Farage fever: the new media mindrot

It's interesting that mewling lefties are always asking "why is the media platforming Farage all the time?". It boils down to one thing. Like him or loathe him, he is at least animated compared to the NPCs fronting the other parties. As such, it's a symbiotic relationship. The media hate him, but they need him, because otherwise there's no reason to tune in to the bland televisual mulch they call election coverage, which largely exists for their own entertainment rather than public information. When all the other parties essentially agree with each other, and the media drones largely agree with them, there is no conflict of ideas, no controversy, and no reason to report it, let alone watch it.

There is plenty the media could go and look into if they were at all interested in politics. The new sectarianism emerging in this election is the beginnings of something big and worrying. There is a rich seam there for investigative journalism, but that would mean confronting some uncomfortable truths, and heading into some of the darker corners of British politics in places they would rather not go. Journalists much prefer a jolly on the train down to Clacton to see what their boy is up to.

Consequently, this has again become another Farage election where the media loses their collective mind. The Telegraph, in particular, has gone off the deep end, absolutely convinced that Reform is about to break through. Those of us who are more reserved in judgement are few in number on social media. One sure fire way to lose followers on X is to suggest that Farage is not going to lead us to sunlit uplands.

On that score, it’s hugely entertaining that all the people who said they weren’t susceptible to Covid hysteria have completely surrendered their critical faculties when it comes to Nige. Everyone’s vulnerable to something I suppose.

The hype, though, simply doesn’t add up. What I'm seeing in a lot of places is Reform candidates mounting only a limited local campaign, largely by themselves, while at least half are paper candidates who are mounting no campaign at all. This does not amount to 2015 Ukip levels. Much of the local party infrastructure that supported Farage in 2015 has completely collapsed, and much of the original activist base has died. On that score, Farage might have a problem for 2034, in that his core voter base is dying off too.

Commentators on the right, particularly those who live on X, seem to think that Farage fever has also gripped the nation, but it's highly superficial popularity as a novelty act, and by many, he is still not regarded as a serious politician. Even if Farage is popular on TikTok, barely half of 18-24s took part in the 2019 general election.

There are places where Reform can win respectable second place, and there will be a few knife-edge seats, but for Reform to win big, it would take a full mobilisation of Reform sympathetic voters, and a collapse of turnout. Though many anticipated a low turnout, it will at least rival the last two elections. In FPTP, encouraging headline polls do not translate into seats and, apart from Clacton, zero seats for Reform seems like a safe bet.

I am still open to the possibility that Reform could win maybe four or five seats by an accident of numbers, but not by an emphatic mandate, but if I were Farage, looking at the state of Reform's unvetted candidates, I would be hoping against such a breakthrough. Farage winning Clacton is a success, but any more is a major liability.

As such, any ideas Farage might have about taking over the Tory party are high fantasy. He would need at least a dozen high calibre MPs to get that ball rolling, and that's just not likely now or in 2034. To capitalise on any 2029 breakthrough, Reform would have to focus on movement-building so there's a ground game for 2034. That requires a lot of diligent shoe-leather work that Reform's leadership have thus far neglected, assuming the Ukip infrastructure would reinvent as Reform. This election will be the ultimate test of whether a ground game still matters. I think it does.

On the whole, I think we're seeing a lot of wishful thinking. The mania is based on one self-selecting YouGov poll, and YouGov has always over-egged the minority parties like BXP, and they're underestimating the Gaza effect on the Muslim vote. Reform isn't yet fighting fit, and the party needs real leadership. Farage is second to none as a media performer but he is not a details man, and lacks the youthful energy required to do the miles.

Meanwhile, the Tories certainly won't get "zero seats". Even the bleakest predictions put them on 70 seats, and we should not discount the tribal loyalty that an establishment party commands. Not forgetting that the Indian vote will mobilise under the Tories to keep Muslim candidates at bay. As far as the polls go, I don't think they're picking up on the overall fragmentation of politics, which could deliver wildly unpredictable results on the local level.

What I'm prepared to say with reasonable confidence, though, is the Reform mania won't deliver much for the right. Farage doesn't stand any chance of taking over the Tory party, now or in the future. This is not a new plan. It's just the same old recycled Farage shtick he's been churning over for the last twenty years. If elected, he will serve in Westminster purely as a renegade, keeping the media occupied and entertained, but will end up self-sabotaging. He will have limited use in "shifting the dial" on immigration discourse, but Reform is incapable of ever becoming a serious operation, largely because of his many personality flaws.

We go through this ritual of Farage mania at every election these days and he always falls short, despite the many excitable articles from polling experts and Telegraph pundits. They have a singular inability to think back beyond last week, and they don't learn anything when they're wrong. They're recycling 2015 narratives and superimposing them on what is a very different situation that's as much contingent on turnout as any other factor.

As ever, though, the left wing media is equally useless in reporting what is actually going on. The former BBC hacks who haunt social media as though they still matter (Sopel/Maitlis/Goodall et al) are more activists than journalists now, and their “analysis” is more smear and innuendo. As such, they haven’t been able see past their own Farage derangement syndrome to properly critique Reform. What they produce is self-congratulatory and out of touch.

As to the current crop, I’ve had zero cause to consult their works this time around. Were it not for the televised debates the legacy media would have virtually no role. They’re no longer required. If artificial intelligence ever does start to replace journalists, these types will be the easiest to replace, and yield the greatest financial saving.

The problem with the BBC is that, traditionally, its university educated journalists (back when a university education meant something) were smarter and better connected than the average viewer. Fast forward to today when we have greater expertise at our fingertips, more time and willingness to be informed, and a greater mistrust of prestige sources, BBC audiences are likely to have a broader range of influences and experiences than the average BBC hack who spends most of their time talking to politicians and other journalists inside the same square mile, week in, week out.

We now find that the best analysts and commentators are from outside the traditional media because they utilise audience interaction to learn and grow, when the average BBC "transmit-only mode" hack believes the audience are low intelligence, and must, for their own benefit, be protected from alternative sources. This is how we got a class of modern journalist that believes in censorship, and that they alone possess the critical faculties to decide what is and isn't a legitimate source. The same old elitism.

This is how modern journalists have become objects of ridicule. They genuinely don't have the first idea how out of the loop they are, or how anachronistic their methods are. The information revolution was something that just happened to other people. We now have a class of intellectually incurious "citizen of nowhere" journalists who have no idea what makes Britain tick, no idea how anything works, and no particular desire to find out. Ed Conway is perhaps the only one close to an inquisitive mind among the entire lot of them.

The saddest thing of all, is that I could have written this at virtually any point in the last fifteen years. Social media is not a new thing, nor is the internet. They haven't evolved in the slightest. Through the use of their inherited institutional prestige, they continue on in their own start-up vessels, speaking only to a very narrow audience of metropolitan liberals, producing self-congratulatory confirmation bubble drivel without the slightest hint of self-awareness.

The good news is that they are a dying creed. Their continued presence in the media landscape is the toxic legacy of terrestrial media monopolies, but this can't last forever and they're the last generation. Marianna Spring is their latest and last attempt to manufacture a young clone of themselves, and she's widely ridiculed and, rightly, treated with contempt. Independent media leaves them standing. You get more informative and interesting content even from GB News. Though GB News is televisual chewing gum, you're still more likely to be exposed to different ideas and perspectives than the BBC equivalent, which is no longer capable of prioritising actual news. The sooner Sky TV and the BBC are wound up, the better off we will be.

___

Speaking of most excellent independent sources of analysis, and since I’m managing to annoy and alienate potential readers by criticising Farage, it would be most helpful and appreciated if you would consider a donation or a paid subscription. I would be coining it if I were writing uncritical, generic right wing propaganda, but that’s not what I’m here for.