A Chink of Light

Ben Wildsmith 

What’s ‘freezing rain’ when it’s at home then? This weekend’s weather has been a snowstorm if you ordered it from Temu: a paltry dusting of the good stuff followed by yet more rain pouring through the gloom and washing away our Christmas cheer.

January is an assault on the human spirit, isn’t it? The existence of Christmas/Yuletide is an admission that winter in the northern hemisphere is psychologically unbearable.

It glimmers in the distance as November begins to turn the screw and even those who dislike it can whinge about something different for a change as daytime becomes the blink of an eye and endless night consumes us.

This week, having drained the last of the Baileys and polished off the least enticing selection box items, reality comes barging back into our lives with the crude boisterousness of a released convict.

Creditors

Your boss, who has endured over a week without exerting ill-natured control over anyone, is bursting with ideas for the year ahead. Your creditors are stuffing demands into envelopes with renewed zeal, and politicians come slithering back into public, ready to unveil a fresh line in empty promises for 2025.

The dank, sleety grind of the new year is a trial at the best of times, but these are most assuredly not them.

We seem to have arrived at a place in the UK where failure and dysfunction is so glaring as to have become a global curiosity.

Internationally, the country is treated like the ‘after’ photo of a meth addict whose glowing smile and future prospects have given way to horrific, irretrievable ruin.

‘Don’t let this happen to you’ is the implication whenever foreign politicians reference the UK. It is a byword for societal collapse, particularly amongst the new breed of right-wing populists who can see that the death of the Tory party provides political space for the establishment of something different and reckless.

So, the lurid details of the UK’s darkest, most heartbreaking failures have become political footballs in a transnational game of influence.

Manipulative sham

Elon Musk’s intervention in the ‘grooming gangs’ issue this week reveals his faux concern as the sneering, manipulative sham of someone whose empathy is a tradable commodity.

He is, it seems, incapable of producing a tone that resonates more fully than the brittle mockery of trolling. In exploiting the tragedy of ruined childhoods and blighted lives for cheap point scoring, he betrays a personal emptiness that even now, in the poverty of our digital enslavement, does not ring with the humanity of real people.

Musk’s crass interventions this week suggest a hubristic delusion as to his actual influence. A structural feature of right-wing nationalism is that it must be local in its focus.

Whilst Communism sort to erase national boundaries in pursuit of class consciousness, the wellspring of right-wing populism is national identity.

With this in mind, I encourage everyone to allow themselves a hearty laugh at Musk’s rejection, this afternoon, of Nigel Farage.

The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2025

Waving around a $100 million cheque, Musk seeks to control the direction of the popular right in the UK, presumably as a dry run for similar enterprises around the world.

With all the slapdash presumption of wealth, Musk sees Farage’s refusal to back his calls for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s release from prison as evidence of ideological weakness.

He could not be more wrong. Farage, by far the most instinctive politician of our time, understands the nuances of British notions around respectability. He has, over decades, edged nationalist politics into mainstream discussion in the UK; into places where the BNP could never tread.

Taboo

It has been a masterclass in legitimising the taboo.

So, here is the prospect of spring in our wintery despond. Elon Musk’s money will be wasted in British politics because he understands nothing at all about how the UK works.

If the rest of Reform UK throw Farage under the bus in their haste to pocket Muscovite millions, the advances the party has made will recede at pace.

You can win elections in the UK by motivating enough ill-tempered pensioners to the polls, but you won’t do that by allying yourself with jailbird football hooligans.

A chink of light has emerged.