Sweet Caroline?

Richard Littlejohn compares Nigel Farage to Clacton’s previous claim to fame, Radio Caroline. For all its alleged left-wingery, and its ability to annoy the forces of conservatism no end, British Boomer rock’n’roll was made up of common or garden proto-Thatcherites, often tax exiles. The only notable exceptions were David Bowie and Eric Clapton, way out on the Far Right, at least performatively in Bowie’s case.

The Sixties Swingers hated with a burning passion the Labour Government of 1964 to 1970. The pirate radio stations were their revolt against its and the BBC’s deal with the Musicians’ Union to protect the livelihoods of that union’s members. Hence the Marine Offences Act 1967, which outlawed broadcasting from a boat off the British mainland. The Minister responsible was Tony Benn. Of course.

Behind this union-busting criminality was Oliver Smedley, who was later to be a key figure behind the Institute of Economic Affairs, an engine room of Thatcherism. Viewers of The Boat That Rocked, once a mainstay of late night television, should consider that the Postmaster General so mercilessly ridiculed in it was in fact Benn, and that the Prime Minister who legislated against pirate radio was Harold Wilson. Those Swingers used the lowering of the voting age to put what they thought were the Selsdon Tories into office in 1970.

They went on to entrench their moral, social and cultural decadence and libertinism, first in the economic sphere during the 1980s, when the pirate radio stations were entirely frank and accurate about their own impeccably Thatcherite credentials, and then also in the constitutional sphere under Tony Blair. David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak  and Keir Starmer have all accepted uncritically the whole package: moral, social, cultural, economic, and constitutional. Indeed, they have embodied it. As does Farage.