Tuesday 5 May 2020

The Brexit Hall of Lame: Nigel Farage


The Brexit Hall of Lame: Nigel Farage.

Last year I did some ranty facebook posts about brexit. Now I've resurrected this blog, I'm putting them here. I'll also eventually finish the series, incorporating such giants of the political and intellectual world as "haunted Victorian pencil" (James O'Brien) Jacob Rees-Mogg, six-form blunderkind Dominic Raaaaab, and Crunchie munching airfix soldier Mark Francois. We'll start, however, with Kermitler himself, Nigel Furhrage.   













Nigel Paul Farage, born on 3 April 1964 in Downe, Kent, is a descendant of French Huguenot refugees and is the great-great grandson of Nicholas and Bena Schrod, Germans. Nigel Farage’s hatred of foreign food, languages, and people, plus his allegedly foreign and possibly Putin-sourced funding (currently being investigated by various non-BBC journalists and the FBI), his massive public-funded BBC platform, his six-days-a-week LBC talk show, and his plucky-underdog anti-elitism, have made him the most enduring and powerful force in twenty-first century British politics.

Nigel Farage co-founded the United Kingdom Independence Party in 1993 and was its leader from 2006 to 2009 and 2010 to 2016. He was first elected UKIP Member of the European Parliament for the constituency of Fatherland and Gammon in 1999, then re-elected in 2004, and reelected also in 2009, and reelected yet again in 2016, on the grounds that the European Union is run by unelected bureaucrats. He has stood seven times for various seats in the UK Parliament, and failed to be elected there on every single occasion. He was a leading member of LeaveUK in the EU Referendum campaign of 2016, his anti-immigrant “Breaking Point” poster patriotically resembling a well-known item of Nazi propaganda. He left UKIP after its referendum triumph and joined Leave Means Leave in 2018, and then formed yet another new Brexit Party, although it is little more than a vehicle for separating bibulous gammons from their money. And just when you think he’s finally disappeared, he’s fucking well back again, his amphibian face bobbing up to the surface of your TV screen yet again, wide-mouthing more lies about the EU, about immigrants, giving word-for-word predictable reasons why he’s supporting this foreign fascist or that one, why he’s fighting yet another election, why he’s resigning from this hate party or that one, why he’s joining or forming this new hate party or that one…. Nigel Farage is the unflushable turd of English nationalism.

Nigel Farage’s belief in blood-based tribalism may be accountable to the fact that he doesn’t have the brains to pour piss out of a boot if you told him the instructions were written on the heel (President Lyndon Johnson). His apparent ignorance of how this belief system might assign him and his progeny to an eternal inheritance of French-German mongrel status may be accounted to the fact that he doesn’t have the brains not to pour piss out of a boot if you told him the instructions were written on the insole (me). But there may be complementary explanations for his stupendous perversity as well. The sad desperation of a man named “Farage” to appear “English” may have its roots in an anxious parentage and upbringing that was posh but not quite not posh enough, in the finely graded English class divisions and conflict so perfectly captured by David Croft and Jimmy Perry in the needy prickliness of Captain Mainwaring in his confrontations with the aggravating easiness of his social superior Sergeant Wilson. Farage’s father was called Guy Justus Oscar Farage, a spangly Gilded Elevator of a name entirely suited to a man with the manners and tastes of Donald Trump. Apparently too much of a drunken oaf even by the standards of the Bullingdon boys, Guyus Justusus Oscarus Farageus once lost his stockbroker license and had to go selling antiques like some kind of witlessly charmless and hideously unsexy version of Lovejoy, although after learning his lesson the big boys let him back into the city because money. Guyus Justusus Oscarus Farageus sent the boy Nigel to Dulwich College, a posh private school in London, rather than Eton, the posher private school in Windsor, Berks. According a typically cringe-worthy and shamelessly arse-licking BBC profile, Nigel “decided” not to go to university, but being, in his own words, “good at selling things,” he followed daddy into The City as a commodities trader, spending a spell in the pay of Credit Lyonnais Rouse. Apparently too much of a petty crook even for the stockbroker belt, he was, as his father had been, humiliated at the hands of his social superiors by being busted by Surrey Trading Standards for illicitly using UKIP magazine to hawk videos of himself for £5 a pop.

Nigel Farage might have learned from these experiences to kick against the pricks at the top of the British class system, but no. Presumably because, despite everything, he still loves massive pricks and wants indeed to be an even bigger one himself, he dedicated his life instead to blaming others for his smallness, misdirecting his accusations of “elitism” and kicking sideways and downwards at those he considers beneath him in his fantasy league of human worth. His class-based resentments started turning tribalist and racist as early as his sixth-form days, when his teachers expressed concern over his abandonment of standard Thatcherism in favour of full-on fascism. He dismissed these accusations as a liberal-elite conspiracy against him based on nothing more substantial than his expressed admiration for Enoch Powell. But he truly found his goose-stepping groove following the Maastricht Treaty, abandoning the snooty Tory Party and shedding his City clothes to refashion himself as Britain’s mustard-trousered Mussolini, the green-shooting-jacketed Maréchal Pétain of Vicious England, the leather-riding-booted Obergruppenführer of the Framley Fox Hunt.

Nigel Farage’s pathetic outsider-looking-in self-contradictions and hypocrisies don’t end with his immigrant-background English-fascism and his petit-bourgeois anti-snobbery. A staunch critic of the EU’s democratic deficit, his record as an MEP consists of little more than a right-winger's wank-bank of videos of his ad hominem and often personally abusive orations made for no other purpose than to upload to his YouTube channel for the advancement of his personal profile and broadcasting career. A staunch opponent of UK taxpayers’ money funding the EU, he’s made a living from it for 17 years, and indeed aims to do so for many more, given his distinct discreetness concerning the £39 billion Brexit divorce bill because that’s his comfy fucking pension right there. A staunch opponent of EU financial corruption, he’s been criticised often and occasionally busted for trousering overly generous EU expenses. A self-proclaimed Fisherman’s Friend, he was arsed to turn up for precisely one out of 42 meetings during his three years on the EU Fisheries Committee. A staunch believer that the Will of the People must be obeyed, he once said that the EU referendum was merely advisory and that a mere 52-48 victory for Remain should lead to a second referendum. A staunch opponent of “globalisation” by such conspiratorial organisations as The EU and The Jews, he’s a prominent albeit second-tier member of an International Cabal of Wealthy White Supremacists, referring to scab-faced Nazi Steve Bannon as “my kind of chap,” to Donald Trump as “a great silverback gorilla” after revelations of the latter’s serial and serious sexual assault habit, and has unofficially nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize (I absolutely shit you not). A staunch opponent of foreign interference in internal politics, Nigel Farage personally campaigned for Trump, standing with him in a Gilded Elevator in Trump Tower alongside others also now declared “Persons of Interest” in the FBI investigation of illegal funding in the 2016 US election, and has spoken in support of Marine Le Pen, and expressed the hope that Norbert Hofer would be elected president and would call an anti-EU referendum, until the fellow fascist told him to fuck off and stop interfering in Austria’s internal politics.

But perhaps nothing measures up to the cognitive dissonance that must surely rupture the space-time continuum itself whenever Nigel Farage looks in a mirror and contemplates himself as a member of the Master Race. In order to sustain his own belief system, what he must see staring back at him is Arnold Schwarzenegger, rather than, say, a weedy little man-frog who smells of cigarette smoke and beery farts. But, with this, as with everything, he is wrong. Nigel Farage, for instance, is a man whose head is so physically small and strangely narrow that it is the perfect embodiment of his attitudes and opinions, an apparent cranial-cerebral confluence so perfect in its biology and its visual symbolism that it could almost convince the most rational mind that there is not only science but even art in the bone-headed practice of phrenology. Maybe he thinks his own physicality does indeed prove this theory, but then he'd have to admit he's small- and narrow-minded, which would present him with an intellectual conundrum that would make his tiny little head explode in a sorry little ppphhhttt on the mirror. But the coup de grace is this. In the middle of Nigel Farage's tiny little Donald-Trump-hand-sized head is a face that in repose resembles nothing more than that of a frog, and is thus as hilarious a rebuke of his own Master-Race theories as the physiognomy of bonk-eyed Nazi-activist and YouTube-chef Nick Griffin, and indeed also of the original brown-eyed, brunette, and comedically mustachioed leader of the blond-haired Master Race and incarnation of screaming, arm-waving genocidal mania himself. And yet there he is, Nigel Farage, the most enduring and powerful force in twenty-first century British politics. And here we are, giving him everything he’s ever fucking dreamed of.

Nigel Farage has been married twice, to an Irish woman and a German woman, both of whom divorced him. His four children will retain EU passports after Brexit and, probably unlike yours, will continue to enjoy all the benefits offered by Freedom of Movement throughout the European Union. A private aviation enthusiast, on 5 May 2010 Nigel Farage was involved in a terrifying plane crash, which he tragically survived.

Nigel Fuhrage, unflushable turd.

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