Nigel Farage and Elon Musk plot to take over Britain

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Here’s a little question for you. Do you believe that we should have a genuine democracy, where free citizens have equal power, not least through our right to exercise our vote - or where our democracy becomes the plaything of wealthy billionaires?

That’s what we should all be mulling over as Reform Party leader Nigel Farage pals around with his new BBF Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on earth, with an estimated $350bn to his name.

Farage is clearly full of festive cheer as he lives it up at Mar-a-lago, the Florida resort which is the main residence of President-elect Donald Trump.

Accompanying him was Nick Candy, a British billionaire luxury property developer who is, just FYI, the husband of singer and actor Holly Valance, otherwise known as Flick from Neighbours, who has somewhat sullied my fond teenage memories by becoming a right-wing devotee of Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Nick Candy is a former Tory donor who notoriously made a cameo in Partygate, the scandal involving various Tory figures and No. 10 staff violating lockdown rules during the pandemic. You could see him looking very chirpy at the time as he raises a glass. Ordinary members of the public, including those who could not hold the hands of their dying relatives, were not quite so chirpy about this.

Candy has now become Reform treasurer, so presumably will play an ever more influential role in British politics.

But Farage has posted a picture of them both alongside Musk and a very weird painting of Donald Trump as a young man in a blazer, with the caption ‘Britain Needs Reform’.

So, what’s going on here? Musk is apparently toying with giving a vast sum of money to Farage’s Reform, with suggestions floating around of $100 million, or £78 million.

Whatever the sum of money, and that amount has been denied, Farage says that he’s in open negotiation with Musk, the plutocrat who has of course ruined Twitter, turned it into a cesspit of disinformation and misinformation, and who keeps using his position at the top of the platform to promote extremist nutcases, including flagrant neo-Nazis.

Now you might think - this is clearly absolutely deranged. How can it possibly be legal for a foreign tycoon to just start buying up British democratic real estate. Surely - surely! there’s rules against that?

Well, yes, you can’t just directly hand money as a foreign businessman to a British political party. But there’s an extremely easy loophole to exploit - he can just make such a donation through the British branch of Twitter (or ‘X’, whatever).

You see if you’re registered as a company in the UK, then you can just throw dosh at political parties willy-nilly, even if it’s just a ruse as a foreign businessman who has nothing to do with the UK at all to get around the rules in order to influence a democracy he doesn’t belong to.

Obviously that’s absurd, and obviously it should have been banned a long time ago. Labour is apparently considering doing something about it, but it’s rather late in the day.

Let’s just consider the breathtaking hypocrisy for a moment. Farage was of course the leader of the UK Independence Party, and Reform is just the artist formerly known as UKIP. UK independence, restoring Great British sovereignty, no longer having those pesky foreigners intervening in our affairs.

Oh, not singing those tunes anymore, are we, Mr Farage?

Let’s just cast our memories back to those heady Brexit days eight years ago. After the then-US president Barack Obama did just a speech backing Remain and that Britain would be back of the queue in any new trade deal with the US, Farage said he had behaved ‘disgracefully’.

Well I’d note we still don’t have that trade deal, but, in any case what he was objecting to was Obama intervening in British affairs.

This yet another case study in the fraudulent political project that is right-wing populism, posing as it does on the side of the little guy against the elites. Farage is himself a former trader in the City of London. One of Farage’s closest allies and benefactors to UKIP was Arron Banks, another rich mogul.

Trump right now is stuffing his supposed anti-establishment administration with billionaires and multimillionaires. It isn’t even a subtle plutocracy.

Here in Britain, the public are already understandably fed up with living in a country rigged in favour of wealthy elites.

A study in 2023 found that when asked who the most powerful group in society were, the top answer was ‘the very rich’, with 39% opting for this option. National governments only came second at 24%. If you then throw in ‘businesses’, the fourth choice at 10%, that means about half the population think the super rich and business are the most powerful in our society, with only a quarter opting for the people you actually elect to run things.

It gets even bleaker than that. A report this year found that three quarters of the British public now think the British government is rigged to serve the rich and influential, with just 26% saying it reflects the will of the British people.

Why are we resigned to this, as though it’s a fact of life? Why should those with vast fortunes call the shots? Do we think they’re driven by what’s best for the people at large, or what’s best for their bank accounts - indeed often their offshore bank accounts?

Look at the state of this country. Public services falling apart. The wages of workers squeezed for the longest period since the Battle of Waterloo. A housing crisis, huge numbers of kids growing up in hardship and squalor: yet the mega rich are booming: as one example, the the average FTSE 100 executive earns 120 times more than the average UK worker.

This is what happens when you have a society rigged in favour of the rich - millions of people struggle, while a tiny group absolutely rake it in at our expense.

These elites push the all too convenient idea that economic policies which make them unbelievably loaded are actually good for everybody else.

And they can do that because, well, newspapers are mostly run by very rich moguls. Think tanks pushing those poisonous ideas are bankrolled by rich individuals and businesses. And of course the mega rich donate to political parties - a very wise investment, on their own terms.

You then end up with some of those rich donors filling up House of Lords - no doubt because of their talent, of course.

(Shameless plug: I wrote about this in The Establishment And How They Get Away With It a decade ago).

Now Farage and co try and peddle the idea that the real problems in our society aren’t caused by their extremely rich mates and indeed society being rigged in favour of their extremely rich mates.

Instead, they claim, the real problems are caused by migrants. They then attract support from citizens who are struggling by pointing the finger at The Foreigner, while backing policies which will make their lives harder - but enrich the elites even further. Indeed, Farage backs tax cuts which would disproportionately favour the rich - and leave us with massive spending cuts which would hammer those who are struggling.

His big hero of course is Margaret Thatcher, and it’s her government which ensured we have this run down, divided, struggling country, and never got out of that mess.

There is nonetheless a growing chance that Farage will become prime minister.

The Starmer government is a burning skip of a mess. The polling shows he’s a more unpopular prime minister after 5 months than any other since the polling began in the 1970s.

He conned Labour members into making him leader by claiming he backed taxing the rich, public ownership, scrapping tuition fees, opposing unjust wars, and so on - and then abandoned that when he was in the top job.

Because in the election campaign Labour ruled out fair taxes they should be hiking - like income tax for the top 5%, or corporation tax, or indeed wealth taxes - they ended up backing themselves into a corner of hiking employers’ national insurance. In a meaningful sense violating their election pledges, because Starmer is addicted to violating his promises. And that’s the worst tax they could have hiked frankly, which will feed into lower wages and fewer jobs. Whoops!

Indeed, after already suffering such a protracted squeeze in living standards, real disposable incomes are set to fall under this government. This will fuel even greater political disenchantment.

After only winning 33.7% of the vote with the lowest turnout ever recorded, despite the election being handed to them on a plate by a Tory party which comprehensively self-immolated, Labour came to power with no vision for the country, and quickly became defined by attacking pensioners and taking freebies from rich people.

They lurch from crisis to crisis, and they are driving what was already profound and dangerous disillusionment with our democracy.

That’s a disaster these fake populists are set to profit from.

For those of us who want a different answer - who think the wealth created by working people should go to working people; that our services and utilities belong to the people, not profiteers; that we’ve got the resources and talent to solve our problems, like the housing crisis and hardship; that we can make the climate emergency an opportunity for jobs and living standards; that we shouldn’t arm genocides - well we need to get our act together. Millions of people agree with us. Their voices just aren’t being heard properly.

We need to desperately settle on a clear strategy because otherwise - I’m sorry to say - we’re heading for a very dark place.