racial Equality and much else, has been a willingness to change his mind on policies like multiculturalism and risk controversy on the left in the process. By way of contrast, all too often Ukip sounds like a lazy party pitching its appeal at some lazy voters.
