The return of the Farage ratchet

IT is a seaside tradition that is becoming as familiar as the Punch and Judy show. Nigel Farage goes to Clacton, a windy town on England’s east coast. The Tories panic. The policy consensus is nudged to the right. Call it the Farage ratchet.

Mr Farage came here in 2014 to parade with Douglas Carswell, a local Tory MP who had defected to his UK Independence Party. They posed for photos at the top end of the pier by the Moon & Starfish pub; Mr Carswell would win the by-election that followed. The result: David Cameron solidified his plan for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

Mr Farage was in the same spot again in 2019, as leader of the Brexit Party. He turned European parliamentary elections that year into a verdict on Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Soon she, and it, were gone. And on June 4th he was there again. The day before Mr Farage had announced that he would take over the leadership of Reform UK, an upstart party which he controls, and stand for Parliament in Clacton.

The crowd was far bigger this year; the speakers struggled to carry his speech over their heads. He flattered them: Brexit would not have happened without Clacton. “Is this not the most patriotic town in the whole of our country?” he asked. Alas, they had been betrayed by their leaders. “They don’t believe in Britain and the British people the way you do.”

Mr Farage’s goal is even bigger this time: to remake the British right. Reform UK’s support is drawn overwhelmingly from former Tory voters. It stood at 11% in the polls before Mr Farage’s announcement; if that figure were to rise by three percentage points exclusively at the Tories’ expense, they would lose another 40 seats, according to our prediction model.

Having contributed to its defeat, Mr Farage then hopes to cannibalise the survivors. “My aim is for the centre-right of British politics to realign, and it can’t do that under the current Conservative Party,” Mr Farage said later in the Moon & Starfish. Tory MPs would be encouraged to defect to him under a “reverse takeover” of the Tories. He cites as his model the Reform Party of Canada, which hastened the demise of the Progressive Conservative Party in the 1990s and then merged with it.

This new movement would speak “for the little guy”, he says. He proposes a net-zero migration regime, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the automatic deportation of irregular migrants (“If you’re from Syria, you go back to Syria, end of”). He claims it would speak for small businesses.

This is not an implausible scenario. Plenty of Conservative MPs, though by no means all, agree with every letter of that agenda, and long to unite right-wing voters under a single banner. The ratchet duly clicked. On June 4th Rishi Sunak said that, if the Conservatives were re-elected, Parliament would vote for an annual “cap” on immigration; he is also considering a more hawkish position on the ECHR.

Many in the crowd in Clacton conceded that leaving the European Union had been a disappointment, but they did not hold Mr Farage responsible. “It has been sabotaged from the inside,” said one attendee who was wearing a Donald Trump hat. Mr Sunak might have stood a chance if he’d only ordered the Royal Navy to tow migrant boats back to France or put some sharks in the channel, added a friend. Phil Suarez, a retired policeman, said that Brexit had made life more complicated for his wife’s floristry business and that, as an electric-car driver, he disagreed with Mr Farage’s hostility to climate-change schemes. But he was minded to vote for him regardless because of immigration.

TV crews hunting for stereotypes of Eurosceptic coastal England were not disappointed: there were mobility scooters, teenagers circling on bikes and veterans in berets. But in Clacton library a book group discussed an account of women’s education in Afghanistan; posters advertised a German-language group and called for volunteers to teach English to refugees. Mr Farage has a good shot at finally becoming an MP. But he is not a shoo-in. ■

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