When politics can be a dirty word...
NO more Mr Nice Guy – Nigel Farage’s curious choice of words to describe what he calls his return to frontline politics with his new Brexit Party. Few, including the wages department of the European Parliament, thought he had ever gone away.
The first time I heard the phrase ‘No more Mr Nice Guy’ was in a macabre joke about Adolf Hitler being found alive in Bolivia, where he was planning the Fourth Reich.
It is also the title of an American self-help book which argues that most men are self-loathing and need to be more selfish to improve their sex lives.
The dictionary definition says it is when ‘one has decided to stop being considerate of others and instead act exclusively in one own’s self-interest’.
Who knows which, if any, of these pointers led Mr Farage to choose the phrase, but it is another example of the reckless, often tasteless, use of language in this nationalist era when you can even make up your own facts.
Having gone through all of this first in our own referendum in 2014, we in Scotland should be used to it – but it still shocks.
While back then we were on the cusp of an oil boom, and in peril of having the NHS privatised if we didn’t vote Yes, Mr Farage had 80 million Turks about to invade the UK when they were granted EU membership and £350 million a week more for the health service if we left.
Now, without a hint of irony, Mr Farage wants honesty to return to politics. While describing his 25 years in politics as if it was a trial of St George, he is demanding an end to ‘career politicians’.
He even suggested the political class wants to remain in the EU because the European Parliament is a bolt hole for those who can’t get elected to Westminster.
If he could be dismissed as merely a self-obsessed fool we could afford to laugh. But there is a sinister edge to much of what he says.
If his claim that politics is ‘broken’ is true, then he is one of those who vandalised it.
The man who said we had left the EU ‘without a shot being fired’ only
weeks after Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered, now wants to ‘put the fear of God’ into MPs. How close is that to incitement?
Always happy to mention a war, he uses the First World War phrase to say we are a ‘nation of lions led by donkeys’. Worst of all, he says that the revered 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU have been ‘betrayed’ by Theresa May.
Now, Brexit has been a national humiliation. The Prime Minister’s handling of it has, at times, been abysmal. But while she may be charged with Olympic standard incompetence, Mrs May is not guilty of betrayal.
We are still leaving the EU, however much some of us may regret it, and the referendum result is being honoured. The principles of competent government might have been betrayed but the people have not been.
But, as a leading Scottish Nationalist confessed recently, saying that Britain is falling apart plays better with focus groups than anything positive they can say.
Just as Nicola Sturgeon describes the Scotland she wants, Mr Farage demands the UK becomes an ‘independent, normal country’, with both suggesting that if you don’t vote for them then you are condemning your nation to live with some kind of abnormality.
Mark Francois, the Tory MP who seems to see himself as the sergeant-major of Brexiteers, cuts a risible figure, with his references to Germans and D-Day and quoting Tennyson. But if he had been born in North Berwick rather than North London, he would probably be a leading figure in the SNP talking about the English, Bannockburn and reciting Burns in the same manner and to the same effect.
We may live in a time when the traditionally major parties lack leadership, but that does not mean that the Farages and Sturgeons who fill the stage can provide this, either.
What is more, they know it. They know they are opportunists. Mr Farage may condemn those who want a second Brexit referendum now, but within minutes of the polls closing in the first one, he was demanding a rerun because he thought he had lost.
IT is the same with those demanding a second referendum on independence before the next Scottish election. They are in a hurry because they think that their moment is passing, but change of that sort, which is supposed to last centuries, does not need to be made in haste.
Politics in this country may not be in good shape at the moment, but those who claim it is broken are the ones intent on breaking it, not repairing it. It is their opportunity.
The cheap use of words such as ‘betrayal’ and opponents being told to ‘hang their head in shame’ merely because they hold a different opinion, is because of the poverty of nationalist arguments of all flags.
But hey, ‘nice guys’ such as Mr Farage have managed to make careers out of it.