The British Conservative Party has begun to understand that the populist Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party, an almost existential threat to the immediate future of the tories, he is neither embraced, nor courted, much less ignored. 10 days before an election that could be a historic debacle for Rishi Sunak and the historic right in the United Kingdom, perhaps the decision to attack Farage will no longer serve any purpose, but they have begun to angrily air publicly their past mistakes, their dalliance with the conspiracy theories of the wildest American right and its apology for Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine.
It is somewhat ironic that the most devastating attack against the character has come from the only one who in recent years has been at his level in histrionics and popularity: Boris Johnson.
“This is vomitous nonsense and completely contrary to history. Nobody provoked Putin. “No one has shaken the bear with a stick,” the former conservative prime minister wrote this Sunday on his X account (formerly Twitter). “It is extravagant that the author of the text [en referencia a Farage] “suggests that what we should do now is reduce our aid to Ukraine,” he added.
He responded in this way to the populist politician’s statements to the BBC, later endorsed in a forum published in the newspaper The Daily Telegraph —always ready to cheer on the hardline of the tories and Farage himself—in which he justified the invasion of Ukraine for the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU. “I have never been an apologist or defender of Putin,” he said, “but if you provoke the Russian bear with a stick, don’t be surprised if he responds later.”
Strong, early and continued support for Ukraine has been one of the most popular decisions of recent conservative governments. It was, in fact, Johnson’s last breath, and allowed him to briefly regain his battered popularity.
Both Sunak and the Labor Party candidate, Keir Starmer, have harshly attacked Farage, whom they have branded as an “appeaser” [una referencia a la acusación de Churchill contra Chamberlain cuando intentó negociar con Hitler]; They have defined his words as a “shame” and have accused him of playing into Putin’s hands.
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It remains to be seen how effective these attacks will be once, according to all the polls, many Conservative voters – almost half of them – have chosen to use Farage as the perfect boot to beat the Conservative Party’s backside. They do not seem to care much about the politician’s past or his extravagances, just as they did not care about Johnson’s at the time, whom some have reminded in recent hours that he too, during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign and long before becoming a statesman defending Ukraine, he accused Brussels of provoking Russia with its expansion policy.
Flirting with conspiracy theories
The populist Farage was as a young man an admirer of the infamous Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP who in the late sixties of the last century agitated the party tory and pushed it even further to the right with a racist and xenophobic message. His 1968 speech in Birmingham, dubbed by the media as “rivers of blood” (Rivers of Blood), stressed the United Kingdom as much as Farage stresses it these days. Coincidentally, with the same degree of animosity towards those arriving from outside. Powell will also go down in history for a phrase as devastating as it is accurate: “Every political career inevitably leads to failure.”
Farage’s, it is foreseeable, will also have that conclusion. But if on July 4 he wins a seat and enters the British Parliament, the damage he could do to whoever is the new leader of the torieswith the theft of time and spotlights, is devastating.
For this reason, in the last few hours some of the most extravagant stories of his already long political career have emerged. Like the conversation he had in 2018 with the American presenter Alex Jones, a defender of Trump, the alt-right and the most extravagant conspiracy theories that have circulated in recent times. For example, the thesis defended by Jones that the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012, when 26 people died at an American school in another firearms massacre, was a false setup created by advocates of greater gun control in the country.
Jones used the same refrain as others when presenting the barrage of lawsuits brought against him by victims’ families as an attack on freedom of expression. “That’s right, the liberals [el término genérico con que los estadounidenses llaman a las personas de izquierdas] They are really very illiberal. “They have become the same fascists that they intend to attack with their criticism and rhetoric,” Farage then responded, in a clear attempt at complicity with the presenter, who was interviewing him. “They hate Christianity, they want the nation-state to disappear and replace it with a globalist project. The EU is the prototype of this new world order,” Farage assured, to the delight of his interviewer, with a conspiratorial and anti-Semitic whiff that he much liked.
The politician has attacked the press for recovering those words and has accused the Conservative Party of trying to create a smokescreen to cover up its recent betting scandal, in which there are already at least four people under investigation.
And the toriesso far, seem incapable of stopping a monster that they have allowed to grow for 10 years at their expense and that now threatens to destroy them.
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