Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and Elon Musk (E311)
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If you're hearing this, well done. You have found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 311, Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and Elon Musk. As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.

A very happy new year to all of you, my charming little listeners. I hope you're all safe and well, especially those of you living in the United States, where at least from the outside, it appears that planes are falling out of the sky, the government is being stripped down and sold for parts, and various sections of the landscape are spontaneously bursting into flames. Here in the United Kingdom, we're mostly safe from that last one, at least on account of the entire country being permanently damp and a little bit mouldy.

What we are unfortunately not safe from is the looming threat of the far right. That's what this episode will be examining as we discuss the political party Reform UK and its relationship to the country's two most prominent far right figures. Those figures are Nigel Farage, Mr Brexit himself and Reform's leader, and Tommy Robinson.

the perpetually re-imprisoned anti-Islamic agitator. That is so awesome that your country is being held hostage by two pub lizards, essentially. Just dudes who should be in a K-hole in like the back of a grimy pub are somehow wheeling their bodies out there and taking you hostage. I know. I think that's kind of what's beautiful about the British far right is that like,

You know, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are from the opposite ends of the class spectrum, right? Nigel Farage is very kind of posh, very sort of, you know, privately educated. Tommy Robinson obviously starts out as a football hooligan. And yet they both strike you as the kind of guy that you could very easily, you know, find yourself uncomfortably making conversation with in a pub that you don't

you know, really shouldn't have gone to. And yeah, kind of just desperate to finish the conversation and leave. Yeah, they keep popping off to the bathroom for a cheeky line and they come back and the conversation is even more uncomfortable. Like they just seem on edge. Yeah, that's it. And, you know, I think that is a charming feature of our far right politics.

Their pupils just keep getting larger and larger and larger every time they return. Yeah, violence closer and closer to the surface. I love that this guy is so problematic that you use the term re-imprisoned. This guy, he goes in and out. He's like the trailer park boys. At the end of every season, he goes into prison, and at the beginning, he gets out. Literally, I have lost count of how many times he's been in prison. The Hash in here is fantastic. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Now, to some of our longer-term listeners, these topics might feel like something of a retread. Farage and Robinson were actually the first two topics I ever covered for this podcast all the way back in 2019. I wouldn't actually recommend revisiting those episodes. I was brand new to the world of podcasting and had pretty much no idea what I was doing. Plus, the sound quality sounds like I'm speaking through a walkie-talkie in a cave somewhere. More.

More importantly, unless I suppose if you're an audio fascist like Julian. What the fuck? There's no doubt that what I wrote back then is now firmly out of date. So you admit that I made it so much better, that it used to be so bad, and yet I'm still a fascist. You cannot win!

Yeah, I will admit you have made the sound quality better, but you were a little bit fascist about doing it. That's right. I allied with your husband, to be frank. That's true. He was my axis. He genuinely was, actually. Yeah, there was a time, I'll just give you a bit of a behind-the-scenes look, where both of you just started ganging up on me and bullying me, saying that I needed a new mic. Yeah.

That's right. I was just like, this one works fine. Yeah, and you were just like, you're like, it doesn't, we'll pay for a better one. And Paul was just like, yeah, the sound quality is really bad. He's right. Amazing. If you research the relationship between conspiracy theories and the British far right, both Farage and Robinson are inescapable. So they've cropped up in my reporting many times, but I haven't really gone into what they themselves have been up to over the last five or so years. That's a problem.

You know, with Farage, I kind of understand that. But with Robinson, I was convinced this guy would sideline himself somehow. I know, yeah. That is so grim. Yeah.

Let's have a quick recap of the main players here for the benefit of those of our listeners who have the good fortune not to be familiar with them already. Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, founded the far-right street movement the English Defence League in 2009. The EDL differentiated itself from other far-right political groups like the British National Party by rejecting what you might call classic white nationalism and instead focusing specifically on Islam and immigrants from Muslim countries.

When I last covered Tommy Robinson, he was about to go to prison for violating a court order by publishing a live-streamed video of defendants entering court. Before being sentenced, he appeared on InfoWars to directly appeal to President Donald Trump, presenting himself as a political prisoner. I feel like I'm two days away from being sentenced to death in the UK for journalism. On behalf of my family, we love the United States.

I have no future here. It's inevitable. I will be murdered, I will be killed. My name is Tommy Robinson. Today, I'm calling on the help of Donald Trump, his administration and the Republican Party to grant me and my family political asylum in the United States of America. I'm sat here today before you to make my case of political persecution.

I have been found guilty of what is the equivalent of exercising First Amendment rights. Funnily enough, 2025 finds him in a very similar situation, now serving an 18-month sentence for repeating claims against a Syrian teenage refugee that were ruled to be libelous in a previous court case. Once again, he has managed to present himself to a gullible international audience as having been imprisoned by a dystopian British government for telling the truth about Muslim grooming gangs.

This time, though, Robinson has gained fans from more respectable right-wing thought leaders than Alex Jones, people like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk. This, and the combination of him having been re-platformed on the social media platform X, means he seems to have actually managed to become something of a core celeb for the international far-right. So yeah, I mean, he's still going into prison all the time, but he has bigger time fans now, which I think is actually really helping him out.

I mean, I'm assuming most British voters are also in prison. So maybe he's just kind of visiting it to court his audience. Yeah, we all just take our turns in prison.

Now, let's move to Nigel Farage. Farage rose to prominence in this country as leader of the Eurosceptic outfit the UK Independence Party, known more commonly as UKIP. Under his leadership, UKIP moved from being a single-issue anti-EU party to having a more coherent right-wing populist platform, which led to some of the party's great successes, first in European parliamentary elections of 2014 and finally with the Brexit referendum itself.

Following Brexit's shock win in 2016 and some internal disputes with his UKIP successor, Farage launched a new party called the Brexit Party, which has since rebranded to the less single-issue-sounding Reform UK. Now, when I last discussed Farage, he was certainly the UK's most prominent far-right demagogue on the international stage, but he had never actually been a member of the UK.

actually been an MP. After the 2024 general election, however, the Essex constituency of Clacton now holds the dubious honour of being represented by him in Parliament. Reform UK.

In fact, Reform UK very much exceeded expectations in that election and managed to gain four MPs, taking its grand total to five. They already had one, Lee Anderson, who defected from the Conservatives. Now, five MPs may not seem like a lot in a pool of 650, but it was more than they were projected to win in the polls leading up to the election. This led Reform's deputy leader, Richard Tice, in a podcast interview to make a

confident assessment about the party's future. I think too many people sadly thought that a reform vote was a wasted vote. It wasn't a credible vote. What we're proving now is that, and there was all the nonsense talked through the campaign. I mean, there was a serious effort by the mainstream media to do us down. And so, in particular by the sort of the last diehard supporter of the Tory party in the name of the Daily Mail. And so, yeah,

Yeah, we were probably suppressed on votes by half a million to a million votes. But we've just kept on pushing. And that's the thing. You know, when I started on this endeavor, and people thought I was completely bonkers, I always remember the words of my late uncle who said, Richard, you've got to be in the room to be in the deal. My view was you've got to be on the ballot paper. If you want to effect change, you just don't know what happens. Events deborah events. And events came our way in multiple ways. And we just were just plugging away and word spread slowly but surely. And...

And by being at the table, then you can pick up some crumbs. In a sense, that's what we've done. But the momentum we've got since the election is remarkable. 18 months ago, we had 8,000 members. We've now got more than 100,000. We've doubled since the election. Doubled since the election. On July the 5th, no one would have thought that possible. That's so awesome. It's like a virus describing itself, replicating at an alarming speed. No, you're right.

No, you're right. That is actually a perfect description of it. Yeah. He's right as well. They have overtaken the Conservative Party, I believe, on members. Not that I think the Conservatives ever had a huge amount of members. It's kind of one of those things where often... Yeah, I guess it's one of those things where they're not hugely... That's not where their funding comes from a lot of the time. But this all might seem like the usual bravado, I guess, from a fringe party. No one's going to talk down their chances, essentially, of...

winning big at the next election, even if those chances are in fact very small. But there does seem to be a depressing amount of evidence that he is actually correct. The first YouGov voting intention survey released since the 2024 general election showed Reform actually overtaking the Conservatives as the party of opposition, with 25% of the voting intentions compared to Labour's 26%.

Conservatives sat with just a measly 22%. The latest polling, which was released on the 3rd of February, actually showed reform sitting a point above Labour. Terrific. I know. I love bringing bad news.

Now, before you all start panicking, it's worth noting that one charming little quirk of the UK election system is that what percentage of the popular vote you get is actually almost totally immaterial. Take 2019, when historically unpopular communist crackpot Jeremy Corbyn took Labour to its worst ever defeat since the dawn of time, with a mere 32.9% of the vote share. I see you've folded...

I see that you're following the line. That's good. That's good. I'm glad that your Labour Party also got reformed mentally. I see Richard Tice has been feeding you crumbs from the table. Yeah, I'm looking to be the new Secretary of State for QAnon and the upcoming Labour cabinet reshuffle.

Compare that to 2024 when our charismatic leader Keir Starmer stormed to a historic landslide with a whopping 33.7% of the vote and about half a million less votes themselves. So all of this is to say that even if reform are genuinely this popular by the time of the next election, which is probably a good many years away, it may not actually help them unless those votes are spread efficiently over a majority of seats.

I'll be honest though and say that I'm pretty sure that all of what I just said is what experienced sophologists call 'left-wing cope'. So if reform really are going to be the next party of government in these sacred isles, it's worth going a bit deeper beyond the far-right label to see what they actually stand for.

Here is what the landing page of the Reform UK website says. You are worse off, both financially and culturally. Wages are stagnant. We have a housing crisis. Our young people struggle to get on the property ladder. We have rising crime. Energy bills are some of the highest in Europe. The NHS isn't working. Both legal and illegal immigration are at record levels. And woke ideology has captured our public institutions and schools.

I see. We've got a new American export. Wokeness. There's something interesting going on here, I think, and it becomes clear when you watch a lot of interviews with reformed politicians, which, for my sins, I have. The party is best known for its hardline stance on culture war issues like immigration and woke ideology in schools, which I assume is their coded way of saying anything to do with LGBT people. But unfortunately,

I think they understand that there's a hard ceiling of support you can get for being the party of culture war. That stuff might animate people to yell at each other online, but when it comes to voting, a lot of them will be focusing much more on how you're going to actually materially improve their lives.

And so this is a strategy that the spokesmen for reform have clearly been taught to follow. Keep banging the drum that life in Britain is expensive, hard and that many of our most vital institutions are failing. Here's Richard Tice, who I played earlier, staying on message in a different interview. The extraordinary thing is we're becoming mainstream. We've now got three political parties polling in the 20s. You know, we're give or take 21, 22 percent. Labour a couple ahead. Tories a couple ahead of that.

It's all within the margin of error and it's extraordinary. It's never happened before, I don't think, in my lifetime that I can think of. And so a lot is going on and there is a real sense of shift at a time when, at all different age groups, people are feeling poorer financially and the quality of life. And here's Lee Anderson, Reform's first ever MP, who defected from the Tories when he got kicked out for saying that Sadiq Khan...

The Muslim mayor of London was secretly controlled by Islamists. Now, I don't want to give it to the Tories, but I mean, it feels very quaint right now, the idea of a conservative party running someone out for being too racist and conspiratorial. I know, right? Yeah. Like, you really have to be trying very hard. In fact, yeah, there's quite a funny thing about Lee Anderson is that I believe since 2018, I might have the right days wrong, he has actually defected from both Labour first off and then the Conservatives.

All right, just going on the tour. So basically he's getting continued, just getting kicked out of people, just being like, nope, you're too racist for us. And now he's found home and reform. Lee couldn't resist bringing up drag queens straight out of the gate, but managed to steer himself back to the company line. Well, I always say I want my country back. And when I say I want my country back, people go, you're racist, you're bigoted.

No they're not. What I mean is I want my schools to be like they was. You know where you go to school and learn. You won't have a drag queen sat there reading your bloody stories. Kids won't be told that there could be 25 different genders. I want them to learn to read and write, do the maths and be equipped and have opportunities when they leave school. I want to be able to ring a doctor up in the morning and get an appointment the same day. I want my constituents to be able to go to a dentist the same day and have a tooth pulled out or have that treatment.

i want bobbies to walk these streets i want rapists and criminals locked up what murderers locked up for life it's not much is it really yeah we can do that this man is like 40 cigarettes away from a certain doom i mean i wouldn't be too worried about this guy he can barely breathe

25 genders. Gotta date them all. No, that's actually a really good point, Jake. For our listeners, they're not walking at a brisk pace at all. And yeah, he's quite audibly wheezing. Can you imagine how miserable your life must be? You're walking around being like, 24 genders. Oh, it's raining right with me. Okay.

Like just being like, just spouting off like all of the like new understandings about sexuality and gender that like you just personally don't like. And you're just like, oh my Lord, oh my Lord. I wouldn't trade places with him for the world.

But something I do want to make clear for those of you who aren't living in the UK is that there are some decent points buried in there. Doctor surgeries genuinely do have longer and longer wait times to get an appointment. And in many parts of the country, including where I live right now, NHS dentistry basically just doesn't exist anymore. Again, it's, I mean, it's like, it's very interesting that, you know, in the midst of his, you know, his bigoted mumbling,

He has this expression, this desire for improved access to health care, you know, which is something that we don't even get here in the US. No, definitely. But what are Reform actually planning to do about it? Let's go back to what their website says. Only Reform will stand up for British culture, identity and values. We will freeze immigration and stop the boats, restore law and order, repair our broken public services.

So...

Ignoring all of the less bad things and more good things stuff in there, what are the actual concrete policy plans? As far as I can tell, they are freezing immigration and cutting taxes and government spending. Now, I really have to stress here that I'm not a policy wonk, but it seems to me that freezing immigration, cutting taxes and government spending would be the three main tasks on my agenda if my chief policy goal was to absolutely obliterate public services and especially the NHS.

This is a bit of a bind that lots of right-wing politicians find themselves in if they sweep to victory on an anti-immigrant platform. As actual bona fide policy wonk Stephen Bush wrote for the Financial Times, while voters often say they want lower immigration alongside lower taxes, they'll also generally punish any governing party who actually grants those wishes because of the inevitable heavy impact to public services. Most political choices can be boiled down to a simple dichotomy. To do less,

or to spend more. Immigration is no exception. If states reduce the number of people who can come into their countries and work legally, they are forced to either do less because vacancies aren't filled or spend more to attract and retain domestic talent.

The NHS is a useful example here. Pay and conditions in the NHS are middle of the pack in terms of the global healthcare market. What that means is that some of the doctors and nurses we train end up working in the US, New Zealand or elsewhere, while we in turn recruit around 20% of our staff from Africa, Asia and Europe. So if politicians actually want to keep their promises on immigration, they need to be willing to spend.

and to tax more. They also need to be willing for both the state and the private sector to do less. But the state doing more for people seems to be at the heart of reform politicians' rhetoric. Better GPs, better wages, better schools. Although to be fair to them on that last one, I don't have a concrete figure on how much our education sector is currently spending on drag queens.

I spoke to Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, the largest anti-fascist organisation in Britain. He told me that their research shows that this complication in reform's policy platform is one that's reflected within their support base. I mean, we've been doing polling on reform voters for some time, and it actually ties into some of these questions about how is it we split reform voters away from reform the party? And actually,

Actually, you can broadly split people who support reform into two categories, and it's based on economics. You know, there's richer supporters and there is more economically deprived supporters. And what's really clear is, you know, reform isn't just a party that says we don't want immigration. Nigel Farage's economic policies...

are really libertarian. You know, he's talked about wanting more or perhaps the full privatisation of the National Health Service, less workers rights, all these sorts of things. He's very pro-business. For a lot of the more economically deprived or lower income households that support reform at the moment, when you actually ask them what they want, as well as, you know, why they care really fundamentally about immigration, they want more workers rights, they want more state investment, they want the nationalisation of various industries, etc. There is real fault lines

between Farage, who tells them that he's a man of the people, but actually supports a raft of policies that deep down these supports don't agree with. So there's that element. There are fault lines. DISTANCING FROM THE FAR RIGHT

Despite only becoming an actual MP last year, it's undeniable that Nigel Farage has been the most influential figure in British politics in the last 10 years. Having spent nearly his entire political career agitating for a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU, many commentators optimistically predicted that he would become a spent force in British politics post-2016, having had his defining issue essentially put to bed.

In fact, he became something of a kingmaker. In the 2019 general election, Reform, then the Brexit party, made an electoral pact with the Conservatives to essentially let them run unopposed. Conservatives won the election handily. In 2024, Reform weren't feeling half as benevolent, and even in seats where they didn't directly take a seat from a Tory MP, they often managed to undercut their votes so that Labour walked in.

Now it seems that there's a genuine chance Farage might move from being kingmaker to king, but not like the actual king because we also have one of those. When

Winning a general election, though, means being seen as respectable by enough people who matter. This has been a tension in Farage's image from the very beginning. One of the reasons he was so inescapable in the media for so long was because he positioned himself as a cheeky outsider, unbound by the usual political pieties on gender, race and immigration.

But to take this strategy too far would be to be ostracized by polite society completely. To borrow his deputy Richard Tice's metaphor, not at the table, receiving your crumbs. Farage also kind of, he looks like somebody from like the Aliens universe who like works for the company, but like protects

But he pretends to be kind of on your side. He's sort of affable at first. He doesn't kind of have that imposing sort of resting sort of bitch face like Trump does. Yeah, he's so damn cheerful.

Do you know it's something I've noticed in having watched lots of interviews with him over the last few weeks? He's just always so chipper. He's always got a smile on his face. It's quite a clever media strategy when some of the policies that you're advancing are a little bit nasty. Do you know? Yeah.

Just a little bit. This is why Farage has always kept quite a firm line on white nationalism. When he was leader of UKIP, he maintained a bar of anyone who had previously been a member of the British National Party, an explicitly white nationalist party, or Tommy Robinson's EDL. In fact, when UKIP, at the helm of Farage's successor, began inviting Robinson to party events, Farage made a very public demonstration of leaving the party in protest. I have worked...

tirelessly for UKIP. I've spoken at one and a half thousand public meetings up and down the country during those years. I've traveled hundreds of thousands of miles and the aim was very simple. It was to take votes away from the establishment parties to force a vote in this country that would get us back our independence and you could argue that in 2016 we had been pretty successful.

One of the keys to that was talking about things that everybody else wanted to brush on the under the carpet issues like immigration Which we were told if you discuss that it's somehow Disreputable I made sure that UKIP talked about tough issues But we absolutely excluded anybody who'd ever been a member of the British National Party the English Defence League We wanted to make sure that when the abuse was thrown at us. It couldn't possibly be proved to be true Now I'm afraid

that over the course of the last few months under this leader, Mr Gerard Batten, a lot has changed and he seems to be pretty obsessed with the issue of Islam, not just Islamic extremism, but Islam and UKIP wasn't founded to be a party based on fighting a religious crusade.

And also obsessed with this figure called Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who is seen by some to be a great hero, standing up and fighting for working-class people, but who has a pretty suspect record and who brings with him

Scuffles. Horseplay. LAUGHTER

Yeah, this is quite a funny. Yeah, the British media often refers to like fights, like street fights as scuffles. I'm not totally sure what that's about, but it's just like a very like British media word. It's scuffle. It's like, you know, when two characters in a cartoon show approach each other aggressively, their bodies disappear and they sort of turn into like a tumbling dust cloud. Yeah, a little fist coming outside. Yeah.

It's also what you would call a fight between two boys wearing like Bermuda shorts and ties. That's it. It's kind of like quite an adorable word. It's private school fighting.

Yeah, it's not too serious. Yeah, it's quite an adorable word for the likes of what the EDL actually do. Yeah. Glassing each other. I had a Canadian buddy that I worked with years ago. He had a tattoo on his shoulder that said, it was like W-G-A-

Almost like where we go when we go out. I was like, what does that mean, man? And he goes, it means what goes around comes around, buddy. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, you know, fights. I was like, oh, you've been in a lot of fights? And he goes, 100 street fights guaranteed, buddy. What?

Now just imagine if he'd been bragging about being in a hundred scuffles. A hundred street fights guaranteed, buddy. He's a pretty famous guy. He's definitely been in shows that I'm sure that you all have watched. I saw him throw his cousin through a window at Wasega Beach, too. Oh, all right. Well, this is good. I'm glad you relate to this episode because most of your friends are re-imprisoned.

He was certainly not allowed in the United States, I'll tell you that. Awesome, dude.

Now, if you think I'm being overly cynical here by saying this is simply about maintaining respectability rather than Farage's genuine distaste for ethno-nationalism, it's worth bearing in mind that this is actually exactly how he framed the divide himself in a recent interview. You've mentioned Tommy Robinson a couple of times, Mr Farage. Are Robinson supporters welcome in Reform UK? Well, people who sympathise with the fact that he wants to fight against grooming gangs, yes. But if you genuinely think...

If you genuinely think that this guy is a hero figure in every way, given his record, given some of the things, not just that he's said that he's done, then maybe we're not quite right for you. I understand a lot of people sympathise. Look, Nick, a lot of people sympathise with what he's had to say about what's going on in British towns and cities. And he's grown up himself in Luton, where there have been a lot of community problems.

So I understand that. You know, sympathy, yes. But if you're an outright, you know, if you're an outright guy thinking this should be the next prime minister, then clearly reform is not for you. How concerned are you that those people might join reform, though? Because you mentioned in the past people have been attracted to parties in which you've been involved with views you say you've opposed. Can I be very clear? The last time Tommy Robinson stood for elected office, he got 2.2 percent. All right. I'm leading a party.

We've got ambitions to upset the apple cart in British politics in a way that's not been seen for over 100 years. Him and his close advocates can do what the hell they like. We're going to do what we do without them. Is that a bunch of cut limes on his tie? I can't tell from here. Can you zoom in? Can you enhance? I think those are. I think those are limes on his tie. I think he's...

And did he say they're trying to do something with the apple cart? Upset the apple cart? Upset the apple cart, yeah. Is that kind of a slang? That's not a slang that's across the pond. No, we don't have apple carts here. We've got overpriced apples. Unfortunately, the scuffle upset the apple cart. Elon Musk.

Publicly rejecting Tommy Robinson in order not to appear too threatening seems like a pretty sensible calculation, and probably one I'd do myself in Farage's situation. In a way, having a signifier like Robinson floating around in British politics is actually quite useful for reform, because it means when confronted with labels like far-right, they're able to draw a clear line between themselves and someone a little further down the respectability ladder. But it's not

entirely straightforward. For one thing, Joe Mulhall at Hope Not Hate pointed out to me in our conversation that this is another dividing fault line in reform's support base. Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, in many ways, there's really close parallels in what they believe in terms of their attitudes towards immigration and society and a whole range of issues.

There is a huge difference in style. Nigel Farage wears his expensive suits, you know, background as a public schoolboy, worked in the city, is a multimillionaire. Tommy Robinson was a football hooligan from the streets of Luton. And Farage, as a result, has always thought that he needed to distance himself from Tommy Robinson, even though in many ways he believes and says very similar things.

The big fault line that's come here is that with Tommy Robinson in prison, many of Tommy Robinson's supporters, some of whom were at the largest far-right demonstration the UK has seen in decades last year in July, where there was maybe 30,000 people on the streets, were calling on Nigel Farage and Reform to defend Tommy Robinson, to come out and support him. But Nigel Farage and Reform rejected that.

and said they would refuse to do it. And this has caused a huge split within the base of reform, and our polling shows that it's roughly 50-50. Some of the reform voters and supporters think that Tommy Robinson's too extreme and shouldn't be touched. But there is a big chunk in the party, the other half, that think that he speaks for them and he might be a bit rough around the edges, but he says the same things we do and we should support him. Can you guys imagine if the United States, in addition to Trump, also had a rude hockey player who

who's going around who was like almost just as popular and and like and just like like even more extreme it would be fuck that's who it would be a hockey player by the way that's kind of like i think that's like the american equivalent yeah well it maybe speaks to you know the often discussed difference between the the uk and the states where um

We're like, I don't know, classes. We're a much more class-stratified society. So, you know, you need your far-right emblem depending on which class you're in. Whereas maybe in the States, you know, what's beautiful about it is that rich or poor, you can all join in on admiring this billionaire. Right. Yeah.

I don't know, but maybe that's it. Yeah, I mean, that is very true. I think the United States, you know, one of the biggest problems that we have is there is a conscious sort of steering the conversation away from class and being conscious of that. So that makes sense. And the party recently discovered that Tommy Robinson has one very high profile supporter who disappointing has come at a significant, very literal cost.

I'm talking about everyone's least favourite billionaire, Elon Musk. I really am sorry to keep on bringing this guy up, because I know we're all sick of him, but if he does continually insist in meddling in my country's far-right politics, I don't have much choice.

Those of you who listened to our premium episode 258, Princesses and Pogroms, might remember how I spoke about Musk's blatant incitement of the anti-immigrant race riots that happened here in the summer. There, at the very height of the violence, he posted helpful statements like, Since then, Musk has kept his interventions in UK politics at a steady ebb. Post-1998,

posing for a photo op with Farage at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in December. Farage posted that photo to X with the caption, Britain needs reform, to which Musk responded, absolutely.

There have also been persistent rumors of Musk considering a donation of $100 million to reform. When asked about it following his trip to Florida, Farage commented, We are in negotiations about whether he can help. He is fully behind this. He is motivated enough by what's going on in Britain to give serious thought to giving money.

Now, it's worth saying to our US listeners that this size of donation is pretty much unheard of in British politics and would quite handily make reform the best-funded political party in the country by a mile. In an interview on GB News after the Florida trip, Farage quibbled with the amount but seemed quietly confident in the billionaire's support. That 100 million story, I mean, where the Sunday Times got that from, I have no idea. Probably some bloke. So how much will it be then? Probably some bloke down the pub. You're in the pub all the time. And you. Well,

When I do, keep my ears open. It's very important. Two things we talked about. Number one, what really fascinated me were the margins by which Trump won in the seven key swing states. And the person behind that was, one, Elon Musk. I spent an hour going through with him what his strategy was, how he got new voters registered that weren't on the electoral register, how he used various tech tools to get out the vote on the day. There's some revolutionary stuff here. And I'm pledged...

to professionalising reform. I took copious notes yesterday. I've learnt a huge amount. And he will help, X will help reform UK at the election coming up? He's already given me considerable help. With targeting voters who can't get... Understanding the process from start to finish. Reaching disaffected communists who frankly feel there's no point in voting for anybody, but just to get them to agree with you or to like me on TikTok or whatever, that just isn't enough. You

You've got to get them registered, you've got to know who they are, you've got to get them to vote. Inevitably, given all the press stories, we did discuss money. Now, that's a negotiation we would go back and have again. He is not against giving us money. He hasn't fully decided whether he will. If he does, it wouldn't be anything like the ludicrous telephone numbers quoted in the Sunday Times. But the most important thing is this. This is what Musk said to me.

He said British politics now has a uni-party. There is very little to choose between the Labour and Conservative parties.

And he genuinely fears that the mother country of the English speaking world is frankly going down the tubes. And he agrees Britain needs reform. He is right behind me. I wonder if Elon was like, it kind of sounds to me like, and I could be wrong, but that he basically was teaching Nigel Farage how to reach the crypto call of duty demographic. Yeah, because

because I must admit, I didn't really follow much of the US election that closely. Is any of that true about Musk being instrumental in winning the seven swing states and getting out the vote to people who weren't on the electoral register? Does any of that ring a bell? All I know is that he held like, you know, like a journey to the stars kind of contest where he was like, you could win a million dollars by registering to vote. He did something that

seemed kind of illegal. Yeah, he tried his best and it's questionable whether he made the difference, but he certainly tried to put his thumb on the scale. He probably made more of a difference turning Twitter more conspiratorial and ostensibly right-wing. That probably had a larger effect than any kind of

on the ground sort of strategy he was doing in any of those swing states because I feel like he's kind of a lazy guy. You know, I don't imagine that he's going out and knocking on doors, but he's probably saying if you use these buzzwords and talk about crypto and talk about this, that, and the other thing, you can get these guys excited about voting for you.

That's my impression as well. I don't, it doesn't feel like Matt Musk is like actually much of a like electoral whiz, but he's, you know, he's incredibly good at just bringing a lot of publicity to something, to whatever he's interested in. As we'll find out in this next section. Grooming Games.

At the turn of the new year, Musk began posting dozens of tweets about the UK grooming gang scandal. Now, that story in itself is a very serious and very complicated topic, which I feel I can't really do justice in just a few minutes here. I have written a piece for friend of the show David Farrier's site Webworm, explaining the history in a lot more detail, so if you'd like to read my full thoughts on the issue, please follow that link in the episode description. For now, here's the very short version. Groom

Grooming gangs became national news over here when the Times ran a series of high-profile stories in 2011. These stories drew attention to several court cases across northern England and the Midlands in which two or more adult men participated in an exploitation scheme where they befriended underage girls, some as young as 12, before brutalising, raping and trafficking them.

The inquiries and reports that followed revealed serious failings of police, social services and care home staff to protect the underage victims. There are countless chilling accounts from these girls and their families of being ignored, brushed off if they attempted to report their abuse and in some cases actually arrested for defending themselves.

The victims continue to be failed today. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, a far-reaching national inquiry investigating institutional responses to the issue, published a report in 2022 outlining 20 recommendations to prevent further safeguarding failures in the future. It has yet to have had any of them implemented.

Nonetheless, it isn't serious concern for abused children which keeps this topic at a constant background hum in far-right discussion online, which is presumably how Elon Musk stumbled across it a good ten years after it became a major news story here. It's the fact that in the most infamous

grooming gang news stories like Rochdale and Rotherham. The perpetrators were mostly from a British Asian Muslim background while their victims mostly weren't. Now I want to make it as clear as possible this was a huge news story in this country in the 2010s. Every time there were new convictions they were front page news. There were several prime time documentaries and even a BBC drama.

Elon Musk, however, had only just heard about it, and so he fell victim to a common trap that ensnares people who think of themselves as highly intelligent. The understanding that if you didn't already know something, it must have been deliberately hidden from you. Musk began posting incessantly about the topic, implying that there was an ongoing legacy media cover-up, for which he implied the current Labour government was responsible. In

In particular, he singled out the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who he said was, quote, In other posts, he began to outline this theory in more detail. In the UK, serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service's approval for police to charge suspects.

Now, I want to stress again that the British state's response to the victims of these cases was unequivocally abysmal. In some cases, it probably verged into complicity. So...

I don't want to defend the British state in this regard, and if that was all that Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage were saying about this, then that the state had failed, then we'd be on the same side. But they're not, so we're not. And if you understand how the grooming gang story broke in the first place, you'll understand why this framing in particular is really absurd. The whole reason the Times broke the story about grooming gangs in 2011 was because their chief investigative reporter, Andrew Norfolk, picked up

up on a significant number of prosecutions for this specific kind of child sexual exploitation. Now, I don't know enough about the inner workings of the Crown Prosecution Service to know if Starmer should get the credit for this, but it happened during his tenure, which is the exact thing that Musk is trying to condemn him for.

Musk also singled out Jess Phillips, a Labour MP and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, after it was revealed that she'd rejected a request by Oldham Council for a government inquiry into grooming gangs in their town. Musk called her a, quote,

Jesus Christ. I know, yeah. Yeah, it actually emerged that she, I think, after his comments, needed to get, like, extra protection because it had just kind of, yeah, put such a target on her back, basically. God, talk about a guy who should kill himself. Yeah.

Filling in for Liv. Just like, what are you doing? What did you do? Like these horrible things cloaked in like Wizard of Oz insults. Like, who is this guy? I know, Wicked Witch, yeah. She's a Wicked Witch, a very Wicked Witch, flying monkeys, flying.

Well, I guess it's maybe just his sneaky way of he wants to say bitch, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Piece of fucking shit. These guys are shit. They're nuts. Why add wicked? Because then it's bickered bitch. Because he's a child. Farage, when asked about these remarks in a radio call-in, defended Musk. Sophie is in Manchester. You're through to Nigel Farage. Sophie, go ahead. Hello.

If he was... If he was...

inciting violence, then that would be going beyond the line at which free speech is acceptable. Now... Using language such as "rape genocide apologist", the ice is pretty thin, Nigel Farage. It's very, very strong language and it offends many, but then free speech should be able to offend many.

And, Sophie, I do not believe... So it's OK to cause offence, to knowingly cause offence? Of course. That's what free speech... Nick, that is what free speech is. We should be allowed... You should be allowed, I should be allowed to say things that others find offensive.

the presenter on After You, says many things that people find offensive. But hey, I wouldn't, I might not like what he says, but I wouldn't want him shut down. Right. Hmm, interesting. Nigel Farage is a stupid cunt who should fall backwards into a canal and choke on mud.

Well, I may not like what you say, Julian, but... I think he should fall backwards into a canoe. No, I mean, it's such a cop-out, isn't it? It's such a cop-out just to be like, well, he should be allowed to say it. And it's like, yeah, people aren't saying, you know, do you want Elon Musk arrested for saying that? They're saying, do you condemn it? Which he's perfectly capable of understanding when it's someone like Tommy Robinson. Yeah.

Exactly. He loves to just mincing little fucking bitch. Yeah. If Tommy Robinson had come to the table with $100 million and a strategy how to recruit more young broccoli heads to your party...

By the way, I'm going to be using that word like all the time ever since I learned it from Liv yesterday. Is that a generational slur? Yes, yes. That's the kids. That's the white t-shirt, black sweatpants, the broccoli heads, the chains, the bad attitudes. There is a broccoli uprising and it is not good. We need to get them back for Cheugy, to be honest. I've never recovered. Yeah.

Chu-gi? Yeah, Chu-gi. Is that how you pronounce it? No, no, no. Definitely say Chu-gi. It must be British. Chu-gi. I don't have TikTok. I've only just read it. I've never heard it's pronounced. That's not how you say TikTok. You can't get TikTok in the UK? It's Tic-toic. Tic-toic.

No, no. Yeah, that's true, actually. You guys wouldn't know what it's called anymore. Yeah. No, we got it back. We got it back right away. No, you can't fucking install. You can't download and install it. Oh, you can't? If you have it, you can keep it, but you can't update it currently.

Oh, sick. Wow. And you cannot install it fresh or reinstall it. I've been grandfathered in. I've grandfathered into TikTok, which is good because I like to watch guys out in the woods. They make a fire in a tree stump and they put a pot on it and they cook their meat. Man, the stuff you can beat off to these days. They make meals out of the forest. They make meals out of the forest with their dogs.

kind of content that i watch on tiktok and star citizen videos this bricks you up this gets you going no i mean i honestly in this field like i really should be on tiktok because you know how else are you going to know where if you're like researching conspiracy theories and online radicalization you need to you need to be on those kind of platforms i love tiktok for the exact opposite there's no radicalization there for me if i go to youtube it's like

gun video guns and attachments and like comedians like stand up comedians who are just like secretly like Trump supporters but I go to TikTok and it's like this Canadian guy out in the woods who's like hey buddy I'm going to make some tea and play some Sega Genesis oh

Would you like to come with me? Wait, what? I literally found a guy whose whole thing, he lives in a cabin in the woods and he creates these ASMR videos that are kind of geared towards 90s children. So he's like, hey, buddy, I'm going to cook my favorite meal, classic macaroni and cheese.

Oh my God, wait. So you found a woodsman that eats mac and cheese and plays Genesis? He eats mac and cheese and then he's like, I'm going to play some NHL 96, buddy. Come with me. I see. And then at the end of the videos, he's like, please, please enjoy yourselves. He's wonderful. He's got a big mustache, long hair like Travis. He kind of looks like Travis. In fact, it might be Travis. Travis' alter ego.

I don't know. I'm a little suspicious of this. This sounds like some sort of weird social media hypnotism program designed to seduce American men. Like, hey, I'm just going to play some Jurassic Park on the CRT television.

Nothing, nothing strange about that. Have you seen the video? He literally has a Jurassic. He literally did that at the video the other night. Oh my God. No, I think you're right. Yeah, he's creating hundreds of Manchurian candidates out there. Yeah, the fantasy that you can be like a woodsman, but also spend all your time playing video games is like, it's really cornered Jake perfectly. The Tommy Problem.

Farage was more than happy to ride the wave of renewed attention on the grooming gangs issue sparked by Musk. Making a public call for a new inquiry in Parliament, he outlined why exactly he thought all the previous inquiries into the issue weren't good enough. They didn't focus on the issue as an explicitly racial one. The Prime Minister is doing his best to tell us there's been an inquiry, the J inquiry. Well, there has, and it's 459 pages long.

Grooming gangs are not mentioned once. Rotherham is literally mentioned once in passing. And the scope of that inquiry was like a shotgun. It was to cover a whole range of areas in which children were being abused. What we need and what we're calling for is a rifle shot inquiry, one that looks specifically at to what extent were gangs of Pakistani men involved

Raping young white girls. All right, that's enough. What a piece of shit. I know. I mean, like, it just kind of gives the whole game away, really, that statement, because it makes exactly clear that they do not care about any of this type of abuse if it's perpetrated by white guys, which it has been in several cities, do you know? Or against non-white victims, which...

again, yeah, it's often assumed, I think, that all of the victims of this were white because they're frequently not named because they're underage. But there have been several cases where researchers have confirmed that's not the case. So yeah, it just could not be clearer that, yeah, he doesn't care about those victims. He doesn't care about those perpetrators. There's just this very specific kind of abuse that he thinks deserves an inquiry and everyone else can get lost. Yeah, I'm imagining a different type of rifle shot. LAUGHTER

But unfortunately for Farage, the issue had brought up another related matter that he and Musk saw less eye to eye on: Tommy Robinson. Throughout his post-incrusade over grooming gangs, Musk continuously reiterated his support for Robinson.

He shared Robinson's latest documentary, Silenced, in which Robinson alleged the result of his libel case had been the work of a vast, politically motivated judicial conspiracy. The documentary you're about to watch is the most important documentary I've ever made. This story is far bigger than Tommy Robinson. This is about the weaponisation and the politicisation of these buildings, court buildings across the West.

The Royal Courts of Justice, ironically named. These buildings have been weaponized and used against members of the public to destroy them if they speak out. From Donald Trump to Steve Bannon to Gert Wilders to Marie Le Pen to Katie Hopkins. That's what's happening. It's like terrible injustice has been done. I'm about to name some of the worst people to do it in the world right now.

Yeah. He's like, good people getting slandered. Horrible person. Horrible person number two. A worse person. Oh.

Musk also quoted a post by an account called "Inevitable West" which read: "Tommy Robinson was smeared as a far-right racist for exposing the mass betrayal of English girls by the state. The nation owes him an apology." Musk added this commentary: "Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth? He should be freed and those who covered up this travesty should take his place in that cell."

In fact, it seems that Musk's support for Robinson is so passionately felt that he's agreed to pay his legal fees. At least this was the claim made by the administrator of Robinson's Telegram channel, which they gave as the reason for shutting down a crowdfunding campaign. Given how well-known Farage's distaste for Robinson is, it was inevitable that he would be asked about this relationship.

When the question came at a Reforms East Midlands conference, he attempted to answer diplomatically. Do you worry that the party pooper could be the person who may be your biggest saviour a week ago, Elon Musk? You called him a bloody hero on Boxing Day. Yeah. You said you were expecting a reasonably sized donation. Do you still think that? He's saying remarks now attacking Britain, supporting Tommy Robinson. Is he now a political kryptonite to you? Well, he's attacking the leadership of Britain.

I mean, he's saying Britain's been terribly badly led and that the grooming scandal, the mass rape scandal, which has resurfaced and transcripts of what was said in court have been online. And I recommend you at home, don't read them. You won't sleep at night. And so, yes, he is attacking the leadership in Britain. He's very supportive of me. He's very supportive of the party.

He sees Robinson as one of these people that fought against the grooming gangs. But of course the truth is Tommy Robinson is in prison, not for that, but for contempt of court for the third occasion. But equally, there are people in Britain

who think that Robinson is a political prisoner. That's the narrative that he's pushed out. That's how he earns his living. But it isn't quite true. Musk's response came a day later. The billionaire posted... The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn't have what it takes. What a fickle bitch. I know, right?

Hours after this, Musk publicly responded to a post asking him whether he thought Rupert Lowe, Reform's MP for Great Yarmouth, should take over the party instead. "I've not met Rupert Lowe, but his statements online that I have read so far make a lot of sense." Suddenly it seemed that a $100 million donation everyone had been so breathlessly talking about was going to remain all talk, at least for as long as Farage stayed in charge.

The politician put on a brave face when asked about the falling out in an interview, but it was clearly a little embarrassing having been going all over the airwaves in previous days to talk about what good chums the two were. We all know about the dispute that's been going on between you and Elon Musk. What would Donald Trump say?

Oh, I've been a friend of Donald Trump's for a decade. I've been very supportive of him. He's been very supportive of me. I can't see that changing for a moment. And interestingly, despite what Elon said when he woke up the other morning, you know, that I was no good or whatever. I mean, I'm sure he's not alone with that opinion, clearly. But, you know, and then yesterday he retweeted me twice with positive messages. So I don't know.

Are you catching up with him later this month? Yes. How long are you going over for the inauguration? I'll be over for a good sort of four or five days. And, of course, look, I have no desire to go to war with Elon Musk, and I'm not going to, and I haven't done. I'm a huge admirer of him. I think he's a heroic figure. I think the sort of tech changes that he's bringing to the world are incredible. I think buying Twitter actually has brought a lot of free speech back, even if some people don't like what's being said. Well, you know what? Tough. Um...

And, you know, there is no way, there is no way I'm going to fall out. But equally, Nick, I wasn't going to be moved. I don't know what he was thinking when he woke up on the wrong side of the bed the other day. It was not something, not like him really to sort of insult. I'm not going to read too much into it. He said very nice things in the days followed. Very retweeted, very nice comments. So, yeah, I mean, you know. So sad. I know.

It's so embarrassing having to be like, well, he retweeted me after that. Just like, yeah. He texted me back. He texted me back. He didn't leave me on read. It feels like Elon Musk is sort of like using this Trumpian technique of coalition building, which is like simply, you know, there are people who are greatest people ever and they're heroes and they're wonderful, who are the people who are aligned with me. And there are people who are awful, who are cancers in society, who are not aligned with me or disagree with me or speak...

against me in any way. And it proved pretty successful for Trump, so I guess maybe Elon Musk is trying a similar tactic. In my interview with Joe from Hope Not Hate, he mentioned that while Musk's withdrawal of support was an obvious blow to reform, it had offered Farage another golden opportunity to emphasise himself as a sensible moderate. The big question is how useful is this Tommy Robinson split issue for Farage? Now, in one sense,

It seems to have scuppered or briefly scuppered a relationship with Elon Musk in America. Elon Musk came out and criticised Farage for not standing up for Tommy Robinson, for example. And there was all this talk in the British media about $100 million going into reforms coffers. So in the first instance, it was extremely embarrassing for Farage when Musk then drops him and says he hasn't got what it takes to run reform. It's hugely embarrassing and it, of course, was very amusing. However, Farage has taken what he can out of that.

The thing that he's got out of that is he's used it as an ability to tell everyone who will listen to any media interview that he's had about this is that I'm not like Tommy Robinson. He has used it to place that clear water between himself and someone who is demonstrably understood to be an extremist. People are less sure about Farage, but the vast majority of people across Britain, polling's really clear, think that he's an extremist.

I would say also the polling is pretty clear that the vast majority of people think reform are far right as well. And that's the challenge that Farage has, is trying to prove to those people that he's not and he's using Tommy Robinson. So in some ways, as embarrassing as the whole Elon Musk debacle has been, it has allowed him to really put his flag in the ground and say, I'm a centrist, I'm a model. Of course, the truth is he's not. But at least in the way he's presenting his image to the electorate, he's found it really useful, I think.

Sure enough, here he is on ITV's This Morning, just the other day actually, pretending to have concerns with Robinson's approach to Islam. My reservation about Robinson is that the way he talks

about Islam. It's as if he wants to go to war with everybody of the Islamic faith. He's a long criminal record. All I've said is, look, let Mr Robinson do what he does. I'm running a political party. We intend to win the next general election. He would not be an asset to us. So it seems that despite Farage's commitment to free speech when defending Musk's comments, there are some ideas so beyond the pale that he wants nothing to do with them.

It's certainly interesting that his personal line is Robinson's statements about Islam, given he's got such a colourful history on that topic himself. Take in 2013, for instance, when he said that while some Muslims integrate into Britain, others are coming here to, quote, take us over. Or a few years later, when he described Muslims as a migrant group, quote,

that fundamentally wants to change who we are and what we are. He continued this theme of Islam as a fundamental threat to British identity last election, consistently referring to Muslim independent political candidates as representing sectarian politics attempting to take over, and told one interviewer that there were large numbers of Muslim young people who loathe British values. It might not be war with everyone of the Islamic faith, but it hardly reads as friendly either. Naming the problem.

It is clearly important to Reform's ambitions that they shed any kind of association with extremism, and they've shown that they're willing to fight for it. Last year, they even managed to force an institution as big as the BBC to back down and apologise for having referred to them as far-right in their reporting, a label which Richard Tice called, quote, defamatory and libelous. But...

because I'm the bravest and most principled reporter in the whole world, I'm going to do it anyway. For one thing, not to pull rank, but I do literally have a PhD on the topic of the far right, and so I know for a fact that it's an accurate label here, and I'm not the only expert to say so. If you look at this kind of notion that the far right is an umbrella term, split in two, that has the radical right on one side and the extreme right on the other, and the

big difference here is that ostensibly the extreme far right is your fascist groups that reject democracy in all of its forms whereas the radical right rejects the essence of liberal democracy which is essentially popular sovereignty majority rule etc fundamental elements of liberal democracy

That is what the radical right rejects. And there is endless evidence of Nigel Farage and reform rejecting institutions that defend liberal democracy, calling for pulling out of legislation that protects universal human rights, rejection and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, but also undermining institutions of democracy. Farage has his own history.

as his close ally Donald Trump in America, of regularly disputing and questioning electoral results. He did it in Peterborough in 2019. He did it in Oldham in 2015. He did it in Rochdale just last year. So all of this, again, is this kind of sense, these undermining institutions of liberal democracy. And then, of course, most importantly here is that the far right, when you think about the far right, they define themselves as an in-group and an out-group. There's an out-group, which is an enemy, and they are an in-group, which is a threat.

And of course, for reform, that's currently asylum seekers, it's Muslims, it's Islam more general. And so you kind of put all these things together and you say they're comfortably radical right. Calling reform far right isn't just accurate, though. It's important. Farage's whole political career has been a masterclass in shifting the Overton window steadily rightwards, constantly pushing the envelope of acceptable politics.

With Reform UK a serious electoral threat, Labour's rhetoric on immigration has become increasingly extreme. In November last year, Starmer gave a speech on immigration which sounded curiously Farage-like. As the ONS sets out, nearly one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023. That is four times the migration levels compared with 2019. Time and again,

The Conservative Party promised they would get the numbers down. Time and again, they failed. And now the chorus of excuses has begun. We heard that from the Leader of the Opposition yesterday. But what we didn't hear, what the British people are owed, is an explanation. Because a failure on this scale isn't just bad luck.

Wow. Right?

It's crazy. It's insane. Look at my left-wing party dog. Well, I mean, the same thing happened here where the effort to own or criticize the far-right party by the quote-unquote liberal party is to be like, well, they haven't delivered on it. The American people

owe an explanation for why they failed at these like horrible policies and we're going to do it better and like insulting them or criticizing them and not being able to achieve these like horrible policy things they themselves are being sort of pulled further right and trying to get a piece of that like you know that right wing policy

It's so fucked up. I mean, we're seeing the same thing here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember seeing a tweet recently where it was like, you know, fucking, it may seem like Trump is deporting a lot of illegals, but Joe Biden deported twice as many illegals in the same period. And it's like, dude,

What are we doing? Race to the bottom. Way to, yeah, create that as being like the only metric of good and successful politics. I don't know. Yes. Yeah. Our Secretary of State for Health as well just came out recently with saying, this is again another Labour politician saying something like,

ludicrous where he's like the NHS is anti-white or something like anti-white the kind of open a deliberate experiment with open borders like this is like language that I think genuinely the conservatives would have found extreme 10 years ago yeah yeah yeah just outflank Nigel Farage to the right that's really really smart

Now, I know what the sensible argument for this tactic is. Labour have to act tough on immigration in order to stop the far-right from gaining ground, particularly in key seats in the post-industrial north. The problem is, I've been hearing this argument from Labour literally all my life. Every Labour leader has had their little tough-on-immigration moment, and as far as I can tell, the far-right are more powerful than ever. The liberal left media in this country, such as it is, is fond of

acting completely helpless as the far-right keeps gaining ground, but the truth is they've helped Farage become mainstream every step of the way. One of the ways they've done this is by using euphemistic language about his positions. Terms like national conservative or the even more aggravating

populist, which Dr Aurelien Mondin, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Bath, argues has been a gift to the far-right globally. Using populist instead of more accurate but also stigmatizing terms such as far-right or racist acts as a key legitimizer of far-right politics. It lends these parties and politicians a veneer of democratic support through the etymological link to the people.

and erases their deeply elitist nature. What this points to is that the processes of mainstreaming and normalization of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far-right. In this case, the mainstreaming process has involved platforming, hyping, and legitimizing far-right ideas while seemingly opposing them and denying responsibility in the process.

Even if Reform UK don't identify as far-right, for some bizarre reason, people with unquestionably extreme views seem to be convinced the party is their political home. In the general election last year, candidates for Reform were found posting memes promoting the Great Replacement Theory, liking posts that made claims like, quote, the white race has achieved more than

all the other races combined, or themselves offered up fascinating historical takes like Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality. The party later claimed that this had simply been a vetting problem that was now fit

But it seems that a vetting problem made it all the way to the top, since their former deputy leader, Ben Habib, made the chilling argument in April last year that asylum seekers coming to the UK via boat should be left to drown. So at some point, you know, the Royal Navy or any other body, they're going to have to pick these people out of the water or off a dinghy that's not seaworthy. OK, at that point, what do they do with them? Do they take them back to France or not? What do they do with them?

The presumption in your question is that we have a duty of care to people who are seeking to enter our country illegally. We have a duty of care to people drowning in the channel, yes.

Well, we only, by the way, under international law, Article 98 of the UN Convention of Law of the Sea, we only have an obligation to save people if it's reasonable to do so. And under the same international law, we have the right to turn people back who are seeking to enter our waters illegally. I understand. I love it.

turning people back, at the point when they refuse to be turned back, or someone just puts a knife into the dinghy and it starts deflating, or they jump into the water because they've been told that's what you do and then you'll be picked up. You know as well as I do, anybody who has ever been on a boat will know that the rules of the sea are very clear. You have to save life where you can save life. Only if it's reasonable to do so. But it will be reasonable to do so because there'll be people drowning. No, I don't think it's...

I don't think it's reasonable. Are you genuinely saying the Reform UK policy is we will let people drown to make a point? Because I think that's what you're saying. Well, sounds like that's what he's saying.

This conversation, by the way, took place the day after five people, one of them a four-year-old girl, drowned trying to cross the channel. So, yeah, just a particularly terrible time to make a horrible argument like that. Well, he looks like a horrible guy, and he's got his eye ear pods in, he's got glasses, glasses.

And he's making a bad case to let people drown. Yeah. Now, to be fair, as I possibly can, Habib, that man who was just speaking, is no longer in the party. He quit in November, citing fundamental differences with Farage. And it seems there's some kind of drama going on there. It seems he's done a lot of interviews about it, but I honestly don't care to find out. Perhaps even Nigel Farage was like, maybe we should pull people out of the

water and he's like no i'm sticking to my guns on this yeah or faraj was probably just like this this guy's a liability right he makes us he makes us look terrible but no matter what faraj says about maintaining a firewall against the fascist or white nationalist right they just keep joining it's clear that many of them view reform as an opportunity to imitate faraj's own political strategy and keep dragging mainstream political discourse further rightward the

Gregory Davis, writing for Hope Not Hate, reported that Mark Collett, the neo-Nazi leader of the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, had urged his followers to start covertly joining reform as the party expanded last year. I don't think genuine FMO nationalism at the ballot box now has a hope in hell's chance because...

Anyone that goes up against reform is going to be completely squished. Nationalists have to now start thinking outside the box. We have to start doing different things. If we try to take on reform...

you know, it's going to be like going up against the sort of, you know, 600 pound gorilla in the room. It's not going to work. They are going to hoover up the anti-immigration vote, anti-establishment vote. The fact is, I think nationalists now, if they want to play a role on an electoral level,

The best thing they could do if they're not face out is engage in some kind of entry ism of the Reform Party. It would be brilliant if the Reform Party ended up getting sort of 80 something MPs at the next general election and 10, 15 percent of them were sort of closet ethno nationalists who could help.

drag the party even further in the right direction when they have a more meaningful parliamentary group. But I think now nationalism has to really think outside the box and we have to make the best of this situation. And the best of this situation is to keep undermining the Conservative Party, hope people see Labour for what it is and hope the instability in the Labour Party caused

by the schism over Israel-Palestine breaks that party down as the Tory party has been broken down. So I still think there is hope, but I think we have to be very clever at how we approach this. It seems that at least one person was listening.

In early August, Reform hired a man called David Haydn Milakovich as an organizer for Staffordshire. Haydn was known to local anti-fascist organizers, having given a speech at a patriotic alternative anti-migrant protest in March 2023 and leafleting with some of their members soon after. Davis writes, As revealed by the anti-fascist research group Red Flare, Haydn Milakovich has also operated a TikTok account under his own name in which he posted a string of highly dubious looking videos.

The account has since been deleted, but the thumbnails and hashtags used beneath leave little doubt that the content is anti-Semitic in nature. And I've actually included a screenshot just so you can see exactly how little doubt is left that the content is anti-Semitic in nature. Do you guys want to describe that to me? Yeah, there's a sad small child's dirty face right next to the words war and above that are the words...

Jews Own Governments. Beneath it, we have some hashtags. Truthseeker, Jew, 9-11, CIA, Viral, Facts, Migrants, War, USA, Oral Order.

economy. Twin Towers 9-11. Rabbi, wake up. Yeah, so it's very difficult to think of an innocent explanation for what that video might contain. These are just the thoughts that go through my head. I wake up in the morning and I go, 9-11!

You, Rabbi. You know, this is just kind of, you know, I'm not all that surprised to read some of this stuff. This is, you know, just kind of a day in the life, you know. This is your internal monologue. Follow the money.

It would be nice to think that the end of Musk and Farage's little lovin' signals the end of reform getting any kind of big funding, but sadly that doesn't seem to be the case. While the party's hardline stance on immigration is often the material that gets in the most media play, many of their politicians' views on climate change are also far outside the mainstream political context.

consensus of the last 10 years. Rupert Lowe, for instance, who Musk nodded to as a potential leader, tweeted this in 2020. The cult of climate change marches on with no definitive evidence to support or deny the factual accuracy of their assertions. They can't deny it. Funny.

Yeah, that's actually a really good point. That's really bizarre wording. Yeah. Why would they have definitive evidence to deny the factual accuracy of their assertions? That doesn't make sense. Richard Tice in particular has been extremely vocal on the topic, repeatedly denying in media appearances that extra CO2 has made any impact on the planet. And you're the only party who doesn't seem to be concerned about the future of the planet. That's something that does affect young people. We know that it's at the forefront of the minds of young voters.

Absolutely. And here's the point, right? Net zero will make zero difference to climate change, as confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that says if you get to net zero tomorrow, it'll make no difference to the level of sea level rise for between 200 and 1,000 years. Actually, what we need to do with climate change, of course, we all care about the environment of the planet. You need to adapt to it. The idea that you can stop the power of the sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous. And anybody who thinks you can, frankly, you're misinformed.

Yeah, we need to kill people on boats trying to come over instead of trying to change the thing that's making the migrations. Yeah, when you put them side by side like that, it is just like so dark, isn't it? It's just like, keep on just like pumping out CO2 and then yeah, we'll just drown anybody who tries to escape the consequences of that. Now...

It's not really the style of this podcast to debunk the stuff we cover line by line, as it would honestly take too much time. Here though, I do think it's worth pointing out that literally every word out of Tice's mouth there was untrue. The IPCC in fact said that reaching net zero emissions is the only way to stop climate change, and that while sea levels will rise regardless, they will rise much more if our emissions continue to increase.

But despite being happy to use the prestige of scientific credentials when it sounds like they agree with him, Tice has an explanation for those who don't. They've all been paid off. There are very serious scientists who agree with me. Yes. I mean, literally, Nobel Prize winning professor of physics and hundreds of other serious scientists. And why would you put everything on red...

When, as you've just said, right, there's two sides to the bait. But what's happened is we were basically smeared and labeled and suppressed in terms of having debates and just canceled. Why? Follow the money. If you don't understand something, follow the money. And if you as a scientist wanted a research grant in the last 15 to 20 years, you had to toe the line. You had to buy the line and you get your research grant. And money talks. And when you let vested interests...

do that, it's truly shocking. I agree. That's why I think it's worth noting how many big donors to Reform UK have vested interests in oil, gas or other highly polluting industries. According to Adam Barnett and Sam Bright writing for DeSmog, Reform received £2.3 million from these donors in the period between the 2019 election and the start of the next one in 2024. Since then, the party has recruited the billionaire property tycoon Nick Candy as their treasurer. Nick Candy!

Yeah. Yeah, if you also want to know a funny thing about him, he's, she may not have been famous for you guys. Do you remember the pop star Holly Valance? No. No. Please, come on. With this British shirt. Well, she's married to him anyway. Oh, good. Good.

Candy boasted to the press in December last year. We have a number of billionaires prepared to donate to the party. Even the big Tory donors are calling me. A lot of people will join us. The movement has started. So doesn't that just make you feel excited? Guys, we've got the best and brightest billionaires on our side. No, we have the good billionaires. Cool.

I've been researching the far right for long enough to know that it's never a bad bet staying pessimistic. I look at Labour winning the general election last year and get the same, slightly uneasy feeling I did when Biden won in 2020. I was pleased, obviously, but the numbers themselves didn't exactly feel like the firm, lasting repudiation of the far right that I'd been hoping for. It's important not to give in to doomerism, particularly since it feels like a general atmosphere of political apathy.

and disengagement has been such fertile ground for far-right politics in this country. But it's worth making an honest assessment of what use the normal anti-fascist strategies are for a party that has been so successfully mainstreamed.

How, for example, do you deplatform a politician who's one of the most recognisable faces in British politics and is never off primetime TV or radio? I asked Joe what he thought we could practically do to prevent reform's resistible rise. He gave a really thoughtful answer which outlined that we can't just focus on the party itself, but the wider conditions in this country that they continue to exploit. The fight against reform is a big one.

And it's going to take huge amounts of people. It's not going to be small groups of activists, which we're going to need, which, you know, doing protests, etc. But this is going to be a national party that's going to be standing all over the country, pushing divisive leaflets through the doors of communities that are already struggling and susceptible to this politics. And it's going to take a massive response.

I think there's a few things. One is a shameless plug here. You know, Hope Not Hate is going to be campaigning all over the country over the coming five years. We're going to be launching a big national anti-reform campaign in the coming months. We're going to be giving speeches and talks around the country. But the key here is bringing together activists from over the...

sensible or the centre-left or left, anyone who's just against reform that wants to come out and put a message of more progress and hope through the door. We're going to be organising that all over the country. So do sign up to our newsletter as the shameless plug. But the other thing is, the real thing that's necessary is the Labour Party or the current government is going to have to deal with the material needs of the communities that Farage is preying on.

If the Labour Party, in five years' time, we get to a situation where people don't feel better off, where they still don't have enough hospitals, schools, houses, jobs, you know, our wages are still stagnant, unemployment still, all of these things, then reform's job is ten times easier. And so the other thing there is we need to be pressuring our MPs. We need to be pushing the government to turn around and say, if you don't deal with these issues, you know, it's going to be super important that anti-fascists and anti-racists organise things.

over the next five years. But part of that organisation needs to be pushing the Labour Party to deal with the problems. The status quo is not going to work here. We need a vision of what a better Britain looks like, that looks after people. So it's a two-pronged. We need to marginalise reform, but we also need to give people hope. And a big chunk of that is going to be pushing our government to make sure that they can deal with the things that people really need. Yeah, we're going to have to kidnap somebody that Keir Starmer cares about. LAUGHTER

Now, yeah, this seems like a sensible approach to me, but it is worth being realistic about the challenges. The left in this country has been pretty comprehensively fragmented and marginalised in recent years, and looking at statements and actions by our Labour government, it doesn't seem like they're feeling a huge amount of pressure from that direction. It seems...

Everyone on the liberal left kind of agrees that if we want to beat reform, we need to take a leaf out of Farage's book. But whereas many in Labour seems to think that means offering a watered-down version of his anti-immigration rhetoric and nationalist policies, I think we should be studying his career and learning what it looks like to effectively consolidate real political power outside of the mainstream. We love our Annie, don't we, folks? LAUGHTER

I'm noticing a parallel, I think, that, you know, as conditions get increasingly difficult for your average person, the easy choice is to look to the party who blames it on somebody else, blames it on these factors that look like that, hey, if you just get rid of it,

if you just let these people drown in the fucking channel your life is going to improve it's easy it's the easy way out it's the easiest thing to do is to blame is to blame it on uh you know somebody else and and and advertise a quick fix it's amazing that labor's like answer is not hey we should improve these conditions and work diligently to like show uh

you know, that we actually care about like the, the material needs of the people. And instead it's, we need to get better at this blaming thing.

Why aren't we blaming? Yeah, they're just like, the people love this blaming thing. Yeah, people seem to love the blaming. Absolute dunces. God, we are, oh man, talk about the blind leading the blind. Between Labor and the Democrats over here, it's just absolutely the drugs. Just pitiful. They should both be raised. And I mean, that actually could mean several different things. Raised better by their parents. Raised better by their parents. They should.

Hey, they should be carpet bombed into oblivion better by their parents. I think we should start the Sonic 3 party here and in the UK, the Sonic the Hedgehog party. I think this is what launched 8chan. What?

What the fuck are you on about? Sonic the Hedgehog Party, we are about moving fast, we are about collecting rings, and we are about freeing animals. But more than anything, we are about going to patreon.com slash QAA and signing up for five bucks a month to get access to all of our episodes, both the main ones and an extra premium every single week, all on the same feed.

go to patreon.com slash QAA and sign up now with your parents' credit card. Rules and regulations do not apply. Do not sign up with your parents' credit card and don't really listen to anything that Julian says. Except for one part, right? Except for one part. Go to patreon.com. That is true. You should do that and you should follow Travis View. What? Okay. Follow Annie. Annie KNK on Twitter, right? This is something going on? Uh,

No, follow me on Blue Sky. I don't post on Twitter for the time being. Fuck! Sorry. Everybody's on Blue Sky. Everybody's having good times. It's the future. Not everyone. Not everyone. Not me. I'm having a bad time there. I text Julian on the side. I go, I hate this site. Charcoal Sky. Red Sky!

with the blood of our enemies. That's what I'm about. You should start a new platform. Yeah. Or you could, yeah, bring some of that energy to Blue Sky. It's too nice there. It is. Anything you want to plug before we leave, Annie, other than the shitty website that everyone should also destroy?

No, I'm quite proud of the article I wrote for Webworm about grooming gangs. So yeah, if you do want to understand more about the ins and outs of that kind of scandal, then please do have a look there. That's right. We'll have the link in the description. Will you take us out, Annie? Will you give us a nice British farewell? Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.

We have auto-cued content based on your preferences. Do you think that that's breaking down a bit with like the social media and stuff that people are like they're not going through the same channels as what they used to? Every time I tweet something now and sometimes I'm a little bit mischievous I think well this is going to get a reaction and they're looking for something in a tweet or an article or something on Facebook to pull you up on.

to say, "Look what Anderson said." When you've not said anything like it. It's like a few weeks back, some woman put on eggs. Women have to put up with pregnancy in periods. What do men have to put up with? I said, "Well, men went to battle at Somme." The point I was making is that men have died in their millions being slaughtered in wars, and it's always men, and it's always young working-class men from villages like this that go and give their life up for country.

The next minute people saying, "Oh, Leanne says he was in the Battle of the Somme." So I'm thinking to myself,

I've got to explain every tweet I put out. Aren't you clever enough to understand what I'm saying? Yeah. That traditionally, and it's traditionally white working class young lads, teenagers, that have gone and died for this country. Yeah. They've worked down the coal mines, they've worked in the fishing industry, they've worked in the foundries, they've worked in the steel mills. They've done all these sh** horrible jobs. Yeah. But when times has got, as they allegedly are now, they're overlooked.