Friday Funnies: Too “Far Right” to Run Against

Nigel Farage and the Great Westminster Vanishing Act

This is personal!

Nigel Farage beats the establishment. Again.

There is something wonderfully British about the Nigel Farage situation.

MP Farage recently resigned his Clacton seat, forcing a by-election and effectively asking voters to elect him all over again. Britain’s major political parties then faced the obvious question: Who were they going to put up against him?

Their answer: Nobody.

Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens all declined. Officially, they said that Farage had created a “farce,” a “circus,” a “vanity project,” and serious politicians simply wouldn’t dignify it.

How terribly principled.

There is another possibility: they were afraid he would beat the pants off them.

Rather than send a candidate into the electoral woodchipper, Britain’s political establishment discovered a sudden respect for staying home.

Farage, you see, is simply too far right to run against.

And what, precisely, makes Nigel Farage so terrifyingly “far right”? He thinks Britain should control its borders, British laws should ultimately be made in Britain, violent criminals should receive meaningful sentences, taxes and regulation should be lower, farmers and domestic industry should be protected, Net Zero mandates deserve reconsideration, free speech is worth defending, and British history need not be treated as a national embarrassment.

He also supports keeping the NHS free at the point of use, which is presumably an especially cunning form of fascism.

Apparently “far right” is now easier than actually arguing with Farage's policies. The particularly awkward problem for Britain's political establishment is that increasing numbers of British voters seem to agree with him.

Perhaps the frightening thing about Farage isn't that he's far right. It's that he's far too popular.

Apparently the proper way to defeat the dangerous far right is not to stand against it and persuade voters to reject it.

It is to hide from it.

Fortunately, democracy found someone much braver to run:

Count Binface":

Binface is a 5,900-year-old intergalactic space warrior who wears a rubbish bin on his head and campaigns to make 99 Flakes cost 99p and ban speakerphones in public.

Compared with Westminster, something of a moderate.

So Britain’s major political parties left the job of confronting Nigel Farage to a man dressed as household waste.

Then it got better

.

Farage won with roughly 63 percent.

Count Binface came second with about 27 percent. And yes, Binface was actually financed, backed and supported by the other major Parties and still roundly beaten.

"I've managed to beat the establishment candidate"

Nigel Farage

The man wearing a rubbish bin was willing to do something Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens were not: stand against Nigel Farage. Perhaps the establishment isn’t frightened that Farage is too extreme. Perhaps it is frightened that he is too popular. So popular, that they could only put up a trash bin as a candidate.

But Farage does seem extraordinarily unlucky around British institutions. First he was debanked by Coutts, the 300-year-old private bank synonymous with Britain's wealthy and well-connected establishment, producing a scandal serious enough that regulators had to “remind” banks not to discriminate on political grounds. But of course, charges against the bank were never brought.

Now the Metropolitan Police are investigating Reform donations, while the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards resumed yet another investigation into Farage upon his return to Parliament. Sound familiar?

Nothing seems to sharpen the institutional microscope quite like a conservative becoming inconveniently popular. Pure coincidence, naturally.

Perhaps Farage should try wearing a rubbish bin on his head. It appears to attract considerably less institutional concern.

Either way, British politics has achieved perfect symbolism:

The establishment refused to take out the rubbish.

So the rubbish took them out.

Cheers!

---

Jill and Robert with Nigel - at Palm Beach, Trump’s acceptance speech, 2024.

---

---

(I can’t resist finishing this essay up with an old favorite!)

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

So, apparently my sense of humor belongs in the rubbish bin and my politics are “far right.” This may be particularly problematic since I am actually a dual U.S.-British citizen, although for reasons increasingly obvious, I have somehow neglected to renew my British passport.

If my particular combination of politics, sarcasm and rubbish-bin humor appeals to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Being this ridiculous every week takes considerably more time than you might imagine.

JGM

---

---

WOKE 1.0 VERsUS WOKE 2.0

---

Woke 1.0: Change the Culture

• DEI everywhere

• Critical Race Theory

• “Equity” over equality

• Identity politics

• Intersectionality

• Pronouns in the bio

• Gender as self-identification

• “Latinx”

• Defund the Police

• Abolish the Police

• Cancel culture

• Safe spaces

• Trigger warnings

• Microaggressions

• Speech is violence

• Silence is violence

• Words are violence

• Men can get pregnant

• Biological sex is a spectrum

• Drag Queen Story Hour

• Remove statues

• Rename schools

• Rename military bases

• Rewrite curricula

• Decolonize everything

• Reparations

• Corporate DEI departments

• Racial preferences in hiring/admissions

• Mandatory diversity training

• ESG

• “Anti-racism”

• “White privilege”

• “Whiteness”

• “Heteronormativity”

• “Lived experience” over inconvenient statistics

• Censorship rebranded as “content moderation”

• Disagreement rebranded as “hate”

• And, naturally, a land acknowledgment before the quarterly sales meeting, because apparently the entire United States is stolen land, private property is a colonial construct, and the rightful owners are whichever Indigenous people occupied it at the historically convenient moment.

Woke 2.0: Change the System

Now the ambitions get somewhat larger.

• Abolish ICE

• Decriminalize illegal border crossing

• Sanctuary cities and states

• Mass amnesty / pathway to citizenship

• Expand voting access to noncitizens in some local elections

• Abolish the Electoral College

• Make Washington, D.C. a state

• Make Puerto Rico a state

• Expand the Supreme Court

• Impose Supreme Court term limits

• Restrict presidential control over executive agencies

• Strengthen the independence of the federal bureaucracy

• Weaken or eliminate the Senate filibuster

• Abolish the Senate, or radically restructure it

• Replace equal state representation with population-based representation

• Lower the voting age to 16

• Expand federal voting-rights legislation

• Universal voter registration

• Restore voting rights to felons

• Reparations through government policy

• Wealth taxes

• Expand federal administrative power over climate, labor and civil-rights policy

• National gun-control measures

• Restrict or eliminate qualified immunity

• Federalize abortion protections

• Constitutional amendments guaranteeing various positive rights

• And when an inconvenient constitutional structure gets in the way, explain that the Constitution itself is the problem.

---

---

Woke 1.0 wanted to change what you could say.

Woke 2.0 wants to change the machinery that decides who governs.

Or, put another way: the revolution has moved on from the HR department, to governance.

Woke 1.0: Pronouns, bathrooms, statues and DEI.

Woke 2.0: Borders, elections, courts, states, the presidency and the Senate.

JGM