Owen jones nigel farage biography

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’.

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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

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

A lot of politics these days is talked about in terms of whether a particular policy, candidate or party is “Establishment” or not. In a sense, it has always been this way—it’s why British party leaders on the election trail invariably try to prove that they aren’t Establishment by making visits to building sites, pubs, and cancer wards. But with the gap between the Haves and Have Nots feeling wider than it has since the 80s, the concept of non-Establishment politics has assumed renewed appeal. Many of this year’s voters may well choose to back whichever candidate looks the least likely to whisper “let’s smash the bloody proles” over a late-night single malt in the darkest corner of some Whitehall drinking den.

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Nevertheless, the concept of the Establishment remains a slightly nebulous one. Even Nick Clegg occasionally gets talked of as “non-Establishment” by Westminster journalists, but to a lot of people he’s the personification of an Establishment shill—what with all the breaking his election promises for a sniff of Deputy Prime Ministerial power and all.

Fortunately, a book written by Owen Jones, published last year, can help you work out who’s really non-Establishment and who’s just a poseur in a slave-made Che Guevara T-shirt. It’s called The Establishment and How They Get Away with It .

When I met Jones recently, every so often he had to interrupt our conversation in order to text someone from BBC Newsnight to tell them that, yes, he did want to appear but, no, he would not go live with Kelvin MacKenzie. The former editor of the Sun is persona non grata among the left, as well as most with a conscience, thanks to his infamous front page blaming the 1989 Hillsborough disaster on the victims. “THE TRUTH” was a headline based on lies f

Right-wing political party in the United Kingdom

Not to be confused with Reform (think tank).

Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) is a right-wing populist political party and limited company in the United Kingdom.Nigel Farage has served as the party's leader since June 2024 and Richard Tice has served as the party's deputy leader since July 2024. The party currently has five members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons and one member of the London Assembly. The party also holds representation at the local government level, with most of its local councillors having defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK. Following Farage's resumption of the leadership during the 2024 general election, there was a sharp increase in support for the party. Following the election, it was the third largest party by popular vote, with 4,117,610 votes achieving 14.3 per cent of the vote in total.

Founded in November 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating a no-deal Brexit, it won the most seats at the 2019 European Parliament election in the UK, but did not win any seats at the 2019 general election. The UK withdrew from the European Union (EU) in January 2020. A year later, in January 2021, the party was renamed Reform UK. During the COVID-19 pandemic the party advocated against further lockdowns. Since 2022, it has campaigned on a broader platform, in particular pledging to reduce immigration to the UK, supporting low taxation, and opposing net zero emissions.

Farage, who previously owned 60% of Reform UK Party Ltd, had been the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing populist and Eurosceptic party, in the first half of the 2010s, and returned to frontline politics as leader of the Brexit Party during the Brexit process after the 2016 EU membership referendum, which had been called partly in response to UKIP's influence.

Nigel Farage should not be allowed to hijack the widespread disaffection with the Westminster elite argues John Westmorland

In March this year Channel 4 produced a programme entitled ‘Nigel Farage Who Are You?’ The programme intended to find about the “political whirlwind” that is “turning British politics upside down”. Actually the programme failed to deliver. It allowed Farage to be the laddish bon viveur his self-publicity is based on – visiting his “favourite watering holes” and mischievously trying to sneak the camera crew into the European parliament.

The truth about the success of Farage is far simpler than the media like to suggest. Farage is, like many other of the New Right leaders across Europe, such as Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party and Marine Le Pen of the French National Front, a child of the decay of Europe’s social democratic parties.

When Labour fully embraced neoliberalism under Blair the divisions between Labour’s natural voter base and its parliamentary representatives grew. Tony Blair was the political son of Margaret Thatcher. He tried to popularise neoliberalism with a mixture of authoritarian lectures to trade union leaders about the need for ‘reform’ in concert with holding tight to the Tories anti-union laws.

New Labour went, as Gordon Brown boasted, further than the Tories in the financial deregulation of the city. And finally they took Britain into a succession of wars that gave rise to the biggest anti-war protests the world has witnessed.

This is the story that accounts for the current political realignment that we see across Europe. The working class and many of the normally quiescent middle class too, have been hit hard by Neoliberal policies that have hugely discredited the mainstream parties. However, this is the story that the mainstream media will not tell, and indeed studiously avoids.