A guide to speaking like a Reform UK supporter

 Once you follow the utterances of Farage and his fellow Reform politicians, you realise two things. First, his political language and ideas are lifted directly from those of Donald Trump with hardly any adaptation for British circumstances. So Reform speak enthusiastically about abolishing what they call ‘DEI hires’, although DEI is a term used in the USA that has no meaning in UK law. They also propose to implement a ‘DOGE Team’ (named after the US department briefly headed by Elon Musk) to reduce expenditure in the local authorities they control, although almost all this is determined by statutory obligations. Farage’s most recent statements on ‘law and order’ go even further down this road, with pledges to send criminals to El Salvador (the destination chosen by Trump for deportees from the USA), and to loosen gun controls. 

The second striking feature of Reform politicians is that, like Trump, they have changed the meaning of words with the aim of making racism acceptable. So here is a guide to two revised definitions:
▸    Immigrant. This word traditionally means a person who comes to a country to become one of its residents. But the revised Trump/Reform meaning is ‘a dark-skinned person, irrespective of their place of birth’. A corollary of this definition is that white people are never defined as immigrants. This redefinition provides a means of bypassing legal prohibitions on racist language. So when Trump accuses ‘immigrants’ of being genetically violent, he does not include the white South Africans he welcomed to the USA, nor of course his own mother and grandfather. Instead, he means blacks, browns and even first nation Americans. He believes all should be deported whether or not they are US citizens because he believes the USA is a country for white people, to be run by white men. 

▸    Free speech. Legal restrictions on using racist language are keenly resented by Reform and the rest of the far right, who look back with nostalgia on the days when they were able to use derogatory racist epithets in everyday speech. They therefore demand ‘free speech’, which for them would restore the days when they could use the might of the media to smear and bully ethic minorities, women, gays, or whichever of ther many groups they feel contempt for. ‘Free speech’ in this sense does not apply to their opponents. In the USA, critics of Trump are threatened with costly legal action and an army of lawyers. Farage expresses outrage that by opposing legislation to protect children using on online media places him on the side of sexual abusers like Jimmy Savile.

This way of speaking, for all its absurdities, convinces a great many people. It taps the basic tribal fear of the other, of people unlike ourselves, who the fearful believe threaten our lives, our children and our identity. By stoking this fear, unscrupulous politicians are able to rob and cheat the public, and be free to carry out the many crimes of which they accuse the immigrants.

Trump and the tariffs

International news is dominated by the continuing slaughter in Gaza, distracted by almost daily announcements by Trump of changes to US tariffs on imports from foreign countries. His almost indiscriminate application of tariffs and their frequent changes is bizarre and unique in history. In the past, tariff policy was a means by which countries could protect their goods or protect industries from foreign competition as well as raise revenue. Countries recognised that tariffs increased domestic prices, and imposed them as a considered and long-term economic policy. Trump is not a successful businessman and has no long-term plan for the US economy. Instead, his tariff policy meets three emotional needs: his desire for attention, his need to bully others; and his fear of foreigners and especially non-white people. 

Traditional tariff policies involve setting selective tariffs, usually for several years. This results in minimal publicity. By contrast, endlessly imposing them, withdrawing them and modifying them means daily opportunities to star on the media and receive the attention Trump has always craved. Tariffs are also be an opportunity to bully people who have offended him. Targets can vary from day to day. At the time of writing, he has threatened the BRICS nations and specifically Brazil, both of which he will have heard about on Fox News. Finally, tariffs are an opportunity to strike back at all foreigners, even though it is Americans who meet the cost and American industries that will be forced to pay more for goods that have to be imported because there is no local alternative. Trump persistently campaigns against ‘immigrants’, even though his mother and grandfather both fell into this category. But of course he uses the word ‘immigrant’ as a code word to designate non-white people, who he believes are genetically disposed to rape and theft (crimes for which he himself has been found guilty). 

Trump’s emotional needs correspond to those of many of his supporters, who will doubtless continue to worship their leader however much harm he inflicts upon them.  

The politics of nostalgia

 Our politics are now dominated by the prejudices and fears of the elderly. When I was a young man in the 1960s, half the population were young adults under 40 years of age. There was a spirit of youthful idealism and optimism, as these young people looked forward to a better future. There was a ferment of ideas, usually on the left, as the new generation saw themselves as challenging those who came before. Now these same people have become old, and many of them regard the present with fear and dislike. Their response is a powerful yearning for the past - the time when they were confident and energetic and the world was comprehensible. At its most extreme, they reject any ideas which arose in the last fifty years, as if their capacity to absorb new information ceased when they were 25. These new and rejected ideas include global warming, racial and sexual equality, the rights of gay people, the globalisation of the world economy, the metric system and international mobility. New ideas often emerge from universities and from abroad, and so there is a preference for ‘common sense’ over scientific knowledge, and for isolation over international organisations. The generation which grew up after 1945 was the first to become largely immune to the common infectious diseases of childhood, largely because their parents had eagerly accepted advances in medical science. This meant that some members of the new immune generation had no experience of epidemics and therefore reacted with suspicion to immunisation against COVID. This too was, for them, a new idea to be rejected.

The population of the nostalgic has been successfully mobilised in many countries by political movements which promise a return to an imagined golden age. The chronological location of this golden age is never made specific, but it defines a policy agenda of systematically dismantling all the hated changes that have occurred in the last 50 years. The most extreme example of this is of course in the USA. Green energy policies have been repudiated in favour of oil dependency, even though the former now is cheaper and employs many more people. There is a suspicion of medical science and people are advised to avoid life-saving vaccination. Funding for scientific research has been slashed and world-famous universities are under attack. Engagement in international co-operation and trade is replaced by bullying and threats, and foreign visitors are treated with increasing hostility. There is a bizarre hostility to people who have changed their gender identity, and a desire to confine women to child-bearing by banning abortion. Women and black people in senior positions are being systematically dismissed so that promotion will once again become easier for white men of limited abilities. These policies have rarely been debated or explained beyond a kind of sneering at hated catch phrases such as ‘net zero’ or ‘DEI’.

In the past, peoples who failed to adapt to new technology or to modernise their society fell behind their neighbours and were eventually conquered. The Ottoman sultans banned the printing press for 250 years - years in which Europe sped ahead in scientific knowledge and military technology. In 1717, the Chinese Emperor banned Western books as part of his campaign against Jesuit influence. In 1793, a later Emperor rebuffed a British trade mission, responding that China set “no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Forty-seven years later, the entire Chinese navy was sunk by two British warships, and the country forcibly opened up to British opium sales. Thus began more than a century of humiliation and civil war for the most populous and civilised country on earth. It is rarer for societies to actually go backwards, dismantle their achievements and repudiate their scientific knowledge, but it has happened. The great libraries of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed in the fourth century by Christian zealots, who murdered Hypatia, the greatest mathematician of her day.

Will the USA follow this path? The country will eventually recover from Trump, just as China after many decades recovered from civil war and the cruel insanity of Mao Tse-Tung. But people will fear that the political forces that created Trump could rise again, and investors and visitors to the USA will therefore regard it with suspicion for many years to come.

Tales from Long Ago No. 2

Sometime in the early 1970s, I decided to backpack in the Scottish Highlands. I took a train and then a bus to the pleasant market town of Callandar. I then trekked through a pass between the hills to Comrie. This was a splendid walk of 26km, and I felt young, energetic and fit. Comrie is one of the fine small market towns at which Scotland excels. I found a campsite, and the next day set off over the hills along Glen Lednock for Killin. I reached Loch Tay and then plodded along to the village. I arrived in early afternoon and my next destination was Bridge of Orchy. I should have stopped at Killin for the night and enjoyed staying in such a scenic location, but I had caught walker’s disease - the desire to keep moving at all costs - and decided to plod along Westwards. This turned out to be a foolish decision. Scotland dose not have the English system of rights of way. As a result, Ordnance Survey maps of Scotland show few tracks or paths. I followed instead a book on Scottish hillwalking, which showed a clear track across to Bridge of Orchy. This turned out to be narrow road which became an increasingly fictitious track along Glen Lochay, through a landscape ever less inhabited. It got dark and I needed to find somewhere to pitch a tent.

My tent was the one I had used in an earlier walk in the Dordogne. But what sufficed for late summer in South West France proved inadequate for a very stormy night in the Highlands. I was forced by condensation to abandon the tent, and instead found shelter on a concrete floor in a large open-sided Dutch barn which was used for sheep-shearing. The metal sides of the barn rattled and the sheep fleeces hanging from the rafters swayed in the wind. Miles away, across the Glen, I could see the lights of a house. In the morning, I rose, packed, and headed off for Bridge of Orchy.

I soon encountered a burn which proved difficult to cross without getting very wet feet. Eventually I reached a track which led me to my destination in mid-afternoon. I decided to abandon life in a tent (as, it turned out, forever), and stay in the hotel. I ran the bath in my room, jumped in, and found it icy cold. I went to the reception desk and was told “We don’t run the heating until the evening”. This example of Scottish hospitality was all I remember of the hotel. I am sure it is much more welcoming nowadays, but even in the time of my walk its great saving grace was proximity to a railway station. I decided to end my walk and catch a train to Glasgow.

A few years later, the West Highland Way opened. I completed this in splendid weather one summer. I stayed in small hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. The Way passes through Bridge of Orchy, but I avoided the hotel and continued on the Way up a hill to see one of the greatest sights in Scotland. In front of me was the great expanse of Rannoch Moor, encircled by mountains. Below, was Inveroran Hotel surrounded by a copse, next to a lovely burn. Some tents were pitched nearby. I was greeted by a  hospitable landlady (with a very posh voice) and placed in a comfy room. The dining room was crowded and friendly, and the food was excellent. The next day, I strode along the old military road across Rannoch Moor to Kinlochleven, and the next day on the Fort William.

The new diplomatic revolution

 The ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of 1756 was a major change in the alliances between European powers. Britain allied with its former enemy Prussia and went to war against its former ally Austria. Austria allied with its former enemy France. The Dutch Republic dropped its alliance with Britain and a few years later became its enemy. We are now facing a similar diplomatic revolution, with the USA moving away from its longstanding membership of NATO into a de facto alliance with Russia. The remaining NATO powers will probably respond by moving closer to China, initially in the form of an economic alliance.

These changes are happening because of an alignment in the moral values of the leadership in the USA and Russia, and, to a lesser degree, because both countries are experiencing similar problems. Trump and Putin are both crudely-spoken amoral gangsters, who portray themselves as upholders of ‘masculine values’, and depend on the support of a coterie of favoured and very wealthy oligarchs. ‘Masculine values’ for them involves despising women in any but a supporting or procreative role, glorifying the bullying and humiliation of the weak, and preferring religion or ‘common sense’ to scientific knowledge. Both leaders have undermined democratic institutions, and their regimes depend for legitimacy on the actual or threatened use of military force. The USA has of course a far stronger culture of legality and democracy than Russia, and these traditions may well survive Trump’s attempts to undermine them. But the USA and Russia have encountered similar problems that make authoritarian rule attractive to many of their people. Both countries are vast land empires that have expanded through conquest and the extermination of indigenous populations. Both have disproportionately large military forces which are regularly used to display the might of the country by invading foreign states. Both have seen a radical decline in industrial employment and the concentration of the wealth of the country into the hands of a few. This has created an understandable resentment and a longing for an imagined golden age, which authoritarian leadership has directed against foreigners, immigrants and the educated ‘elite’.

The other great territorial empire, China, has chosen a different route. Instead of the erratic economic policies favoured by Trump, China has successfully built its industrial base, becoming the world’s largest economy in all but name. It is challenging the technological lead of the USA, which is being undermined by Trump’s cuts to research funding. Again in contrast to the USA and Russia, it has expanded it influence through trade and the development of infrastructure in many parts of the world. This is usually funded by loans, making China the world’s greatest creditor nation. It even holds $769 billion of the US national debt, the USA now being the world’s largest debtor. China’s increasing domination of world industrial production makes it committed to stable and tariff-free trade. In this respect, its interests coincide with those of the European powers rather than the USA, where Trump is imposing an unpredictable range of tariff restrictions on trade.

We can therefore expect China and Europe to become ever-closer trading partners, but itt is not yet clear whether this will develop into a more formal defensive alliance. But Europe and China have few reasons for conflict. They do not have common borders or any territorial disputes, or any other conventional reason for conflict. By contrast, Russia has vast empty lands bordering China, while the USA regards the Pacific Ocean, right up to the Chinese seaboard, as within its own sphere of influence. A new Russian-USA alliance would therefore be united in regarding China as both an immediate and a long-term threat.

There is of course already a cold war between Russia and the rest of Europe, with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, its occupation of parts of Moldova and Georgia, and its attacks on European maritime and electronic infrastructure. The new cold war is driven by the Russian leadership, which regards Europe as an existential threat because it demonstrates a more successful and appealing alternative model of government to its citizens.

We may therefore see a new diplomatic revolution in the next few months, although predictions of this kind can rapidly fall apart with unexpected changes of leadership.

Profiting from disaster

 The most successful growth industry in the UK is the public enquiry, and there are no less than 17 of these in operation during 2024. These typically arise in response to media exposures of the various blunders, malfeasance and cruelty by public bodies. After a period of resistance, governments agree the need for a ‘full public enquiry’, which usually begin their work several years after the events they aim to investigate.

Public enquiries are usually headed by a senior judge and are staffed by a large squad of lawyers. These can take immense care and effort to establish the facts of what are often complex and ill-recorded organisational decisions. But that care takes time, and reports always emerge many years after the original malfeasance. In their day-to-day work, public enquiries resemble courts of law, but no-one is found guilty and no-one is punished. The public may be gratified by scenes of senior figures being humiliated and occasionally in tears, but these senior figures are rarely prosecuted, never go to prison nor even lose their generous pensions. None suffer as much as the victims of their misdeeds.

Either concurrently or after the conclusion of the ‘full public enquiry’, a system of compensation for victims is devised. This will often prove niggardly and slow-moving, such that many of those eligible for payments die before they receive any cash. This is not the result of ‘bureaucracy’, but is a deliberate act of Government policy. Some evidence emerges from the Post Office Enquiry, which heard evidence from Kemi Badenoch (the responsible minister for a time in 2023). She had recommended that each claimant receive an interim payment of £100,000 but found this blocked by the Treasury which told her that this would not be ‘value for money’. There was in fact no Treasury budget for compensation to the victims of the Post Office nor for the victims of nuclear tests, nor for the victims of tainted blood, nor for any other people with similar claims against the state.

By contrast, the public enquiries are generously funded, and their lawyers are well-remunerated and paid on time. An example is the COVID Enquiry, which began in Spring 2022, two years after the outbreak of the disease, and is expected to conclude its public hearings in 2026. It employs 250 staff and will probably cost more than £200 million. This is money that would have made a significant difference to those suffering from the disease. ONS data shows that 1.5 million people have long COVID, of whom 380,000 experienced substantial limitations. This large and sudden increase in the disabled population has placed immense strain on the NHS. The Post Office Enquiry began in 2021, over twenty years after the first of 900 sub-postmasters was prosecuted for fraud. This has so far cost over £50 million (plus the cost of legal representation for the Post Office) and will publish its final report sometime in 2026. The Grenfell Tower enquiry reported seven years after the devastating fire, cost £170 million, and delayed any legal action against those at fault. It also delayed action to remove dangerous cladding, although this did of course save the Treasury many millions of pounds.

Enquiries have therefore become treacle-pots for the legal profession, strung out for years and, in some cases, showing no sign of ever ending, let alone producing any change in official policy. The Scottish Child Abuse Enquiry began at the end of 2014, and has been riven by conflict because of interference by the Scottish Government and a refusal by the enquiry chair to investigate allegations against senior Scottish lawyers. Two other enquiries are at least five years old.

There is clearly a need for a better, more expeditious and hopefully cheaper way of investigating government malfeasance. A model for how to do this comes from investigations into aircraft accidents. A team of expert meets to assemble the evidence. Their report aims to describe how the accident occurred, to identify the failures in human and/or mechanical systems that caused it, and to recommend changes in procedures to avoid its re-occurrence. This work must be competed expeditiously to minimise risk for others travelling by air. The Swedish Government adopted this approach for its COVID enquiry. A team of eight experts published their first report in 2020 - the year the virus took hold. Their final report appeared in February 2022 - one month before the UK COVID enquiry even began its work. The Swedes clearly believe the work of governments is to efficiently protect the public and not to fund those who profit from disaster.

Tales from Long Ago No. 1

I have had a career in the sense of careering from one type of work to another. In the late 1980s, I careered into working as a planner in a mental health service in Birmingham. This involved working with psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses to set up a range of innovative services. These included setting up supported housing for people with long-term disorders discharged from inpatient care, a task which required co-operation from local housing associations.

So one day, I went with a consultant psychiatrist to meet the manager of a local housing association in his office in a street of terraced housing. We waited in his office for him to arrive, while the consultant looked wistfully across the street. “I lost my virginity in that house”, he said. The manager arrived and asked his rather glamorous personal assistant to arrange coffee. This she did, using an ornate cafetiere and pouring our cups.

A few months later, I visited an area manager in the Social Services Department. By way of small talk, I commented on her unusual surname and asked if she was related to the manager of the housing association I had met. She went red with rage: “That bastard”, she said, “He dumped me for that bloody personal assistant”.

After that, I have always avoided asking if people are related, however unusual their surname.