Beyond Farage’s farce: Reality Reckons with the Alt-Right

Nigel Farage has been a household name of British Politics over the past 20 years, rising from the Brexit years as a leading figure of the leave EU campaign. More recently, after eight attempts, he was elected to the House of Commons. Yet, after just two years, on the

7^th July, Farage announced that he would be resigning as the MP of Clacton, triggering a by-election that he would re-contest. This followed recent parliamentary scrutiny of Farage’s finances, notably a £5 million undeclared gift from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne, which has also been referred to the National Crime Agency under anti-money-laundering rules.

In his announcement last Tuesday, Farage stated that he was letting voters rather than the “establishment” judge him over the allegations which he faces. However, amid speculation that there would already be a by-election assuming the Parliamentary Standards Committee would find him in breach, the “establishment” political parties announced they would not be fielding candidates, leaving Count Binface, a novelty candidate, as the apparent challenger to Farage.

Whilst Farage will now spend the Summer “arguing with a bin”, as Chancellor Rachel Reeves put it, Farage’s predicament is one of his own doings when trying to represent “the people” whilst being funded by the establishment. The financial backing from Christopher Hardborne, the richest British born individual, and the Georgian townhouse he has been living at courtesy of George Cottrell, a former Farage aide jailed in the United States in 2017 for money laundering, clearly cannot be reasonably described as “the people” against “the establishment”. Rather, Farage is trying to have his cake and eat it by pretending to represent the people whilst being the establishment, albeit the elite wing of it.

This pattern repeats wherever the brand of alt-Right politics has become dominant, revealing the reality of these political parties in the process. Donald Trump’s second inauguration seated Elon Musk, Jeff, Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg in the places usually reserved for family and cabinet, while his coalition of “forgotten” who sent him to the White House saw their cost of living further spiral out of control and America end up in yet another war, despite promising the exact opposite. Australia is also not immune to this, where Gina Rinehart as become an open patron to One Nation, most notably in her lending Pauline Hanson a private jet and gifting her a bright orange bulldozer. Mining magnate Clive Palmer offered the party $10 million to effectively fold it into his own operation. As a result, a movement that was built on Hanson’s suspicion of the establishment is, in practice, being bankrolled by two of the wealthiest mining figures in the nation.

What unites Clacton, Capitol Hill, and Canberra is not coincidence but design. The grievances those who resonate with alt-Right politics is real, and does need to be addressed, but events like Farage's scandal aren’t an aberration in the story he has crafted; it is the story, caught for once in the open, with a receipt attached. The “battlers” were never being sold a movement of their own making, but being sold a movement of the elites, marketed as being for them.