Once upon a time, an innovative novelist, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, wrote a masterpiece to warn readers of the dangers inherent in taking written history and novels of chivalry too literally. This masterpiece and pre-cursor of post-modernist narrative strategies and historiographic metafiction is of course none other than Don Quijote de La Mancha.
Looking at British politics in its current form, there are far too many parallels and not enough ‘desengañó’ (cold sharp shocks of reality to bring us back to our senses, a realisation of the truth, especially after a period of deceit) on all sides of the political spectrum, both left and right.
Enter another massive example this week in the form of Jake Berry and the drama surrounding his defection to Reform. Yet Berry’s speech has echoes of the famous knight errant who charged at windmills or believed the peasant, Dulcinea del Toboso, to be a refined princess worthy of his adoration.
Let us examine some quotations from Berry’s speech.
“Farage should be the next Prime Minister”
“… let’s not kid ourselves. Britain is broken. It didn’t start with Labour. The Conservative governments I was part of share the blame.”
“If you were deliberately trying to wreck the country, you’d be hard-pressed to do a better job than the last two decades of Labour and Tory rule”.
“Millions of people, just like me, want a country they can be proud of again. The only way we get that is with Reform in government. I’m now backing Reform UK and working to make them the next party of government. And with Nigel Farage leading Reform, we’ve got someone the country can actually trust. He doesn’t change his views to fit the mood of the day.
“And people respect that. So do I. That’s why I believe he should be our next prime minister.”
‘Good grief’, you might cry.
Brexit
On both sides, left and right, it is clear to many a reader that another prominent factor is to blame for the disastrous state of the country. I refer to none other than the Brexit monster which has consumed the energies of both the Conservative and Labour governments along with civil service resources.
While polls show the majority of Britons support a closer relationship with the EU to repair Brexit losses, many now believe Brexit itself was a huge mistake. Berry and members of Reform UK are in denial about that.
Brexit is akin to a political Frankenstein’s monster, created by Farage and his donors.
Farage might not change his own views to fit the mood of the day, but he would certainly be swayed to support the wishes of his friends and allies abroad, such as Donald Trump, at the expense of the British people. Reform is known to implement policies written by its donors. For example, Reform promised pothole repair contracts to JCB if it won council elections. JCB wrote Reform’s pothole policy. Britain should learn from its mistakes.
Farage as MP
Only this week, there was an article by Wynne Jones in the Mirror. A woman living in Clacton, who had experienced severe domestic abuse, a mother of two children, had nowhere to live. In desperation, she wrote to her MP, Nigel Farage, who never bothered to respond to her in a timely manner. She turned to a local labour organisation for support and thankfully found a new home.
Farage’s office only responded months later and offered no effective resolutions.
The MP has made at least eight trips to the US – but not held one single surgery for constituents.
In the past year, the Reform leader has spoken just 45 times in Parliament, fewer than any other leader. In contrast, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has spoken 226 times. Farage also failed to show up to key votes on renters’ rights, the winter fuel allowance and even a debate on the government’s post-Brexit negotiations did not grab his interest. (See Wynne Jones, ibid).
A serious fire on Beach Way in August 2024 destroyed three homes and damaged seven others. Eight fire crews battled the blaze for several hours at the time. Burned out buildings are still visible, but residents informed the Mirror it took their MP a week to visit the scene. The local community pulled together to set up refuges for the fire victims.
The South of England is current in the midst of a heatwave, with temperatures soaring to 38 degrees. This is a clear manifestation of global warming. Not that a climate change denier would notice the pressures placed on the sick and elderly and by extension, our NHS, by constant high temperatures
The role of Prime Minister is serious
Make no mistake. The office of PM is a serious one, arguably the top job in the UK.
A prime minister has access to the nuclear button, to top secret papers in red briefcases, to the treasury and to our reputation of the world stage.
Can an individual who spends so much time on television, making speeches and exercising second jobs for tax evading migration consultancies seriously work in such a high-pressured role which requires full commitment and masses of attention to detail, not to mention huge personal integrity? This looks more than doubtful given the comments of local constituents. A prime minister should serve Britain, not himself and his friends.
Farage as PM is a blueprint for disaster. Jake Berry is definitely charging at windmills.
Britain is broken. If austerity policies cracked Britain, Brexit broke Britain. A Reform government will trash our treasury, our environment and our reputation more than any other government has.
Starmer works with European leaders to repair the damage done to our reputation by Brexit.
The Dublin Convention
In his recent outburst against Starmer in parliament and his dealings with Macron, Farage failed to mention an important detail:
“Does the prime minister understand that that demand today is even greater than it was back in 2016, and that we demand that you say the the French president we will not accept undocumented males across the English Channel and that you are not dictated to by an increasingly arrogant, anti-Brexit French president,” (Farage)
Farage, as a former MEP, should be familiar with the Dublin Convention. This legislation allows a European state to send back asylum seekers to their first safe country of entry within Europe. Statistics within the former Tory government indicated that at least a third of the asylum seekers arriving in Britain could have been sent back to another European country had Britain still been an EU member. Only after the end of the transition did ministers realize they had forgotten to negotiate the Dublin convention into the Brexit deal. A lost opportunity. History repeats itself regarding Farage’s attendance record at important meetings. Clearly spending time in the media spotlight drained his attention from the important work of understanding and reading complex European policies to use these to Britain’s advantage. He failed us all in this mission.
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