Amid the wreckage of Britain’s political centre, few figures have been treated with more indulgence by the liberal press than Nigel Farage. A recent Guardian profile of the “silent Reform voter” in Kent offers a personable, even affectionate portrait of Farage on the campaign trail. But asks almost nothing of him. As Reform UK inches closer to breaking the parliamentary duopoly, the real question is not why Farage rises, but why he is met with such little resistance.
The narrative frame is revealing. Farage is presented as a figure of charm and authenticity, glad-handing pensioners in seaside cafés, basking in warm nods from market stallholders. Immigration, net zero, crime. His platforms are sketched only in the vaguest outlines, filtered through voter dissatisfaction. There is no interrogation of Reform UK’s policies, no exposure of contradictions, no reckoning with Farage’s long career of inflammatory statements, reactionary alliances, and tactical retreats.
This absence is not accidental. It reflects a deeper anxiety at the heart of the liberal centre: that to confront Farage honestly would be to confront its own complicity.
Better, they think, to narrate his ascent as a “protest” against remote elites than to face the fact that Farage actively constructs and mobilises the very forces of resentment, exclusion, and reaction that have hollowed out British civic life.
The indulgence extends to Reform UK as a whole. Labour is subjected to constant interrogation over internal feuds and perceived policy betrayals; the Greens are sidelined as a marginal curiosity. Reform, by contrast, is permitted to drape itself in the mantle of “ordinary” Britons, unchallenged.
The Guardian notes, without comment, that many Reform voters are reluctant to admit their support for fear of being branded racist. Yet it does not ask whether that fear is grounded in anything real: Reform’s own rhetoric, its own alliances. The article leaves unexamined the carefully cultivated pipeline of racial resentment, economic precarity, and manufactured grievance that sustains Farage’s project.
Nor does it question the gendered foundations of his appeal. Farage’s entourage is “mostly male,” we are told, but nothing more is said. Why does Reform UK, like so much of the reactionary right, draw strength from male grievance, pub camaraderie, a performance of embattled masculinity?
Because it offers a fantasy of restored status to men hollowed out by decades of neoliberal assault. A grim compensation for the loss of secure work, of community, of purpose. Offered not through solidarity, but through scapegoating and division.
This refusal to interrogate reaches the point of absurdity. A 57-year-old man complains to Farage that he feels “discriminated against” after returning from Spain. Yet the article asks nothing.
Is it economic insecurity, intensified by the very policies Farage promotes?
Or is it something darker?
A projection of grievance cultivated and weaponised by the reactionary right? No time is made to find out.
Later, at the New Belgium Bar, a group of young men cheer and demand selfies. “He’s a man of the people,” one says. “He’s more like a commoner like us.”
Farage: Dulwich College alumnus. Former commodities trader. Millionaire. Yet somehow a “commoner.”
Why? Because he holds a pint? Because he stages pub-table performances of camaraderie for the cameras?
Why is this pantomime swallowed, even by journalists who surely know better?
Farage’s manufactured image as an everyman conceals his reality as a servant of capital and reaction. His long record. Not just of personal prejudice, but of political intent to harden borders, accelerate climate collapse, dismantle social protections—is barely touched.
Reform UK proposes policies that would rip up Britain’s net-zero commitments, accelerate oil and gas extraction, and erect new walls against migration. Policies that would deepen environmental destruction and economic stagnation alike.
Yet these catastrophes are rarely named for what they are. They are treated as “debates” rather than existential threats.
There is a grim irony here. The liberal media decries the “populist surge” even as it prepares the ground for it.
Having cheered on decades of market liberalisation, privatisation, and the atomisation of social life, it finds itself politically bankrupt.
Unable to offer an alternative, it contents itself with hand-wringing while reaction marches forward.
There is another reason for the indulgence: fear. Like their American counterparts before Trump, British journalists are cowed by Farage’s relentless posture as the aggrieved outsider, the eternal victim. To confront him risks a backlash, harassment, litigation. The construction of a ready-made martyrdom narrative.
Farage knows this. He exploits it ruthlessly, weaponising grievance not only against migrants, workers, and the left, but against scrutiny itself.
And so Farage is transformed into a soap opera character rather than recognised for what he is: a political agent whose success threatens to drag Britain into deeper authoritarianism.
The cumulative effect is to normalise Reform’s presence, to integrate reactionary politics into the domain of the “acceptable.”
When Farage is questioned, it is almost always about “strategy” or “electability,” never about the deeper rot at the heart of his politics.
Contrast this with the treatment of any figure to his left: depicted as naïve dreamers at best, dangerous radicals at worst.
The media’s kid-gloves treatment of Farage is not simply a dereliction of journalistic duty. It is a political act.
By shielding Farage from serious challenge, they shift the centre of political gravity ever further to the right, recasting reaction as a legitimate. Even inevitable, response to popular despair.
Farage understands this perfectly. He plays the besieged outsider even as he receives the unspoken blessing of a media ecosystem too compromised, too fearful, too invested in the rotting establishment to challenge him.
As local elections approach, the stakes are clear. Whether Reform seizes hundreds of seats, or whether disillusioned voters drift elsewhere, the damage is already done: the politics of resentment have been legitimised, normalised, integrated into the bloodstream of British political life.
The crisis is not merely that Farage continues to rise and shows no sign of boredom.
It is that so few are willing to name the cost, and worse, that so many have already decided the price is worth paying.
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