Review: Michael Crick’s ‘One Party After Another’, a biography of Nigel Farage

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‘One Party After Another’ should, of course, be the title of a book about Boris Johnson’s current crisis.

Instead, this is Michael Crick’s study of Nigel Farage, and the parties in question are political organizations rather than ‘work events’, although the former UKIP leader will appreciate the irony – as he ought, really, most of Johnson’s political output, since it is designed for his electorate.

I read Crick’s lengthy biography, worrying that it might contain some killer information that I had missed, just after returning the proofs of my book on ‘Political Racism: Brexit and Its Aftermath’. Yet although Crick impressively brings together more information about Farage than anyone else, he basically confirms the emerging consensus: Farage was necessary for Brexit and the hard-Right Tory government to happen, but was not a sufficient cause.

Standing back from Crick’s picture of Farage’s life – often as disruptive for the man himself as for our political system – one sees the continuities from the schoolboy who, Crick tells us, doodled ‘National Front – NF – Nigel Farage’ to the shrewd political entrepreneur who scooped up the votes of Conservative voters, members, councilors and even MPs in European elections, reducing the Tories’ vote share to less than 9% in 2019.

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Farage once claimed to have ‘created’ Johnson and he has certainly been a key conduit for the mainstreaming of the far Right that we now see in the nationalist Tory regime. Driven by hostility to the EU, Farage’s key insight was that the way to make UK withdrawal popular was to hitch it to the Powellite hostility to immigration, which, after the marginalization of Enoch Powell himself (Farage’s hero), had increasingly become the preserve of extreme-Right groups.

So Farage tried to make Powellism respectable, even claiming with typical faux-innocence (in a quote that Crick doesn’t seem to have picked up): “I knew that touching the immigration issue was going to be very difficult. … [T]he only thing that upsets me about it is that, had it been willfully and overtly a racist message, I might have deserved some of [the criticism]. But it wasn’t. It never was. It never, ever was. It was a logical argument about numbers, society…”

This ‘numerical racism’, as I label it, depended on racializing the very idea of ​​’immigrant’, and is the common currency of the Tory Right and campaigns such as Migration Watch, which pretend that they are bothered only about the numbers of people entering the UK, not their ethnicity. It’s a type of ‘inferential’ racism, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall said, which can be traced back to before Farage was born, but he used it in 2006-16 to build a pro-Brexit coalition of all those who would say, ‘ I’m not racist but…’.

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