Item number one. Farage was prepared, during the Brexit campaign, to issue a poster demonising "migrants", that was a direct echo of a poster by Goebbels demonising Jews. His rhetoric has also been a litany of
ad hominems directed at those who treat his views with suspicion, such as referring to those opposing Brexit as "traitors". The irony involved here is, of course, on an epic scale, given the numerous properly conducted instances of research that point to the irreparable harm Brexit will inflict upon the country, which would make him the
real traitor in the proper sense of the word - someone prepared to see the destruction of his country for personal gain.
Item number two. Farage has ruthlessly milked the EU for personal gain, whilst spreading venomous and frequently false rhetoric about the EU. He happily trousers £77,000 per year as an MEP, claims expenses from the EU in addition to his MEP's salary, yet has the worst attendance record in the entire EU.
Item number three. I remember Farage standing up, on one of the
very few occasions he attended a sitting of the European parliament, to launch into a frankly nauseating tirade, claiming that none of the MEPs around him had ever held a proper job (despite his career being primarily that of a dodgy stockbroker dealing in arcane financial "instrument" of dubious provenance). Sitting behind him as he delivered this tirade, was a Lithuanian MEP who survived being a Russian Gulag prisoner as a child, and went on to become one of Lithuania's top heart surgeons before becoming an MEP. But of course, facts have never stood in the way of this odious little creep's demagoguery.
Item number four. Despite 85% of the UK public being opposed to fox hunting, Farage fraternises with assorted toffs in the now-illegal hunting fraternity, and would almost certainly repeal the 2004 Hunting Act if he had his way, in direct opposition to the will of the people that he so frequently and unctuously evokes in support of his Brexit obsession. He also engages in rampant hypocrisy with respect to the poll numbers, having stated publicly that a 52% vote in favour of Remain would constitute "unfinished business", whilst claiming in the next nicotine laden breath, that a 52% vote in favour of Leave constitutes a mandate written in stone that should be forever unchanged.
Item number five. Farage was one of those who proudly stood in front of that mendacious "£350 million per week" slogan painted on the side of a bus, but the moment the ramifications of Brexit started to be discussed, including
less money for the NHS, Farage started talking about the need to privatise healthcare in this country.
And moving on, with respect to the assertion that Corbyn is a "Marxist", those lapping up the drivel spread on this matter by the
Daily Heil, would do well to read
this article, written by a Norwegian political scientist. Sample quotes therefrom include:
As a Scandinavian who has spent more than a decade living in Britain, nothing has made me feel more foreign than observing the current Labour leadership election. From his style to his policies Mr Corbyn would, in Norway, be an unremarkably mainstream, run-of-the-mill social-democrat. His policy-platform places him squarely in the Norwegian Labour Party from which the last leader is such a widely respected establishment figure that upon resignation he became the current Secretary-General of NATO.
Yet, here in the United Kingdom a politician who makes similar policy-proposals, indeed those that form the very bedrock of the Nordic-model, is brandished as an extremist of the hard-left and a danger to society.
So who is right? Is the Norwegian Labour movement some dangerous extremist group that unknowingly has occupied the furthest leftist fringe of the political spectrum? If so, a casual glance at the UN’s Human Development Index would suggest that Norway certainly has not suffered as a result of successive Labour-dominated governments. Or is it, perhaps, that the British media’s portrayal of Corbyn, and by extent his policies are somewhat exaggerated and verging on the realm of character assassination rather than objective analysis and journalism?
The socio-economic structural changes Britain has undergone since the financial crisis has severely discredited the neo-liberal orthodoxy in both academia and amid the general public, as the trend of widening income and wealth inequality has left far more economic losers than beneficiaries in its wake. I would suggest that tapping into this growing demographic among an increasingly polarised electorate makes Mr Corbyn’s distinctiveness as a social-democratic candidate an asset rather than a liability.
Another moniker Mr Corbyn’s detractors often apply to his policies are that they derive from some so-called extreme of the political spectrum, that they are ‘hard left’ and ergo hopelessly idealistic and unworkable. To a Norwegian observer such as myself I find this characterisation puzzling. Mr Corbyn’s policy-platform, particularly in regard to his domestic policies are largely identical with the Norwegian Labour Party manifesto. Railway nationalisation, partial or full state ownership of key companies or sectors, universal healthcare provisions, state-funded house-building, no tuition fee education, education grants and loans to name but a few, enjoy near universal support among the Norwegian electorate, in fact, they are so mainstream that not even the most right-wing of Norwegian political parties would challenge them.
Since 51% of leading British journalists are among the privately educated 7% it is not surprising that they have internalised an ideology that serves their own privileged class interest, consciously or not, rather than that of the wider population. This raises the question of whether British politicians should solely be reacting to the agenda of the conservative-oriented press, or that they themselves should set out visions for how society should be organised to better serve the interests of the electorate.