Campaign catchup: Farage fans, electoral fuel and a curiously sourced ‘scoop’
Good afternoon. You’re safe here: after this sentence, there will be absolutely no mention of what happened in American politics last night. We now go live to Britain, where everything is totally fine, and Nigel Farage is desperately trying to distance himself from some of the most flagrantly racist political campaigners you will find this side of a National Front rally.
More on what to make of Reform’s problem with its own people, and a truly horrifying general election diet, after the headlines.
What happened today
Economy | The UK economy grew at a faster rate than previously thought in the first quarter of 2024, handing the next prime minister an improved economic backdrop. The data confirmed that the UK was the fastest-growing economy in the G7 during the first quarter after a short recession in 2023.
Labour | Stamp duty will rise for first-time buyers next year if Labour wins the election, the party has confirmed, as it plans to allow a temporary tax break enacted by the Conservatives to expire. A party spokesperson said on Friday it would allow the threshold for stamp duty to fall back to £300,000, after it was raised to £425,000 in 2022.
Conservatives | Rishi Sunak’s most senior adviser has been interviewed as a witness as part of the Gambling Commission’s investigation into widespread betting by Westminster figures on the date and outcome of the general election. Sources told the BBC that Liam Booth-Smith was not a suspect and had not placed a bet himself.
Analysis: Why do racists like Nigel Farage?
With impeccable timing, Nigel Farage features in two interview pieces in which he proclaims his anti-extremism credentials today: the New Statesman’s headline is “I’ve done more than anyone else to defeat the far right in Britain”, the Daily Telegraph’s “How Farage took on ‘the skinheads and geezers’ of the far-Right and won”. If victory is defined as “having them line up behind you”, he has a very fair point.
The latest iteration of this phenomenon comes via last night’s Channel 4 News undercover investigation, which revealed a volunteer on Farage’s campaign in Clacton, Andrew Parker, calling Rishi Sunak a “fucking [P-word]”, among other enthusiastically racist comments. Essex police are now examining whether a criminal offence may have been committed. George Jones, who runs events for Farage’s campaign, said that a Pride flag on a police car was “degenerate”, suggested that LGBTQ people were “nonces” and said London makes him feel like “a foreigner in your own country”.
Farage distanced himself from the activists, and claimed that their “appalling sentiments” were not representative of “my own views, those of the vast majority of our supporters or Reform UK policy”. He said that they would no longer be involved in the campaign.
But there is now plenty of evidence that these are not isolated incidents. Yesterday, the Guardian’s Ben Quinn revealed that the party’s candidate in Basingstoke, who has now been dropped, was previously a BNP member.
The candidate for North West Essex resigned after it was revealed that he previously encouraged people to vote for the BNP. Another claimed that Jews are “agitating” to import “third-world Muslims”; another reportedly said of asylum seekers that he would be willing to “slaughter them then have their family taken out”.
A list compiled by the Spectator features plenty of boggle-eyed lunacy about “plandemics” and the World Economic Forum as well as overt racism. Even deputy leader Ben Habib has suggested that child migrants crossing the Channel should be left to drown.
The playbook in response to all of this is smartly calibrated: dismiss, distance and deflect. Dismiss: Reform claims that its candidates are being held up to unfair scrutiny from which other parties are exempted, and that this sort of thing is normal, or – as with the “degenerate” comment, according to Farage on Loose Women earlier – merely “vulgar” pub chat. Distance: When this fails, Reform says that the exposed individual isn’t really representative of the party’s mainstream values. (Farage says that the unfortunate byproduct of his glorious victory over the BNP is that a few of its supporters have headed his way.)
And deflect: Claim, for example, that this is all the fault of the vetting agency hired by Reform, and a short-notice election. Today, Farage turned to a conspiratorial classic: Andrew Parker, he says, is an actor, and “this whole thing is a complete and total setup”. (For the source of this ludicrous claim, see below.)
Perhaps sniffing the possibility of legal action, he doesn’t quite commit to this position, but leaves it hanging in the air: “I’m saying it’s possible, I don’t know,” he said of whether Parker had been paid by unspecified enemies. “Something is wrong here.” Expect more of this sort of stuff when he appears on Question Time tonight – which should be an interesting barometer of how effective it is.
The question that Farage doesn’t really have a credible answer to is what conclusions we should draw from the kind of people who are determined to secure a Reform victory in Clacton and beyond: all the vetting in the world won’t change the fact that these guys think he’s brilliant.
What will all this mean for Reform’s prospects on Thursday? It seems likely that the “floor” to their support, even with all of these revelations, is high enough to do the Tories significant damage across England – and that Farage’s own chances in Clacton remain strong. His comments give his supporters enough plausible deniability, particularly if they are seen through the prism of an alleged “establishment stitch-up”, to stick with him on election day.
But it’s also probably true, as many analysts have observed, that Reform’s current incarnation has a pretty hard ceiling on its support. Many voters who are still planning to back the Conservatives will hear Rishi Sunak reflect on his anger that his daughters “have to see and hear Reform people who campaign for Nigel Farage calling me an effing [P-word]” and feel instinctively on his side. And Farage’s remarks about the EU and Nato provoking Russian aggression in Ukraine already appear to have knocked a couple of points off its performance in the polls.
In a funhouse mirror sort of way, Farage is right about one thing: the damage that the breakneck speed of the current campaign has done to his chances. In five years’ time, you might imagine that a Reform party with a parliamentary presence and more time to organise will do a better job of putting a mainstream face on its agenda. But the instincts revealed this week seem unlikely to have been exorcised: they will just be more convincingly masked.
What’s at stake
For the Guardian’s series about the legacies of 14 years of Conservative rule, The Broken Years, the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes about the consequences of austerity – and how unlikely it is that Labour will reverse the damage. “The Conservatives deserve defeat more than most,” he writes. “They took power 14 years ago promising to deliver responsible policies and economic success. Instead they have presided over economic stagnation and a collapse in public services.”
The role of Brexit in Britain’s economic woes, he argues, has been overstated: instead, “gratuitous” austerity has become “a social and political catastrophe”. One of the most interesting passages is his analysis of what led to a policy carried out with “no pressing economic need”:
I would argue that the best way to explain Britain’s austerity is not economic but sociological. Sociology? I used to talk about the push for austerity being led by Very Serious People (a term I borrowed from the blogger Duncan Black). This was not really a joke: if you spend any time consorting with members of the global policy elite, you realise that many of them are driven primarily by the desire to appear “serious”. In economic terms, this usually means pushing policies that will cause significant hardship – to other people, of course.
The obsession with perceived seriousness reflects peer pressure, but in some ways also reflects personal careerism. Officials in democratic nations cannot expect to remain in office for more than a few years. What do they do next? If they have lobbied for “serious” policies, they can have a bright future giving speeches at Davos about the importance of making “tough choices” …
Sociology partly explains the Conservative embrace of austerity. But there was also political calculation. Denunciations of debt and deficits often go hand in hand with demands for smaller government, in particular a shrunken welfare state. In effect, politicians whose real goal is to move policy to the right exploit fear of deficits to push an agenda that would be deeply unpopular if stated openly.
Winner of the day
Huel, the meal replacement shake brand, after it won the coveted endorsement of Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates, who is using it to keep himself going while covering the election. Sky bought him 10 gallons of the stuff at the start of the campaign. Coates told Press Gazette he eats one proper meal a day, gets up at 4.45am and works an 18-hour day, and avoids sweets. He has “loved every second”. More reminiscent of Mark Wahlberg than I expected, to be honest.
Losers of the day
Contemporary political poets, who are comprehensively shown up by Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey’s piece for PoliticsHome about a competition for verse about the election run by Schweppes in 1950. One highlight:
For candidates to come to blows
Isn’t done
But it would be fun.
Reliable source of the day
Has to be Isabel Oakeshott, who you will remember from ghostwriting Matt Hancock’s book and then giving his WhatsApp messages to the Daily Telegraph. Today she’s got her hands on a remarkable “scoop” about one of the aforementioned Reform volunteers filmed making racist comments in Channel 4’s investigation, who turns out to have an online profile offering himself as an actor and showcasing his “rough speaking” skills.
The claim has all the hallmarks of the crisis actor conspiracy theories that have abounded in the US in recent years, and Parker and Channel 4 flatly deny any hoax. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary. Parker says he’s primarily a property developer; his starriest role appears to be a brief non-speaking role spilling a drink in a Virgin Trains ad. Still, “@reformparty_uk is urgently investigating”, Oakeshott wrote on X. She should know: her partner is Richard Tice, the party’s leader until Farage took over a few weeks ago.
Quote of the day
It’s a metaphor for the whole Conservative period in government. If they can monetise it and steal it, they will do, and they did. And this time they got caught” Attender at focus group in south-west England organised by Lord Ashcroft Polls on the gambling scandal
Number of the day
***
431
The number of seats that Labour already holds or is putting significant resources into fighting, according to an FT analysis (£) by Chris Cook, Anna Gross and Max Harlow. The analysis of data from Labour’s campaign website finds that it is fighting for almost every Tory seat with a majority of less than 28%; it is even putting feet on the ground in Great Yarmouth, which the Tories won with a 41% margin in 2019.
Dubious photo opportunity of the day
I was told there’d be Mexican Coke!
Andrew Sparrow explains it all
The pick of the posts from the king of the live blogs
10.03 BST | On a BBC Radio 5 Live phone-in with Nicky Campbell, Keir Starmer is asked: if you lose the election, particularly badly, will you resign as Labour leader?
Yes, says Starmer.
Campbell says Starmer has given him a news line.
(But not really … Politicians do make news when they discuss what they might do in a hypothetical situation, but only if there is at least a small chance of that situation occurring. By now most analysts would accept that the chances of Starmer losing the election are not small or remote, that “minuscule” is probably overstating it, and that they are really close to zero.)
Follow Andrew Sparrow’s politics live blog every day here
Read more
Listen to this
Today in Focus | The 14 years that broke Britain, part 1
If the polls are correct, an era is about to come to an end. What have 14 years of Conservative government done to the country? Jonathan Freedland reports
What’s on the grid
Tonight, 7.30pm | Ed Davey appears in the latest of BBC Panorama’s party leader interviews.
Tonight, 8pm | BBC Question Time leaders’ special with Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay and Reform leader Nigel Farage.
