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    Economic policy is one thing Nigel Farage can’t crib from the Donald Trump playbook | Rafael Behr

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    Nigel Farage loves a gamble. In his 2015 memoir, The Purple Revolution, a whole chapter is dedicated to the then Ukip leader’s appetite for risk, how he indulged it in the City and how that prepared him for a career in politics.He boasts of the time he “lost a seven-figure sum of money in the course of a morning on the zinc market” before breezing off to the pub. He waxes nostalgic about the halcyon days of freewheeling finance, before “ghastly regulators” spoiled the fun; when “terrible cock-ups” could be written off because “decimal points and all those zeros can be tricky after a three-hour lunch”.Farage the commodities trader was not a details guy. Farage the politician isn’t famously punctilious either, but the stakes are higher. He’s backing himself to be prime minister and it isn’t going to happen if voters see him as the kind of gambler who might blow the nation’s budget on a boozy bet.Dispelling that notion was the purpose of a speech by the Reform UK leader on Monday. Farage disposed of his party’s 2024 election manifesto and its promise of tax cuts worth £90bn because it was a tissue of fiscal fantasy. He didn’t put it quite like that. He observed that Britain’s sluggish growth and high debt demand sober management of public finances. He hinted that Treasury savings could one day be made by unpicking the sacred “triple lock” that guarantees perpetual real-terms rises in the state pension.Liz Truss was not named, but the new, parsimonious Farageonomics has been formulated to silence comparisons between Reform’s agenda and the budget misadventure of the Tory prime minister whose unfunded tax giveaway incinerated the nation’s financial credibility.By dabbling in macroeconomics, Farage also wants to show that he has range; that the policy repertoire extends beyond complaining about migrants. He can also complain about the Bank of England (too cautious over cryptocurrencies), the Financial Conduct Authority (captured by a “diversity agenda”), public sector pensions (“a massive liability”) and net zero (a burden on energy bills).Europe can’t be the scapegoat it once was, but the old moan can be retuned to a post-Brexit key: the opportunity of deregulation from Brussels red tape has been “squandered”. Killjoy regulators tame the animal spirits of the market. The bureaucratic state lavishes welfare on work-shy malingerers and banishes enterprising wealth-creators. The remedy is to slash disability benefits and use tax breaks to entice self-exiled non-doms back from Dubai. The fiscal details of how that might all add up – the decimal points and zeros – remain shrouded in post-prandial haze.View image in fullscreenThe trademark colour and name of Farage’s party has changed since The Purple Revolution, but the argument hasn’t evolved. The biggest difference is in his delivery, which has become less hectoring, more weary. Maybe Farage was deliberately sounding leaden to emphasise his commitment to fiscal responsibility, but he came across as a man who is boring even himself with the usual shtick.This may be why he regularly asserts that the next general election will come in 2027. There is no reason why Keir Starmer would choose to go to the country two years before the constitutional deadline, but Farage needs the vote to come as soon as possible. To complete the transition from protest vehicle to plausible prime minister, the Reform leader needs to woo uncertain voters who think he could be dangerous. That reassurance has a cost in radicalism.Momentum depends on the keenest supporters staying whipped up in a state of visceral outrage, while respectability means keeping a lid on Reform MPs’ and councillors’ most luridly racist, outlandish and violent opinions. Affecting mainstream seriousness and cultivating insurrection at the same time is a chore. The strain is showing.Economic policy poses a particular challenge because the US rightwing populist model, Farage’s inspiration in most areas, resists adaptation to British financial circumstances. Not that it hasn’t been tried. Kent county council, Reform UK’s flagship local authority, promised to implement Doge-style cuts to administrative waste, inspired by Elon Musk’s maverick assault on the US federal budgets. The result was a chaotic display of unprofessional political dysfunction.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDoge was no triumph in Washington either, but the US context is very different. Normal rules of fiscal rectitude don’t apply – at least, not yet – to the country that issues the planet’s reserve currency and can always find buyers for its debt.This “exorbitant privilege” extended to the world’s richest and most powerful state is what allowed Donald Trump earlier this year to implement tax cuts that will drive the US deficit up into the region of $3tn-$4tn by the end of the decade. The White House claims the budget will be self-repairing with money generated by newly stimulated growth. That’s also what Truss said. The bond market was not convinced.Trump also thinks tariffs imposed on other countries will be a substitute for domestic tax revenue. He’s wrong both conceptually and arithmetically. Tariffs are an import tax paid ultimately by US consumers, not foreigners, and the Treasury income hardly dents the deficit. But for now the absurdity of it just hangs in the air, defying economic gravity.That trick is not available to a UK prime minister. Nor is Trump’s habit of shaking down US corporate giants for equity and cash. If Reform so much as flirted with Trumponomics in an election manifesto, markets would convulse at every opinion poll putting it in the lead. Labour would correctly warn that a vote for Reform is a vote to bankrupt Britain.Farage is a gambler, not a fool. He knows he has to moderate his tone and get across some budget details. But attention to detail has never been his thing and responsibility bores him. Maybe he can win without it. He might fancy the odds on Labour continuing to flounder, the Tories failing to get their act together and that combination being enough to put him in Downing Street. And yet it is revealing how vulnerable the Reform leader obviously feels on the economy. His old script is stale, and without the Maga playbook to crib from, he really has nothing new to say – and a long time to be exposed not saying it.

    Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More

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      What would you do if democracy was being dismantled before your eyes? Whatever you’re doing right now | Andy Beckett

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      How would you behave if your democracy was being dismantled? In most western countries, that used to be an academic question. Societies where this process had happened, such as Germany in the 1930s, seemed increasingly distant. The contrasting ways that people reacted to authoritarianism and autocracy, both politically and in their everyday lives, while darkly fascinating and important to study and remember, seemed of diminishing relevance to now.Not any more. Illiberal populism has spread across the world, either challenging for power or entrenching itself in office, from Argentina to Italy, France to Indonesia, Hungary to Britain. But probably the most significant example of a relatively free, pluralist society and political system turning into something very different remains the US, now nine months into Donald Trump’s second term.As it often does, the US is demonstrating what the future could be for much of the world. Trump’s purges of immigrants, centralisation of power, suppression of dissent, rewarding of loyal oligarchs and contempt for truth and the law are not unique. Even governments which present themselves as alternatives to populism, such as Keir Starmer’s, increasingly share some of its features, such as a performative severity towards asylum seekers. Yet with over three years left of Trump’s frenetic presidency, and possibly more – were he to overcome the constitutional and electoral obstacles to a third term – life under him already provides the most unsettling picture of democracy under siege so far.Partly because populism is divisive – setting “the people” against their supposed enemies – and partly because Trump is so volatile, the domestic impact of his regime is very uneven. And so is how different groups and individuals respond to its actions. These complex, often disturbing patterns are particularly clear in California, one of the places he most dislikes, for its liberal values and multiculturalism, and where his regime has most aggressively intervened.In Los Angeles, where US marines, national guard troops and armed officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been controversially deployed by the federal government on and off since June, some largely Latino neighbourhoods remain eerily quiet. In Boyle Heights last Wednesday morning, two of the usual hubs for shopping and socialising, Cesar Chavez Avenue and Mariachi Plaza, were almost deserted, bakeries and cafes empty, only a few of the square’s outdoor seats taken, despite a mellow autumn sun. Fear of sudden arrest, detention and deportation has kept many people indoors and away from public spaces for months.Yet in the neighbouring arts district of downtown LA, a gentrified grid of former warehouses and factories, the bakeries and cafes were busy as usual. Over pricey iced coffees and fat, artisanal sandwiches, fashionably dressed clusters of largely white people chatted about their latest cultural projects. The fact that Trump and his supporters would probably hate the whole scene, or that something approaching martial law had been imposed just up the road, did not appear to be affecting these ambitious millennials. In the US, as in other countries that are becoming or have become authoritarian, for those spared by the state, careers, social lives, leisure and consumerism carry on – and sometimes with a new intensity, as a form of escape.However, avoiding and engaging with politics are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Often, both impulses coexist in people, especially when faced with something as simultaneously provocative and exhausting as hard-right populism. Periods of passivity, of apparent acceptance of the status quo, alternate with an urge to act.View image in fullscreenA fortnight ago, I went to a No Kings protest in Beverly Hills, a Californian city much less associated with activism than deep wealth. I expected a small gathering of elite liberals; instead, there were a couple of thousand boisterous people, of all ages, marching back and forth for hours along the edge of a park, carrying witty anti-Trump placards and chanting, to the accompaniment of drummers and constant passing car horns. The chants were not that fluent, which suggested that the participants did not protest often, and so did their gleeful smiles, as if they were doing something unexpectedly enjoyable and naughty. The whole event was uplifting: politics coming alive for people, perhaps for the first time.But authoritarianism can provoke more jaded reactions as well. In San Francisco, traditionally a more political place, while there have been big No Kings protests, I also encountered a contempt towards Trump and his circle, for their blatant self-interest, cartoonish bullying and vast exaggerations, which risked becoming an angry apathy: a belief that the regime was a malign fact of life, like a government in a totally corrupt state or the Soviet bloc. This response, like refusing to rise to Trump’s attention-seeking, can be understood and justified as a form of conscious disengagement and as a coping mechanism. Yet while liberals and leftists brood, his regime relentlessly moves on.While I was in San Francisco, it was rumoured that he was about to send troops or federal agents to what he claimed was a failing city. Some people I spoke to there ridiculed the idea. They gestured towards the many beautiful streets, successful businesses, picturesque green spaces and extensive public transport – a quality of life which, while increasingly unaffordable for some, exceeds that of many Trump-supporting places.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHowever, in countries dominated by autocratic populism and digital media, propaganda often defeats facts. Trump called off his San Francisco invasion, but the possibility of it remains, like a crude but effective TV cliffhanger. Creating a politics which can stand up to rightwing populism’s showmanship and drama in a sustained way is a project which has so far defeated Trump’s opponents, with the exception of isolated leftwingers such as Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders.If Reform UK wins power, as seems increasingly possible, then British liberals and leftists will face the same challenge. Nigel Farage could launch endless eye-catching policies from Downing Street, such as the Trump-style deconstruction and politicisation of Whitehall, which Reform promised this week. These policies may fail or disappoint, as Trump’s often have, but make the political weather nevertheless. Unless populism’s opponents create an equally relentless and compelling movement, and draw in more of those whom populism victimises and scares into silence, then this age of autocrats will carry on. As the US shows, sporadic resistance, contempt and avoidance are not enough.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Would a written constitution save Britain from the far right? | Letters

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      George Monbiot is right that having a written constitution would be better than not having one if the far right takes power (We must act now: without a written constitution, Reform UK will have carte blanche to toxify our nation, 23 October). But, as he points out, it’s not a guarantee of sane government. At least 75% of what Donald Trump is doing is unconstitutional, but it’s permitted by a compliant Congress and a rubber-stamp supreme court that is suddenly discovering presidential powers in the constitution that its framers never intended. The true problem is that a large proportion of the US electorate is content to let this happen.Marina Hyde noted the same trend here – too many people are so dischuffed (some with good cause, some not) that they are willing to press the “F you” button and smash the system. In 1795, as the first US government was getting under way, the writer Samuel Miller commented that “political prosperity resides, not in the words and letters of the constitution; but in the temper, the habits, and the practices of the people”. With or without a constitution, there needs to be peaceful civic resistance to a future extremist regime until more people are persuaded that a humane and tolerant government is worth having.Peter Loschi Oldham, Greater Manchester George Monbiot advocates a written constitution to defend against the threat of Reform UK. Do we really believe that it will win 40%-plus of votes and a majority of seats in a general election? I know it may be dangerous to dismiss it as a protest vote, but I can’t believe that.I was reading an entry from Alan Bennett’s Writing Home recently, where he opined that if Labour fought an election on the state of the NHS alone it would surely win hands down. Still true. Yet it is desperate to engage Reform on its home ground. I can’t believe people think that migration and cutting public services are the country’s biggest priorities.Ray FloodDundee George Monbiot calls for a written British constitution to be created through “a citizens’ constitutional convention”, with “participatory events all over the country”. But such events are likely to be dominated by people like him – educated, activist-minded liberals – whose values would then shape the constitution. Views that clash with theirs would be excluded by a process controlled by similar voices. In wanting to make his own values permanent, Monbiot shows an instinct not unlike Nigel Farage’s – both seek to enshrine their worldviews as the national default.Nathon RaineBradford George Monbiot says we urgently need constitutional change – there is an immediate opportunity for citizens to contribute to this agenda. The public bill committee reviewing the English devolution and community empowerment bill is welcoming submissions right now. In the evidence I submitted, published on the parliamentary website, I point out how the rise of far-right extremist groups gives renewed urgency to the importance of providing constitutional protection for all elected local authorities in England.It is a simple step for such a clause to be added to the bill. I explain how countries that outperform the UK on economic, social and environmental indicators, for example, Sweden, already enjoy such protections.Robin HambletonEmeritus professor, University of the West of England More

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      Nigel Farage is cosying up to the US anti-abortion group that challenged Roe v Wade. Women in Britain should know that | Zoe Williams

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      Nigel Farage’s obsession with free speech has become the mood music of his own party, the Conservatives and the BBC, so it shouldn’t have been shocking or troubling to learn that he’d testified in the US Congress on 3 September on the subject of this elemental liberty, and how profoundly at risk it is in the UK.His position we could recite in our sleep – it hasn’t deviated, and remains nonsense on stilts. Free speech is only at risk in the UK insofar as 80-year-olds can now be arrested for opposing genocide with homemade placards, and that’s quite a big “only”. But in Nigel’s upside-down world he is remorselessly censored, and a leftist cabal is still calling the shots – and will only get stronger. The troubling element wasn’t what he said, but who orchestrated his appearance.The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a conservative Christian lobby group whose allies include JD Vance and speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who used to work as an ADF lawyer. While their focus, brokering Farage’s appearance in Congress (the formal invitation came from the House judiciary committee) is on free speech, the legal challenges they bring, both in the US and internationally, tend to use the issue instrumentally as a way to gain allies in their battle against reproductive rights.ADF UK has given legal support to people who’ve been prosecuted for protesting outside abortion clinics, breaching the UK’s “buffer zones”, and to the midwife who was suspended from her job for making anti-abortion statements on social media. It also uses the existence of legislation against this harassment as proof of a free-speech crisis in the country. The two issues are thus conjoined in a ratchet, where any victory in one becomes grist for the other.The buffer-zones debate works particularly well, appealing as it does to a progressive sense of fair-mindedness – come on, liberal, if you want to be allowed to call out a genocide, who are you to stop a Christian calling out a pregnant woman for murdering a baby? It’s an argument whose bad faith you can smell a mile off, but it’s enough to sow confusion and turn the wokerati against itself.When Farage was head of the Brexit party, it had no stance on abortion. The New York Times could find no record of his having done so, anyway, and knowing him as we all do, you can’t imagine it: it doesn’t chime at all with the smoking, pint-loving, British pound sterling and sovereignty guy, to be digging around in women’s business. Yet as if by magic, suddenly last November, he wanted to talk about rolling back the abortion time limit “given that we can now save babies at 22 weeks” (the time limit is 24). By May this year, the current limit was “absolutely ludicrous” , according to Nigel. Although he did say to New York Times reporters that it was “bollocks” to say he had found a new interest in the topic of reproductive rights.ADF lawyers have told journalists explicitly that their goal, long term, is to see abortion rights curtailed in the UK – to which one’s every synapse screams, “in your dreams, you hubristic fantasists”. But we’ve seen how fast the current Labour leadership and the Conservatives scramble to meet Reform UK halfway.We have already seen how influenced by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 the Conservatives are: from seeing renewable energy as a way to future-proof the economy to now seeing it as a woke conspiracy we can’t afford. Five years ago, it would have been considered tawdry to be interested in the physiology of whoever was in the toilet cubicle next to you, and now it is a matter for the UK supreme court. Attitudes to migration were becoming steadily more positive from 2015. However, in 2023, they flipped negative, and have since galvanised a hardcore of protesters whose aggression has since torched asylum hotels and left foreign-born carers scared to get out of their cars.Which politicians do you trust to stand up to what is basically authoritarian empire-building? Because the time to start supporting them is now, not five to midnight.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump has dragged the US to the abyss and Nigel Farage would do the same to Britain. Here’s how to stop him

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      The march towards the darkness is becoming a sprint. In the US, warnings about the autocratic ambitions of Donald Trump that were once dismissed as hyperbole and hysteria now seem, if anything, too mild. Faster than most imagined, he has moved to weaken institutional checks on his power – whether the courts, the universities, the civil service or the press – and now has set to work gagging his critics, even, it seems, to outlaw large swathes of the opposition.This week saw the suspension by a major broadcasting network, Disney-owned ABC, of a late-night talkshow, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, following remarks Kimmel had made about the killing of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel did not criticise Kirk himself – an act now considered all but blasphemous in the US – but rather Republicans’ reaction to his murder, especially their eagerness to “score political points from it”.That was enough to prompt Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission – the body that grants, or revokes, licences to broadcast – to come on like a wannabe Tony Soprano, all but cracking his knuckles as he said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” The threat worked: Kimmel is off the air.Of course, this is no one-off. Trump is also trying to cow the US’s biggest newspaper, filing a $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times, accusing it of “spreading false and defamatory content”. The NYT has the resources to resist, but smaller US papers will have got the message. They could hardly be blamed if they now pull their journalistic punches, if only because they do not have the money to pay for a protracted legal battle against a billionaire president.But the Trump administration is not confining its assault to the media. The Kirk killing has handed it an opportunity to crack down on dissent itself. Witness the promise Trump aide Stephen Miller made this week – on the Charlie Kirk podcast – to take on those left-of-centre organisations whose “messaging” is “designed to trigger and incite violence”. It is hardly a stretch to assume that Miller will define that category very broadly, so that it sweeps up most of those who express opposition to Trump. If that seems alarmist, recall that, even before Kirk was killed, Miller was calling the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation”.View image in fullscreenIn the UK, we like to think we can watch all this with, if not smug distance, then a measure of relief. It’s true that we are a long way from the precipice to which Trump has taken the US. But last week between 110,000 and 150,000 Britons took to the streets of London, heeding the summons of the rightwing agitator and serial convict who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson.It’s worth stressing that this was not a Reform or Conservative rally that was hijacked by Robinson. This was his event. Britons know who Robinson is and what he represents – and yet up to 150,000 of them marched behind him. They were undeterred by those who had labelled it a far-right protest and, indeed, by the racist rhetoric that came from the platform. Britain has an admirable history of confining the far right to the margins, ensuring that it had not, until now, demonstrated this kind of strength in numbers. So last Saturday should be understood as a watershed.Not least because of one speech in particular. Elon Musk, via video link, told the crowd “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” He added that the Labour government, democratically elected a year ago, needed to be brought down. This was one of the most powerful men in the world issuing a call that may not have broken the law but which seemed to give approval in advance for rightwing political violence in Britain.And yet the British prime minister did not rush to condemn this incendiary intrusion into our politics. Indeed, Downing Street said nothing at all until prompted by reporters’ questions, and MPs’ demands, the following day. We often fault those guilty of overreaction. But, at a moment like this, underreaction is the greater sin.The polls are telling a very stark story. Absent a dramatic shift, a party of nationalist populism is on course to beat both Labour and the Conservatives at the next election, and very probably form the next government. Nigel Farage may be no fan of Tommy Robinson, but he is Trump’s loudest UK cheerleader; he does not condemn the current US gallop towards authoritarianism but rather stands alongside those responsible for it. If we want to prevent Farage doing to Britain what Trump is doing to the US, we need to halt the advance of Reform.The first move in that effort is to puncture Farage’s core claim: that he somehow speaks for the British people, that his views reflect the “commonsense” views of the silent majority. It’s not true. On issue after issue, including those that define him, Farage is an outlier, articulating the positions of a noisy but often small minority.He was the chief advocate of Brexit, a decision so calamitous that only 31% now say it was the right move. Indeed, a healthy majority, 56%, favour its reversal and want to rejoin the EU. Farage is on the wrong side of that number.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has long banged the drum for leaving the European convention on human rights. If you read the rightwing papers, you would assume that is now a majority view. Wrong. Support for staying in the ECHR is close to 60% and has actually increased as the subject has been debated. Farage is out of step with the British people.But surely on the issue he has made his own, immigration, he is in tune with the public? After all, Labour seems to have built its entire political strategy on that assumption. And yet, the numbers tell a different story. While 81% of Reform voters believe migrants have undermined Britain’s culture, only 31% of Britons in general believe that. Ask about the effect of migrants on the economy and you get a similar picture. It’s Reform that is badly out of touch.You can keep doing this – and Labour must, pointing out that Farage speaks for the fringes not the centre. Britons don’t support handing Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, as Farage advocates. They do not agree that Britain has become North Korea – and they don’t regard as a patriot someone who sits in Washington and tells a committee of American politicians that we have. They don’t reply to the question, “Which world leader do you most admire?”, with the words “Vladimir Putin”, as Farage did. And nor do they think that the Liz Truss measures that sent the UK economy spiralling represented “the best Conservative budget since 1986”, to quote Nigel Farage.Reform’s opponents need to expose every one of these gaps between Farage and the electorate, recasting Farage as a figure of the fringes. But this can’t be a task for Labour or the Liberal Democrats alone. Any party that claims to value democracy, including what remains of the Conservatives, and that sees how swiftly nationalist populism leads to authoritarianism, needs to engage in the same effort and fast. We all do. As Americans are learning to their cost, you cannot delay – otherwise the freedoms you thought would last for ever can vanish, in the blink of an eye.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. His new nonfiction book, The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them (£25), is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £22 More

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      Trump’s anti-press tactics are bad enough in the US. Now Reform is importing them to the Midlands | Jon Allsop

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      On the day that he returned to office in January, Donald Trump signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. A few days later, the Associated Press, a leading global news agency that is also a linguistic bible for newsrooms across the US, said that while it would acknowledge Trump’s order, it would mostly continue to use the original name. In response, the White House banned AP journalists from certain media availabilities. Trump accused the agency of failing to follow the law. The AP said the government was trying to dictate what words it can and cannot use.This week, Nottinghamshire’s Reform-led county council said that it would impose a sweeping ban on the Nottingham Post, its affiliated website and BBC-funded reporters who work there. At issue, apparently, was a story that the paper had written about a proposed reorganisation of local government. The leader of the council insisted that he welcomes scrutiny, but has a “duty” to combat “misinformation”. The Post’s editor called the decision “a massive attack on local democracy” – and it’s hard to disagree.The ban has clear echoes of Trump’s tactics, and some critics said as much explicitly. In the US, there is a clear longer-term trend of Republican officials imposing poorly justified restrictions on the press. But one doesn’t need to look as far as that to understand the Nottinghamshire ban. Indeed, Reform has been accused before of shutting out reporters, or otherwise treating them with disrespect: last year, the party reportedly excluded certain adversarial outlets and journalists from its conference; earlier this summer, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage accused local reporters in Scotland of helping to coordinate protests against him. It all seems to add up, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, to a moment in which hard-right politicians, in particular, feel that they don’t need to engage with traditional news outlets to get their message out, and that they won’t suffer electoral consequences for shutting them out. They might even benefit from doing so, turning the media into a foil as part of a broader war against the establishment.And yet, there are also reasons to doubt these conclusions, or at least to texture them. It’s true that Trump, for example, has shut out journalists whose stories displease him. (In addition to the AP imbroglio, his White House recently barred a reporter from the Wall Street Journal from a trip to the UK, after that paper reported unflatteringly on Trump’s alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.) At the same time, though, Trump will routinely talk to pretty much anyone who will listen, the mainstream media very much included. (Earlier this year, he called the editor of the Atlantic a “sleazebag” – then granted him an interview not long after.) Indeed, Trump has long used media coverage successfully to set the political agenda.In the UK, Farage seems to be using the same playbook. Sure, he has leaned, in particular, on the rightwing press. But such papers aren’t necessarily natural allies for Reform given their deep cultural ties to the Conservatives. And Farage has sucked up oxygen in more hostile quarters, too. This week, just as Nottinghamshire council was banning journalists, Farage was being praised, by Politico, for answering questions about his mass deportation plans with a directness that other parties should seek to emulate.Trump has clearly proven that there aren’t hard electoral consequences for press-bashing. But there are still important differences between UK and US political culture. Trust in the media is at a low ebb here, too. But in the recent past, rightwing political figures who have used Trumpian rhetoric to deflect blame for their own failures on to the media haven’t always been successful. Dominic Cummings goaded the press after his Covid-era drive to Barnard Castle, but could not escape massive public anger. Boris Johnson dodging tough questions – from the Today programme, for example, which his government boycotted – didn’t spare him from the glare of scandal in the long run.This doesn’t guarantee that the leaders of Nottinghamshire council will suffer from banning their local paper. Indeed, it might very well be to Reform’s advantage to let Farage suck up attention nationally while dodging scrutiny for the actions of the party’s councillors across the country; the party surely wants the media talking about immigration, not the reorganisation of local government. And local outlets might seem an easy target, diminished in power and reach in an age of cuts to local news and unchained online discourse.View image in fullscreenAnd yet Reform’s leadership of councils is an important test for the party in a country where voters still, to some extent, value competent governance. “If Reform can’t even face questions from the Nottingham Post,” the Conservative party chair Kevin Hollinrake wondered this week, “what hope is there that they could ever face the serious responsibilities of government?” He’s surely not the only one asking that question. Even in the US, where the culture of political press-bashing is more entrenched, local Republican legislators in some states are cooperating with proposals to steer more resources to their dwindling local news outlets. This isn’t some act of altruism, advocates say, but one born of the realisation that they need voters to know what they’ve been doing when elections roll around.The Reform ban might hold. But at some point, local Reform councillors will want to trumpet an achievement, and when they do, it would not be a massive surprise if they go running to the Nottingham Post. Politicians can, of course, reach voters on social media these days. But established local news brands can still confer prestige. And good publicity is good publicity. For now, Trump hasn’t let up on the AP. But he hasn’t been shy about showcasing its journalism when it suits him. An artwork based on the iconic image of Trump pumping his fist after his attempted assassination last year now adorns a White House wall. It was taken by an AP photographer.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences face discrimination from advertisers, editors warn

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ and other diverse audiences are facing “good old-fashioned discrimination” as advertisers avoid them after political attacks on diversity and inclusion campaigns, editors have said.Senior figures at publications aimed at the gay community and other minority groups said a previous “gold rush” to work with such titles was over.There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans.Tag Warner, the chief executive of Gay Times, said his publication, which had been growing digitally in the US, had lost 80% of its advertisers in the past year. It has also lost in excess of £5m in expected advertiser revenue.Warner, who has led the outlet since 2019, said his title’s growth had been accompanied by an enthusiasm from brands to embrace LGBTQ+ audiences. He blames an anti-DEI drive in the US for the dramatic shift.“I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway, but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes, they’re not nearly as impacted as we are,” he said. “This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.“We’re really experiencing the impact of what happens when voices that are pressuring organisations to give in to less inclusive perspectives start winning. Then it creates this massive behavioural shift in brands and organisations.”Nafisa Bakkar, the co-founder of Amaliah, a publication aimed at “amplifying the voices of Muslim women”, said there had been a “change in mood” among brands and advertisers. “There was this DNI [diversity and inclusion] gold rush,” she said. “It is, I would say, well and truly over.“We work with a lot of UK advertisers, but I would say that the US has a lot more emphasis on what they would call ‘brand safety’, which I think is a code word for ‘we don’t want to rock the boat’. I would say there is a lot more focus on this element.”Ibrahim Kamara, the founder of the youth platform GUAP, which has a large black and ethnically diverse audience, said he had detected a “relative difference” from 2020 in approaches from brands.He and others cited the economic pressures on advertisers generally in recent years. However, he said the “hype and the PR around wanting to support and connect with diverse audiences” had also subsided.“The thing that most people within these kind of spaces can probably agree on is that the energy and the PR is very different now,” he said. “It was almost a badge of honour to be able to say that you’re supporting certain communities. Now, I’ve seen that lots of the diversity and inclusion people that were hired around that period have probably lost their jobs. It doesn’t have the same PR effect any more.”Warner said the anti-DEI impact pre-dated the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Figures such as the conservative pundit Robby Starbuck have been engaged in a long-running anti-DEI campaign, pressuring firms to drop their diversity efforts. However, Warner said Trump’s arrival “gave everyone, I think, permission to be honest about it”.Not all publications in the sector have been hit in the same way as Gay Times. Companies with business models less reliant on US advertising, as well as some big players with long-established relationships, said they had managed to negotiate the changing political environment.“Brands are nervous, that’s for sure, or careful – or a combination of both,” said Darren Styles, the managing director of Stream Publishing, which publishes Attitude magazine. “They’re aware it can be a lightning rod for a vocal minority. But our experience is that most people are holding their ground, if not doubling down.”Styles also said he was not complacent, however, given the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK and its lack of historical support for the LGBTQ+ community.“I’m not incautious about the future,” he said. “Who knows what next year will bring, because that narrative is not going away. Obviously, there’s the rise of Reform in the polls.“[Farage] is quite clearly not an ally to our community and he’s expressed disdain in the past at the awards we’ve given out to people in the trans community. So it is a worry as political momentum gains around there. But I think broadly, consumers in the UK are a bit more capable of thinking for themselves.”Mark Berryhill, the chief executive of equalpride, which publishes prominent US titles like Out and The Advocate, said some brands and agencies “may have been a little bit more cautious than they have been in the past”. However, he said it had so far meant deals had taken longer to be completed, in a tough economic climate.He said the political headwinds made it more important to highlight that working with such titles was simply a sound business decision. “We’ve tried to do a better job in this political climate of just selling the importance of our buying power,” he said. “Everybody’s cautious and I don’t think it’s just LGBTQ. I think they’re cautious in general right now with their work with minority owned companies.“The one thing that maybe this whole controversy has helped us with a little bit is to really make brands realise it’s a business decision. It’s not just a charity or something you should do because you feel guilty.“You should do it because it’s the right thing to support LGBTQ journalism. We’re small. We need to get the word out. We have important stories to tell. But it’s also a good business decision. The more we show that side, certain brands will come along.” More

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      The spirit of Liz Truss, ridiculous but relentless, still stalks British politics | Rafael Behr

      by

      We need to talk about Liz Truss, although there are reasons not to bother. The prime minister who failed faster than any previous holder of the office has much to say about her dismal record, but nothing insightful. She cuts a pitiful spectacle padding out the schedule at rightwing conferences, chasing attention and relevance with an addict’s fervour.Last week, Truss was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, sharing the big lesson she learned in government. It was that British institutions have been captured by a leftist doctrine and that they “hate western civilisation”. She couldn’t possibly counter this threat from No 10 because supposedly the real power was wielded by a well-financed “globalist network”, operating through such engines of anti-democratic subterfuge as the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization.Truss believes these nefarious forces authored her downfall. They taught her that gradual reform is impossible. Only a “Trump-style revolution” will do. This is her routine spiel. Indeed, it was the theme of her paranoid, self-pitying memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years to Save the West, published last year. Her disquisitions on the topic go unreported in her home country. She made more headlines last week from a two-month-old cameo appearance in a promotional video for a whiskey brand launched by a bare-knuckle fighter with a conviction for violent assault. (How that endorsement advances the restoration of western civilisation was unclear.) But a thorough summary of the CPAC speech was dutifully published by Tass, Russia’s main state news agency. Their report led with the claim that “globalists are trying to control the political process across Europe”.It is standard practice for Russian news channels to weave selective quotes from western politicians into tendentious propaganda, except there is no need to take Truss’s words out of context. She narrates the west’s slide into godless decadence without an edit. She provides the frothy conspiracy theories that Kremlin-friendly bots amplify on social media, and hallmarks them with the authority of a former prime minister.A British audience knows the caveats to that status: Truss was ousted within 50 days; a lettuce had more staying power. But the title stands. She really did rise to the top, and not through some freak system malfunction. She played and won the Westminster game by its rules. She had multiple ministerial briefs under three prime ministers. She persuaded a clear majority of members of Britain’s venerable establishment party to make her their leader.Colleagues who suspected (or knew from experience) that Truss was unhinged stayed silent or endorsed her candidacy once her momentum looked unstoppable. Client journalists who had benefited from her notorious indiscretion, and looked forward to ever greater intimacy with power, colluded in the fiction of her fitness to govern.Even now, when the former prime minister’s name is a byword for economic incompetence, Conservatives are euphemistic in contrition. When invited to apologise on behalf of her party for the disastrous mini-budget of September 2022, Kemi Badenoch has said only that she wants to “draw a line” under the episode.The obstacle is not a residue of loyalty but a continuity of belief. The dogmatic engine of Trussonomics – that tax cuts always pay for themselves by stimulating enterprise to generate growth – is still an axiom of mainstream Conservatism. So is Trussite suspicion of the public sector as a redoubt of bureaucratic socialism.Badenoch, like Truss, backs a Maga-style revolution to rip chunks out of the government apparatus. She has spoken enthusiastically about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, adding that Doge methods are not “radical enough” for the bloated British state.The fact that Musk’s purgative rampage through Washington has failed to produce the advertised cost savings doesn’t deter imitators. Nigel Farage has announced the creation of a mercenary Doge “unit” to hunt down waste in the councils that Reform UK won in last month’s local elections.This exercise serves a double function. First, Farage will scapegoat any local officials whose duties can be branded under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Second, he will overstate the expense of such schemes, generating improbable nationwide savings to justify tax cuts in a Reform manifesto. Trussonomics will be rehabilitated and rearmed with imported US culture war rhetoric.Farage was once a fan of Truss’s economic policy. He praised her fiscal farrago as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”. The year harked back to the heyday of Thatcherism. These days Farage has to be careful about fetishising the Iron Lady. His party’s electoral base lives in Labour’s former heartlands, so he is a convert to the cause of industrial nationalisation. He now shakes his magic money tree to the left as well as the right.The Tories lack such ideological elasticity. In any case, Badenoch doesn’t seem interested in economics. She is more animated by the crusade for free speech. This, like the demonisation of DEI, is a fixation borrowed from the US right. When JD Vance declared that European democracy was more imperilled by censorious liberals than by Russian military aggression, Badenoch admired the US vice-president’s deployment of “truth bombs”. Here, too, she is on the same page as Truss, who told last week’s CPAC audience that free-thinking dissidents from Keir Starmer’s Britain find refuge in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (Orbán is Europe’s foremost admirer of Vladimir Putin. He has suffocated independent media and political opposition.)It is hard to know how much of this derangement is conviction and how much is cupidity. There is money to be earned bad-mouthing Britain on the ultra-nationalist lecture circuit, but it is also easy to self-radicalise in that milieu.It is also hard to know how receptive a UK audience is to US conservative manias. Much of the UK right dwells in a US-coded online hallucination of Britain where criminal hordes of migrants have turned city centres into no-go areas and liberal thought police harass law-abiding white Christians.The danger is not that millions of voters will recognise the bleak dystopia as a factual representation of their country, but that it resonates as an allegory of national decline. It is not the complaint that Britain is in bad shape – dilapidation and economic strife are self-evident – but the cultivation of despair by projecting hard problems through a facile, conspiratorial lens. It is the insinuation that existing democratic institutions are not merely failing to make life better but maliciously orchestrating misery.This is the nihilistic cynicism that vaporises trust, corrodes civic culture and makes simple, authoritarian solutions attractive. It is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears and grist to his digital disinformation mills.Perhaps we should be grateful to Liz Truss for playing the archetype of unwitting accomplice to tyranny – the “useful idiot” of cold war parlance – so ineptly. She contaminates any cause she touches.That is why the British right shuns her. But social ostracism isn’t ideological repudiation. The current Tory and Reform leaders are embarrassed by association with Truss, not because they despise what she says but because she looks ridiculous. Her offence was not the grift, but its exposure in ways that might discredit more skilful practitioners. She is not too extreme, only artless in applying the camouflage. She is the crumpled, discarded packaging from a product that, rewrapped, could be delivered once again to Downing Street.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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