Farage is a crook and his party is overwhelmed by scandal

Martin Shipton

As I write this, I am sitting in the tranquil and shaded garden of a caravanserai in the beautiful old town of Sheki in northern Azerbaijan. The muezzin is chanting his call to Friday prayers, as someone I cannot see plays a flute.

A caravanserai is a place where merchants and their camels lodged overnight as they travelled along the medieval (in our terms) trading route known as the Silk Road.

Almost all of the merchants were Muslims, as is 95% of Azerbaijan’s population today. Yet Azerbaijan is a secular country where political Islam doesn’t get a look in – a situation that the country’s people are intensely comfortable with.

In Britain, including Wales, there has been a pernicious campaign perpetrated by the far right to demonise all Muslims as “Islamists”, a word that has become interchangeable with “terrorists”.

The serial criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, is one of the leading exponents of this fiction, which has also, shamefully, been given traction by mainstream opportunistic politicians who should know better.

Last week I received a few abusive messages online when I supported a call for some skilled people from Gaza to be included on a scheme that would enable refugees to be resettled in Wales.

The ignorance of the abusers was depressingly familiar: vitriolic and irrational hatred of all Muslims, coupled with poor literacy skills. Such people have been easy meat for Nigel Farage, who has made a political career out of stirring up xenophobia.

There is considerable irony in the latest financial scandal to hit Farage. While proclaiming the centrality of his commitment to Britain, he has been caught condoning clandestine and illegal donations from overseas business interests.

The new revelations are significant and take our understanding of Farage a stage further. In my view, it is now legally safe to call out Farage for the crook he is.

He knows perfectly well the law defining which donations are legal and which are not. Christopher Harborne, the Thai-based crypto billionaire, is, it has been contended, eligible as a donor because of his continuing British links.

It seems there is something murky about donations to Reform emanating from the mother of Farage’s long-time aide George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster known affectionately and otherwise as “Posh George”, but the details remain under investigation.

Going further back, there are still gaps in the publicly available information relating to Russian influence over the 2016 Brexit referendum, when victory for the Leave campaign provided a major boost to Farage’s credibility. But again, no definitive smoking gun has emerged..

Now, however, Farage’s intention to break the law seems incontrovertible. Secretly filmed footage provided to Channel 4 shows senior aides to Farage discussing with an undercover reporter how to facilitate illegal donations from an American businessman played by an actor. In the culminating scene, Farage himself approves the deal.

Since the story broke on Thursday, the two senior aides to Farage who appear in the footage have been suspended from their roles. Predictably, Farage is seeking to dismiss the exposé as a left-wing plot, but his position is undermined by the authenticity of the footage. Let’s hope that his nefarious financial dealings lead to his undoing.

Things are not going well for Farage and Reform UK, and it is difficult to see how either he or the party can recover from what has become a downward trajectory in terms of public support. The mass of people will not support a party overwhelmed by scandal.

£5m ‘gift’

Farage believed that precipitating and winning a by-election in his Clacton constituency would kill the investigation into his acceptance of an undeclared £5m “gift” from Harborne.

It hasn’t done that, and there is polling evidence to show that the financial scandals Farage is embroiled in are cutting through to the public. Not only has Reform lost its Britain-wide lead, but some polls are now showing the party in third place behind Labour and the Conservatives. Local government by-election results have confirmed this downward trend.

Hard-core supporters of Farage will support him to the end, either refusing to believe he has done anything wrong or prepared to forgive him all sins. In the United States, Donald Trump secured a second term as president by appealing to the high proportion of voters who fall into one or other of these categories.

But Reform’s core base is significantly lower in Britain than Trump’s has been in the US. The party’s hope of winning a general election was always based on profiting disproportionately from the first past the post electoral system – as Labour did in 2024.

In terms of the way forward for British politics, it would be great if the other mainstream unionist parties stopped being frightened of Reform and accepted they are a declining force.

Both the Tories and Labour have sought to copy elements of Reform’s policy agenda, especially in demonising migrants, with a view to winning back voters who had previously defected to Reform. Such posturing simply strengthened the hand of Reform in dictating the narrative.

The consequence has been that, as reported in a recent poll, immigration is seen as the most important issue facing the UK by more voters than any other, with the economy a few points behind in second place.

Sanity

Hopefully Farage’s increasing loss of credibility will see a return to sanity, with the need to improve the economy resuming its position at the top of the agenda.

At that point, moves to re-establish closer ties with the EU should become all the more pressing. Brexit has been a disaster for the UK and it’s gratifying that Andy Burnham has acknowledged that to be the case.

Polling shows that an increasing proportion of voters understand how damaging Brexit has been. The numbers taking the opposite view are very much less. In advance of the next general election, Burnham would do well to promise a referendum on rejoining the EU.

The current situation, where Britain’s economy is taking an ongoing hit for being outside the bloc, is unsustainable and will continue to cause damage to our living standards for as long as we stay on the outside.

And with Reform on the wane, we need to redouble efforts to wean those conditioned to adopt racist attitudes off the toxic bandwagon set rolling so cynically by its leader.

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