Nigel Farage wants to be taken seriously as the leader of a potential party of government, so let us take him at his word: his ideas for government are terrible.
He should be taken seriously because he has a good chance of being prime minister after the next election. It is no use saying, “The election is probably four years away; anything can happen.” The things that might happen are just as likely to increase Farage’s chances of winning as they are to decrease them.
Incidentally, though, on the timing of the election, it was interesting that Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, assumed it would be in 2028, four years after the last one. This was the normal pattern, before the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that held sway between 2011 and 2022: if things were going well for a prime minister, they would go to the country a year before they had to. If things were going badly, they would run the full five years.
Perhaps McSweeney had been so used to assuming a Sir Keir Starmer government would be gratefully acclaimed by the British people that, even when he wrote a memo last year about what could go wrong for Labour, he took 2028 as his target date for the election. The memo was leaked to Tim Shipman, political editor of The Spectator, who commented: “I have had hints since that Starmer’s team is already shifting its horizons to 2029 rather than 2028.”
Anyway, the memo set out four issues on which Labour was vulnerable to Farage: being soft on net zero; immigration; failing to deliver change that voters can feel; and becoming identified with a failed establishment. On each of those, McSweeney’s warnings from last year have turned out to be “prescient”, as Shipman put it.
It is, therefore, worth subjecting Farage’s ideas to the kind of scrutiny that a potential party of government deserves. Last weekend, the Reform leader set out his plan to transform the parliamentary system.
I say “set out”: what I mean is that he free-associated over lunch with a Sunday Times journalist, expounding a series of half-digested, contradictory “radical” ideas of the kind usually found in below-the-line comments on the internet, prefaced with, “It’s all perfectly simple…”
He suggested that, as prime minister, he would appoint cabinet ministers from outside parliament, as in the US. “The point about America is that you can have a senior cabinet position and you are held to account by a committee system that takes place on Capitol Hill, and that is the equivalent of being in a court of law,” he said. “That’s accountability. Standing up in the House of Commons and telling a pack of lies, frankly, is not accountability.”
He failed to explain how standing up in a committee and telling a pack of lies was any different. Then he contradicted himself, complaining that “most” of the government’s authority has been “transferred to regulatory authorities and quangos”. This was quite wrong, he said: “The government has to be in the House of Commons. Why? I’ll tell you why. Accountability.”
Zigzagging from one fashionable nostrum to another, he said: “We currently appoint cabinet ministers with zero experience of the areas. We swap them out after 18 months for somebody else with zero experience of the areas. None of it bloody works.”
He said it was “almost impossible for cabinet ministers to be good MPs anyway, because how could they be?” And said that it was “interesting” that Gordon Brown made Digby Jones – “a character that I like very much” – a business minister in the House of Lords. Yet he said, “the make-up of the Lords is a bloody disgrace,” and he thought it should have “an elected element based on the regions”.
To sum up, then, he thinks cabinet ministers should be appointed from outside parliament, not even via the Lords, and should be accountable to the Commons through committee hearings – and that “quangos” (I don’t think he knows what a quango is) should be abolished.
In other words, he has no idea. “All of this needs to be thought through and debated more clearly,” he told The Sunday Times. His only workable argument – and it is admittedly a powerful one at the level of simplistic slogans – is: “How could we do worse?”
However, that is a question that betrays a failure of the imagination. Voters only have to remember Liz Truss for a reminder that, dysfunctional as government may seem, it is always possible to do worse.
Six weeks ago, Farage set out plans for huge tax cuts, raising the level at which people start to pay income tax to £20,000 a year. He claimed that this would be paid for by abandoning the net-zero climate-change target, cutting the bill for asylum seeker hotels, scrapping “quangos” and tackling waste in public spending. None of those sources of revenue is credible: he was in effect proposing unfunded tax cuts comparable to those with which Truss blew up the financial markets.
As McSweeney feared, the Labour government may not be a huge success, but could Farage do worse? You bet he could.
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