Saturday 24 May 2014

Having it large with Nigel Farage


i.

I had a dream about Nigel Farage last night. Essentially what happened, minus details, was that I went to a party at his place and, after initial hostility, unbent to his view that he really wasn't that bad once you got to know him; the dream ended with him holding me tenderly against him in a paternal hug. Before any low-minded types start jumping to conclusions, I'd like to say that the hug was entirely chaste, with only, at most, a vestigial erotic frisson. I woke up with some lingering warm feelings towards him, but cured them by looking at his photograph.

This dream was not (as the low-minded might say) related to the state of my psyche. It was about you, England. It was about the reasons we may sink into Farage's embrace. To the sensitive dreamer, watching Newsnight is like eating a piece of bad cheese, and I was probably influenced by a particular vox-poppin' fresh who had been featured the previous night, saying that he voted Ukip because they 'answered his questions' in a way that no other political party did.

Of course, the thing about Ukip is that they don't really answer anyone's questions, they just point away from them - literally away: Farage's answer to all our questions about welfare, unemployment and poverty is 'foreigners', and his answer to most other questions is 'beer'. The recent success of Ukip could be put down to them tapping into deep anxieties, but in both their media image and their policies it seems that what they primarily address is our need not to think about our problems. Window posters for the local elections said 'I'm voting Ukip. No more leaflets, thank you'. They are a party you vote for to express embattled impatience with everything. Every time I look at a Ukip manifesto I age ten thousand years, but in abstract the party's vibe is pretty tempting to those of us who basically hate everything and don't want to think.

ii.

If the theme of this post is 'Not Thinking', rather than 'Fantasy Liaisons with Reactionaries', then I can manage a tenuous link to a vegetarian issue. The recent heavily-processed kerfuffle over halal meat being served in the country's two most hallowed institutions - Nando's* and Oxford University - was, as many have pointed out, not about animal rights. There would never have been a big scandal if a secular abattoir was neglecting to stun animals before slaughter - it's the fact that Muslims did it that really freaks people out. This outbreak of halal horror is tied up with the Trojan-horse idea that the UK is going to be taken over from the inside by something that is not itself (even though the place has never been culturally homogeneous, but whatever).

The point I'm gradually getting to is that two things that have been pointed to as consequences of foreign invasions - unemployment (one of Ukip's focal points) and and cruelty to animals - are fostered by long-standing structural faults and iniquities in British society. You could say that these issues are being used as a smokescreen for xenophobia and racism, but it's also true to say that xenophobia itself acts as a distraction from whatever's rotten in the UK. 

There is no self-contained safe place to scuttle back to, and if we feel threatened by outside influences we should look at ourselves and see what kind of utopia would be left if we created some kitsch fantastical hermetically-sealed Middle England. But, as Nigel came to me and told me in a dream, it's easier to go around sticking pitchforks into straw men.

*ok, it's South-African