Latest news with #MakeBritainGreatAgain
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
‘You See What's Happening in America With Elon Musk? We Need the Same Thing Happening Here.'
Britain is sullen. Last year the Labour Party won the general election in a landslide that was a mile wide but only an inch deep. That vote, which gave Labour a commanding majority on a vote share of 34 percent, reduced the Conservative Party to a rump of just 121 seats and, for the first time ever, elected five lawmakers from the far-right anti-immigration Reform U.K. party. Still, the outcome was widely viewed with relief: Britain had been granted a reprieve — five years to show Britons that the center could still work for them. Almost a year in, Labour is flailing and unpopular. Britain's struggling public services need vast amounts of spending, which the party had promised to finance not with higher taxes but with sustained growth that has proved elusive. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been warily triangulating an unpredictable American president with invitations from King Charles III and plans to increase spending on defense. Culture wars have continued to rage, groceries are still expensive and housing is costly and scarce. Aggrievement has settled over the land like dust. Local elections on Thursday are an opportunity for voters to register their discontent, and Reform U.K., which is standing candidates in almost every contest, is polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. If the party performs well, it will be a clear signal that 2024 was merely a reckoning postponed. A few weeks ago I took a train from Cornwall, where I live, to the Midlands, to attend the launch of the Reform U.K. local election campaign in Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city. In 2023 the Birmingham local council effectively declared itself bankrupt and is now both raising taxes and cutting services — a paradigm of the nation and fertile soil for Reform U.K., which had the good fortune to be holding its conference during a garbage worker strike, as thousands of tons of rubbish piled up across the city. 'Rats 'bigger than cats' are roaming Britain's second-biggest city,' CNN reported. In an aging sporting and entertainment arena, many party members and supporters wore its signature turquoise, which is slightly bluer than Tory blue. Nigel Farage, Reform U.K.'s leader, has suggested that the party could take over the Tories, and the turquoise is a tank on the lawn. In the greenish-blue sea of cocktail dresses and ties I spotted a red jacket emblazoned with 'Make Britain Great Again' and a few union jack suits. The stage was set with street furniture illustrative of various grievances: large trash cans and piles of uncollected garbage; a fake pub, the Royal Oak, with a 'To Let' sign; a cinema showing a film called 'Tax Me if You Can.' The number of unfilled potholes in Nottinghamshire, a nearby county, at one point flashed up on a large screen: an alleged 62,288! Reform U.K. grew out of the Brexit Party, which Mr. Farage founded after abandoning the U.K. Independence Party, a movement that in 2010 had policies that included only allowing three foreign players on the starting line up of every British football team and 'a return to proper dress for major hotels, restaurants and theaters.' If much of the political class laughed then — mirth had helped to see off Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and his sister-in-law Nancy Mitford even wrote a novel mocking him — they aren't laughing now. For one, they know that the American political class laughed at Donald Trump in 2016, too. And they know that Conservative collapse and Labour stasis has ceded a space in Britain that an extremist movement could fill. Whether Reform U.K. is that movement is less clear. The party is certainly chaotic. In 2024 two parliamentary candidates were dropped for racist remarks. In March The Guardian reported that the party's new head of vetting had said Adolf Hitler was 'brilliant' at inspiring people, President Vladimir Putin of Russia's use of force in Ukraine was 'legitimate' and Bashar al-Assad, Syria's recently toppled dictator, was 'gentle by nature.' Last month a Reform U.K. lawmaker was expelled from the party after he was accused of threatening violence against the party chair. Some of its manifesto, even now, is either a baffling hodgepodge or definitive evidence of the horseshoe theory of politics. It would, for instance, both abolish inheritance tax for estates under £2 million and nationalize British Steel. But it is remarkably adept at channeling outrage. In Birmingham the emcee, David Bull, a TV presenter and the party's former deputy leader, said that Britain is in terminal decline, and that Labour had broken it. Audience members screamed and stamped their feet — and these were not the polite cheers of other party conferences I've attended. This rage was real. The party's deputy leader, Richard Tice, asked the crowd: 'Do you want to make Britain great again? Do you want to make our brilliant, strong leader, Nigel Farage, the next elected prime minister of the United Kingdom?' The crowd howled their longing. But there were a few more rounds of speakers before Mr. Farage appeared onstage on a shining yellow digger, grinning widely. A jaunty savior arrived to fill Britain's potholes. Mr. Farage, a former commodities trader, is that peculiarly British thing: a character. (Boris Johnson was better at it, but he is gone.) He has 1.2 million followers on TikTok. (The @UKLabour account has a little over 200,000.) And he boarded the MAGA train promptly in 2016, posing with Mr. Trump in front of a golden door, which, I think, must lead to oligarchic nativism the way the wardrobe led to Narnia. In recent months the MAGA connection has been a little bumpier — Elon Musk is not a fan of Mr. Farage, and Mr. Farage was forced to correct Vice President JD Vance when he appeared to call Britain 'some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years.' Mr. Farage issued a statement: 'JD Vance is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.' But MAGA continues to inspire. In Birmingham, Mr. Farage pledged to implement a British version of Mr. Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and railed against the teaching unions that, he said, are poisoning the minds of children. The Conservatives, he said, could not be forgiven for betraying the people on immigration, and the Labour Party could not be forgiven for betraying the people on the economy. After the speeches ended, I parsed the crowd. 'DOGE was one of the things that came to me,' David Gooding from Devon said. 'You see what's happening in America with Elon Musk? We need the same thing happening here.' I asked Mr. Gooding who he thinks the British version of Mr. Musk should be. He said at first that he didn't know, then landed on Arron Banks, a wealthy businessman, mayoral candidate and co-founder of which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016. Mr. Farage 'is speaking for the general people of this country,' Colin Boyles from Oxfordshire said. 'People who have been here for hundreds of years who feel that our country is being taken over. And we don't have a say in it. I feel it's our last chance.' Reform U.K. is an inchoate answer to a yearning. The party will let you scream your rage, and scream it with you. It will be a vessel for your fury. It will watch sympathetically as you point at things that are broken and say that it sees them, too. But it's plagued by the same lack of real answers that the far right seems to suffer from everywhere. I wonder whether that will matter. In Birmingham, when Mr. Farage said that his party was 'full of optimism!' the cheers were muted. The audience members knew they weren't optimists; that's why they were there. The woman sitting next to me asked if I believed I live in a democracy. I told her I did, for now. She seemed hurt.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘I like Rupert Lowe's plain speaking': suspended MP haunts Nigel Farage's big rally
There was one name on the lips of many Reform supporters before their party's local election campaign launch in Birmingham last Friday night, but it wasn't Nigel Farage. Instead, conversation turned to Rupert Lowe, one of five Reform MPs elected last year, who was suspended this month when allegations of bullying emerged, the day after he had described Farage as a 'messianic' leader of a protest party. 'One of the immediate issues he [Farage] has to deal with is the Rupert Lowe issue,' said Pat Elwick, a retired referee from Lincolnshire. He is campaigning for Andrea Jenkyns, the former Tory MP, to become Reform's mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in the local elections on 1 May. Lowe comes up a lot when he's 'out footsoldiering' and is a popular figure, Elwick said. Another activist, Ian from Worcestershire, laughed when asked how he thought things were going. 'It was going quite well, wasn't it?' he said. 'He's had a bad press with the Rupert Lowe thing, but one man doesn't make a party I suppose, like the Tories with Boris. But I like his [Lowe's] plain speaking to be fair.' He hesitated. 'Nigel is plain speaking but he tends to go around the houses a lot.' May's local elections will be the first big test of whether Farage's party has managed to maintain its momentum from the general election. The party was polling at 26% last month, a pip ahead of Labour, and is standing candidates in most of the 1,600 council seats being contested in 23 councils in England, and for six directly elected mayors. Winning council seats is a way to increase its base of activists and potential candidates for the next general election, and Reform had billed the event at Birmingham's Utilita Arena as the 'biggest rally in modern political history'. Outside, protesters from groups including Stand Up To Racism and National Rejoin March waved EU flags, while Led By Donkeys put up images of Farage and Vladimir Putin saying 'Vladimir and Nigel welcome you to Birmingham'. Inside, the Reform supporters – a mix of angular young men in sharp suits and pointy shoes, and older men wearing turqouise ties queuing for selfies with Lee Anderson – were buying 'Make Britain Great Again' caps, rosettes and placards. When the event got underway there were plenty of empty seats in upper tiers of the 10,000 capacity arena, and only the first 10 rows of premium seats in front of the stage were full. But Reform's opponents will not sniff at the party's ability to gather even 5,000 or 6,000 people to a political event on a Friday night – not many fewer than at Neil Kinnock's Sheffield rally in 1992 or during Jeremy Corbyn's 2016 leadership campaign. Reform had decked out the arena with a vignette of how it sees modern Britain – a broken down pub, rubbish on the streets, a dilapidated bus stop and a road strewn with potholes. David Bull, the former Brexit party MEP who Richard Tice described to the crowd as a 'modern day Larry Grayson' toured the set and interviewed some of the mayoral candidates, who include Arron Banks. The founder is standing for the West of England and described himself as being 'as popular in Bristol as a pork pie at a Bar Mitzvah'. Farage arrived on the footplate of a JCB digger, which turned out to be a 'Pothole Pro', he told the crowd. It had been lent to him by JCB's founder, Anthony Bamford, a long-time Conservative donor who recently gave Farage a helicopter flight worth £8,000, and could apparently fix potholes for half the price of others. Councils could use them if they weren't 'tied in to five and 10 year contracts with inferior providers, but we'll fix that, won't we, when we control those county councils'. A question for Farage's party is whether or not he can broaden Reform's appeal beyond a base that has different priorities and concerns than the rest of the country, and is closer to Donald Trump's . Polling by Opinium today shows that Reform voters are more pessimistic about the fate of the economy than the rest of the UK. Eighty percent of Reform voters think things will get worse over the next 12 months, compared with 60% of adult voters. And they remain much more concerned about immigration than others, with 77% putting it as one of the most important issues facing Britain compared with 39% overall. Previous polling has revealed them to be more sceptical about sending British troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers and more positive about Donald Trump. Like Trump, Farage has been holding a succession of events – Birmingham was just the latest and largest – and the MBGA caps and the razzmatazz production values were matched by some Trumpian policies. He pledged to create a 'British form of Doge', to pay for 'the cuts that people deserve', and said civil servants would be banned from working from home. He took aim at Net Zero policies, complained about inheritance tax, promised to end 'unskilled migration' and got a standing ovation for the line: 'Everyone who comes here illegally will be deported.' He finished to another standing ovation, but there had been a brief moment of dissent during the two-and-a-half hour rally, when Rupert Lowe supporters shouted his name. It may be mentioned again over the next five weeks.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Is Winston Churchill the father of Maga?
The entire board of the Conservative Party is off to Oxford University on Monday to inspect the party's archive at the Bodleian Library. Nigel Huddleston, its co-chairman, is planning to dust down some old party slogans to see if they can be repurposed for Tory battles with Labour in the 2020s. They range from the wordy 'Life's Better With the Conservatives, Don't Let Labour Ruin It' from the 1959 campaign to the now legendary 'Labour Isn't Working' from 1979, to the forgettable 'Strong and Stable' from 2017. Or there's 'Prosperity With a Purpose' from 1964 and 1992's 'The Best Future for Britain'. I thought the slogan from Winston Churchill's 1950 election campaign – 'Make Britain Great Again' – has a certain ring to it. It's amazing no one else has had a similar idea. Earl Attlee, the grandson of the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, has been lamenting a collapse in standards. 'Like it or not, we live in a much less deferential society,' he told peers this week. 'It always depresses me when I read of senior military officers or junior ratings or NCOs in the regular Army being referred to as 'Mr', even in a military context. Many years ago, when I was just a full corporal in the Reserves, I was proud of the rank that I held and what it indicated. However, I am not sure now that being a peer is an attractive rank or honour any more.' Hereditary peer Attlee, 68, is planning to retire from the Lords this spring before Labour abolishes his role there in part because he is worried he is 'out of date with modern society'. He explained: 'I do not use social media; I have not got the foggiest clue how to use it.' He will be missed. It is the culmination of the Six Nations rugby tournament today and former England rugby star Mike Tindall has recalled winding up his mother-in-law, Princess Anne, patron of Scottish Rugby Union. 'Most fellows want to get something over on their mother-in-law,' he told a charity lunch in the City. 'It's quite niche if you are playing for England, captain for England and you play Scotland at Twickenham and you win and you are receiving the trophy from your mother-in-law. I don't like the majority of the RFU but I shook every one of their hands and I kept her waiting. I was like, 'Debrief over lunch tomorrow?' and she says, 'Move on Michael'.' Lily Allen, 39, thinks today's young people cannot party like she used to. She told an audience at London's Hackney Empire last week: 'I don't think it has got anything to do with their health and well-being. I think they are vain. All this health and wellness stuff is bulls--t. Young people seem to be obsessed with being in control of their self-image. Not that I advocate getting out of your tree.' Former Conservative party chairman Sir Jake Berry wants ministers to target golf courses rather than farmland for new homes. 'Fields are left empty in the winter because you don't put livestock in a field in winter, because they destroy the grass,' he explained to GB News viewers.'But if you want to take useless bits of land away from people to build houses on, why not start with golf courses? In fact, there are more golf courses in this country than there is land used for houses.' Eighties pop band The Housemartins will never reunite like Oasis, says ex-band member Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim. 'There are so many people reuniting right now and people ask if we will do it and I say 'no'. The party line when we split up was if we saw another member of the band playing a Housemartins version then we were allowed to kill them. The other thing was we would never get back together unless The Smiths do. They have said they won't do it unless the Royal family abdicates so don't hold your breath.' Former Labour MP Stephen Pound thinks he knows why the Sentencing Council decided to develop new judges' guidelines – which could see white people treated with less consideration than minorities – to come into effect on April Fool's Day. 'How fitting that one of the members of the widely derided Sentencing Council is named Jo King,' he tells me. 'Many of us think they must have been.' They weren't. Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at peterborough@ Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
14-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Is Winston Churchill the father of Maga?
The entire board of the Conservative Party is off to Oxford University on Monday to inspect the party's archive at the Bodleian Library. Nigel Huddleston, its co-chairman, is planning to dust down some old party slogans to see if they can be repurposed for Tory battles with Labour in the 2020s. They range from the wordy 'Life's Better With the Conservatives, Don't Let Labour Ruin It' from the 1959 campaign to the now legendary 'Labour Isn't Working' from 1979, to the forgettable 'Strong and Stable' from 2017. Or there's 'Prosperity With a Purpose' from 1964 and 1992's 'The Best Future for Britain'. I thought the slogan from Winston Churchill's 1950 election campaign – 'Make Britain Great Again' – has a certain ring to it. It's amazing no one else has had a similar idea. Peer review Earl Attlee, the grandson of the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, has been lamenting a collapse in standards. 'Like it or not, we live in a much less deferential society,' he told peers this week. 'It always depresses me when I read of senior military officers or junior ratings or NCOs in the regular Army being referred to as 'Mr', even in a military context. Many years ago, when I was just a full corporal in the Reserves, I was proud of the rank that I held and what it indicated. However, I am not sure now that being a peer is an attractive rank or honour any more.' Hereditary peer Attlee, 68, is planning to retire from the Lords this spring before Labour abolishes his role there in part because he is worried he is 'out of date with modern society'. He explained: 'I do not use social media; I have not got the foggiest clue how to use it.' He will be missed. Royal in-laws It is the culmination of the Six Nations rugby tournament today and former England rugby star Mike Tindall has recalled winding up his mother-in-law, Princess Anne, patron of Scottish Rugby Union. 'Most fellows want to get something over on their mother-in-law,' he told a charity lunch in the City. 'It's quite niche if you are playing for England, captain for England and you play Scotland at Twickenham and you win and you are receiving the trophy from your mother-in-law. I don't like the majority of the RFU but I shook every one of their hands and I kept her waiting. I was like, 'Debrief over lunch tomorrow?' and she says, 'Move on Michael'.' Young people today Lily Allen, 39, thinks today's young people cannot party like she used to. She told an audience at London's Hackney Empire last week: 'I don't think it has got anything to do with their health and well-being. I think they are vain. All this health and wellness stuff is bulls--t. Young people seem to be obsessed with being in control of their self-image. Not that I advocate getting out of your tree.' Berry's hole in one Former Conservative party chairman Sir Jake Berry wants ministers to target golf courses rather than farmland for new homes. 'Fields are left empty in the winter because you don't put livestock in a field in winter, because they destroy the grass,' he explained to GB News viewers. 'But if you want to take useless bits of land away from people to build houses on, why not start with golf courses? In fact, there are more golf courses in this country than there is land used for houses.' Slim chance Eighties pop band The Housemartins will never reunite like Oasis, says ex-band member Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim. 'There are so many people reuniting right now and people ask if we will do it and I say 'no'. The party line when we split up was if we saw another member of the band playing a Housemartins version then we were allowed to kill them. The other thing was we would never get back together unless The Smiths do. They have said they won't do it unless the Royal family abdicates so don't hold your breath.' Bad joke Former Labour MP Stephen Pound thinks he knows why the Sentencing Council decided to develop new judges' guidelines – which could see white people treated with less consideration than minorities – to come into effect on April Fool's Day. 'How fitting that one of the members of the widely derided Sentencing Council is named Jo King,' he tells me. 'Many of us think they must have been.' They weren't.
