A Realistic Public Debate

I am thinking of pitching a remake of Hi-de-Hi! in which the holiday camp was called Putin’s and presided over by Vladimir Putin, of whom Anatol Lieven writes:

Diane Abbott has been subjected to ferocious attacks on her character for claiming on Wednesday that “the imminent threat from Russia is a Nato fiction.” The Labour MP added that the alliance was attempting “to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending. The increase should not go ahead.” Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch branded the comments “reprehensible”, while another Tory, Ben Obese-Jecty, labelled Abbott “Putin’s useful idiot”. The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP even received criticism from her own Labour colleagues.

Many of the responses to Abbott are little more than attempts to shut down public debate on a question of vast importance to the United Kingdom. However, it is also true that she would have been much closer to the facts had she emphasised one word and added another: “The imminent conventional threat from Russia is a Nato fiction.”

Put like this, the argument is persuasive. Any suggestion of a Russian invasion or sustained air campaign in Western Europe is absurd. The Russian military and air force are already occupied with a grinding war in Ukraine: where is Moscow supposed to find a new army with which to attack Nato? How would the Kremlin pay for the resulting war when Nato has practically shut down Russia’s maritime trade?

Had she phrased her statement in these terms, Abbott would have been close to what sensible Nato figures and analysts have been saying. In June, the American Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), General Alexus Grynkewich, said that “Russia is not looking for a conflict […] They do understand the term ‘defensive alliance’, and they do understand that we have a number of asymmetric advantages.” Really, Russia’s threats have been intended to deter a direct war with Nato in Ukraine, not to start one.

Russian-organised hybrid attacks in Europe and Britain are a much more realistic danger, one which Abbott should have mentioned. Moscow has engaged in cyber warfare, as well allegedly organising arson attacks and the sabotage of railway lines and undersea cables. Last month, explosive drones were discovered close to Ukrainian planes with military supplies at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany. 

So far, however, the effects have been small, suggesting that Russia’s campaign has been either highly incompetent or deliberately restrained. If the latter, this is presumably because the Kremlin still wants to maintain some element of plausible deniability, and because these attacks are meant to be warnings rather than attempts to do serious damage and cause casualties.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has threatened that “the response to Ukrainian strikes using British missiles on Russian territory may become [attacks on] any military sites and equipment of Britain in Ukraine, or beyond its borders.” This would mean making Russian hybrid attacks overt — a strategy Vladimir Putin has thus far avoided, both because of the risk of a radical increase in Western help to Ukraine, and perhaps because his instincts as a former intelligence officer are more geared towards covert operations.

In war, accidents happen. On the first day of the American-Israeli war on Iran, the US unintentionally destroyed an Iranian elementary school, killing 120 children. In 1988, American forces mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 people. Russian contacts assure me that if a British missile were to destroy a school or an airliner in Russia, a direct response against the UK would be unavoidable.

At present, though, a direct threat from Russia to Britain is far from imminent. What is needed is a realistic public debate about the escalation of British support for Ukraine and its possible consequences, and a serious negotiating strategy rather than one that sabotages US initiatives. Support for Ukraine is legitimate, but it is the interests and security of the British people that ministers should be prioritising.

Sometimes you just have to laugh. As that was the only response compatible with the maintenance of sanity when Tony Blair sent troops into battle in Iraq without the necessary protection against weapons of mass destruction because he knew full well that Iraqi WMD did not exist, so that is the only such response to the news that the Army has ceased “all nonessential training exercises” to save a few quid. Note the lack of reference to the Skripals, although not even in Salisbury had a Russian been alleged to have shed his passport like a snakeskin, to be picked up by whoever found the one in Leipzig.

But Ukraine blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, leading to absolutely no recrimination on the part of Friedrich Merz. It staged the first terrorist bombing in the history of Monaco. It shot dead Andriy Portnov outside his children’s American school in Madrid. It nearly caused an ammonia nitrate explosion when one of its naval drones exploded off the coast of Romania. One of its air defence missiles killed two farmers in a Polish border village, as established by a Polish investigation with which Ukraine refused to cooperate. Its drones’ incursions into Finland and the Baltic states are routine. Germany, Spain, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are members of NATO. Ukraine is not. And that is before we mention the Ukrainian rent boys who set fire to properties linked to Keir Starmer. Russian troops will not be marching up your street and mine any time soon when Russia cannot launch a drone attack on a commercial plane at a civilian airport in peaceful Germany, and the old East Germany at that, of which Thomas Fazi writes:

Saxony-Anhalt, in the western part of eastern Germany, is hardly the country’s most important state: it accounts for only a fraction of Germany’s GDP and is home to just two million people, half the population of Berlin. It is often described as a no-man’s-land between east and west — the flat, monotonous backdrop to the final hour-long approach to Berlin. Yet Saxony-Anhalt is poised to become the stage for one of the biggest political showdowns in recent German history.

State elections will be held there on 6 September, and the AfD is set for a sweeping victory. The party is currently polling at 43%, on track to secure an absolute majority of seats — though that outcome largely hinges on whether the parties currently polling close to the 5% threshold, primarily the Greens, make it in or not. A handful of votes could tip the outcome in the opposite direction, allowing the establishment parties to keep the AfD out of power once again, as they did in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg after 2024 — if not through a full everyone-minus-the-AfD coalition, which might prove arithmetically difficult, then through a minority government.

In short, the result sits on a knife edge; little wonder that the German political establishment is in a state of panic. For the AfD to win an absolute majority would be a historic triumph and mark the definitive collapse of the “firewall” erected around the party in recent years. Not only would it be the first time the party takes power in a state, but it wouldn’t have to share that power with anyone else — a feat hitherto achieved only by the two main establishment parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Meanwhile, the AfD continues to rise practically everywhere — including in Berlin, where it has doubled its support (in the polls) since 2023 and now runs level with the CDU, behind the frontrunner, the Left-progressive Linke. Berlin votes a fortnight later, as does the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the AfD leads the polling. This makes Saxony-Anhalt all the more important, since a victory there could propel the party forward in the other two contests as well.

Crucially, because of the way Germany’s federal structure is set up, if the AfD were to take control of a state it would inevitably have to be reckoned with at the national level too — precisely what the anti-AfD firewall was designed to prevent at all costs. As state premier, one of the first responsibilities of the AfD’s candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, would be to assume the annually rotating chairmanship of the regular meetings of Germany’s 16 state premiers. The position typically entails a visit to Berlin and a joint press appearance with the chancellor.

To get an idea of the panic gripping the German political establishment, and especially its metropolitan, social-liberal wing, one need look no further than its house journal, the magazine Der Spiegel, which recently featured on its cover a mugshot-like photograph of Siegmund — a former perfume trader — with the caption “Germany’s most dangerous man”. It’s such an outlandishly exaggerated claim that the cover drew criticism even from mainstream corners. Ulf Poschardt, the former editor-in-chief of Die Welt, pointed out that such brazen and caricatural ad hominem attacks simply play into the AfD’s narrative: that they are fighting an out-of-touch political-media elite that views everyone outside their narrow political-ideological spectrum as a “threat to democracy” — including the party that is polling first across the country, well ahead of Chancellor Merz’s CDU/CSU.

Indeed, it is precisely because the establishment has lost control of the narrative — and Germany is hardly an exception in this regard — that, as Politico recently reported, it is now studying an arsenal of extraordinary measures designed, in effect, to prevent a possible AfD state government from exercising its mandate. The first scenario involves excluding Saxony-Anhalt’s representatives from meetings on sensitive matters. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that Siegmund would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences”. Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed. Thus, as several ministers confirmed to Politico, one possibility would be to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers, but also organise separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues from which the representative from Saxony-Anhalt would be excluded. According to an emeritus professor of constitutional law, the idea is “perfectly conceivable”, though he conceded that it might be challenged by the federal courts.

A second scenario would involve raising a “wall” within shared information systems. The argument is that the AfD, given its alleged “closeness” to Russia, cannot be trusted with sensitive dossiers. The notion that the AfD would act as a pipeline of classified information to Moscow is rather ludicrous — if only because that would amount to political suicide. “We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” said a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.” Nonetheless, a Social Democrat politician told the magazine that the AfD should be kept away from all intelligence on Right-wing extremism and espionage. In other words, an elected government would be deliberately kept in the dark about dossiers crucial to national security, rendering it effectively incapable of governing. Once again, it is claimed that this would be “legally possible”.

A third scenario, the most striking so far, would involve financially starving the AfD-led state. Saxony-Anhalt receives almost €3 billion a year from federal fiscal equalisation, equal to a fifth of its budget. The threat is to reduce or suspend those funds in order to “make life harder” for a potential AfD government, “or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable”. The finance minister of Baden-Württemberg points out that the system is anchored in the constitution, as though a single constitutional provision could disguise the political motive behind financially strangling a rebellious region.

A final scenario being contemplated is the so-called “nuclear option”: the Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat, the chamber representing the states, may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfil its legal obligations. In other words, Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law, a measure that has never been applied in the history of the Federal Republic, not once since 1949.

The picture that emerges is unmistakable: the same German establishment that is constantly lecturing other countries about democracy and the rule of law is demonstrating that democracy is tolerated only so long as it produces results deemed acceptable. When democratic processes produce an unwelcome government, or risk doing so, ways are sought to circumvent it, to hollow it out or to render it harmless — all in the name of “defending democracy”, of course.

Indeed, it has become increasingly common in recent years in Germany for mainstream parties and media outlets to use the term “Unsere Demokratie” — our democracy. The meaning is clear: only those who hold the “right” positions sit within the perimeter of democracy; those outside it are not opponents within the system but threats to it. In this way, ordinary political disagreement about migration, energy, EU policy or the war in Ukraine can be reclassified as an attack on the constitutional order itself, and the ordinary remedies — debates, elections — can give way to exceptional ones.

In this regard, the German establishment has a formidable ally: the constitution itself. Germany’s postwar order is built on the doctrine of “militant democracy”: the idea, drawn directly from Weimar’s collapse, that a democracy may legitimately refuse to tolerate those who would use democratic means to abolish it. There is a basic logic to the concept, but it is clearly now being stretched to the extreme. One may agree or not with the party’s most radical policy stance, that on remigration — which the AfD itself defines as lawful measures to return foreigners already under removal orders — but that is a policy position, not a programme for abolishing democracy or the constitutional order. Even critics of the party have said as much: writing on Verfassungsblog, one German constitutional scholar noted that the case against the AfD largely rests on its portrayal of German democracy as dysfunctional, and that fundamental criticism of the system is the very thing that distinguishes democracy from dictatorship. Yet the doctrine of militant democracy is no longer merely being invoked against the AfD; it is being used to justify waging war on the party by all means necessary, including extra-legal ones.

In May 2025, the domestic intelligence service formally classified the AfD — by then already the country’s largest opposition party, polling first or second nationally — as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation, on the strength of a 1,100-page report the public was not permitted to see, announced by the outgoing interior minister days before leaving office. The designation — which would have unlocked expanded surveillance powers and fuelled mounting calls for a formal ban procedure — did not survive judicial scrutiny: in February 2026 the Cologne Administrative Court barred the agency from applying or publicising it, finding its conditions unmet.

But the episode’s lesson cuts deeper than its outcome: it took a court to halt the state security apparatus’s attempt to brand the principal opposition party an enemy of the constitution. Nor did the judicial setback end the campaign: by summer 2026, a 1,500-page NGO legal opinion had concluded a ban application would probably succeed, and more than 1,000 lawyers, judges and prosecutors had signed an open letter urging ban proceedings. That the prohibition of the largest opposition party in Germany could be seriously entertained, to the routine applause of Brussels-aligned commentary, tells its own story.

The current geopolitical tensions provide another tool in the hands of the political establishment, in Germany and elsewhere: so long as Russia can be framed as an invisible but ever-present threat, anyone who opposes the status quo can easily be delegitimised as a “Kremlin-aligned internal enemy” — an outright national security threat. It has now become commonplace across Europe to blame virtually every unwelcome electoral outcome — including the recent Icelandic EU referendum — on Russian interference, even in the absence of any evidence. Indeed, a number of journalists and analysts, several of them German, have already been sanctioned for “spreading pro-Russian propaganda”.

No wonder the German establishment seems so intent on escalating tension with Russia. This doesn’t just serve EU-Nato geopolitical interests in Ukraine — where Germany is now leading the charge — but also serves the establishment’s domestic aim of cracking down on the opposition. As mentioned already, the AfD is regularly accused of being a tool of Russian interests, though this largely rests on the party’s programmatic positions: opposition to sanctions, to arms for Ukraine, calls to reopen Nord Stream, and dialogue with Moscow — all things that one might argue would serve first and foremost in Germany’s interests. In this light, the German government’s claims that Russia is behind the failed drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport — for which it has so far failed to provide any concrete evidence — might also be seen as aimed at putting even more pressure on the AfD. The timing of the announcement is noteworthy: four weeks after the alleged attack, but only a few days away from the election in Saxony-Anhalt. Leipzig/Halle airport, incidentally, sits directly on the Saxony-Saxony-Anhalt border, and Halle is Saxony-Anhalt’s largest city.

Finally, the German establishment can count on another formidable ally: Brussels itself. In recent years, the EU has gradually developed a playbook of electoral influence: a dense ecosystem of regulatory, financial, legal and informational instruments capable of shaping electoral conditions and outcomes, which have now been institutionalised through tools like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Democracy Shield, aimed at the permanent monitoring of electoral processes across all member states — continuous supranational oversight of national elections, without any basis in the Treaties. These are tools that can be — and are — regularly deployed in support of establishment-aligned parties, be they incumbent or in opposition. Though these tools are less useful in the case of state elections, one can be sure that they will be amply deployed in next year’s federal election.

Ultimately, one thing is clear: Germany’s elites are scrambling to shore up their power in the face of collapsing legitimacy and popular consensus. Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz has plummeted to historic lows, with his personal approval rating now down to 14% — the worst figure ever recorded for any sitting chancellor. This is hardly surprising: his cabinet is presiding over the deepest industrial contraction in the Federal Republic’s history, one that falls hardest on states like Saxony-Anhalt, whose chemical and automotive employers are being squeezed by high energy prices. At the same time, Merz’s cabinet is rolling back the welfare state (such as scrapping early retirement at 63 for long-serving workers) and promoting a highly dangerous — and highly unpopular, especially in eastern Germany — escalation towards Russia, all while suppressing free speech through surveillance, intimidation and even criminal prosecution. This is ultimately what is fuelling support for the AfD: not a renewed taste for “fascism”, but deep-seated hostility towards the establishment. This is particularly true in eastern Germany, or the former GDR, where a long-standing east-west economic and cultural divide has consolidated into a sharp political polarisation, with the AfD capitalising on growing “anti-western” sentiment — “western” here meaning the former West Germany as much as the West at large.

What is at stake in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, then, is not really the government of a small eastern state of two million people. It is whether the German establishment still believes it can beat its opponents at the ballot box or whether it has quietly concluded that it cannot, and must therefore win by other means. Every measure now being war-gamed in Berlin is an admission of that second possibility. And each of them, if deployed, would hand the AfD precisely the argument it has been making for a decade: that Germany is governed by a caste which regards the electorate as a problem to be managed, and which is prepared to trample on the most elementary principle of “their” much-vaunted liberal democracy — that whoever wins an election must be able to govern — rather than lose control. The firewall may be crumbling, but the establishment appears intent on laying the foundations for something far more impregnable.

Germany has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now. And no one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich.

There has never been a firewall in Britain, either. Thomas Mair, the murderer of Jo Cox, accurately described himself to the Police as “a political activist”. National Fronts come and BNPs go, EDLs come and Britain Firsts go, but certain institutional and organisational manifestations of the Far Right are perennial and even permanent. Mair’s is the Springbok Club, which is run by the people who also run the London Swinton Circle. And that, in turn, was addressed by Liam Fox (born 1961) and by Owen Paterson (born 1956) as recently as 2014. Ah, those old 1980s Tory Boys, in their Hang Mandela T-shirts and all the rest of it. Wherever did they all end up?

In the Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major years, there were Ministers who were members of the Western Goals Institute or the Monday Club, which latter had played a key role in securing British accession to the EU. Those crossed over, via such things as the fiercely Eurofederalist League of Saint George, to overt neo-Nazism on the Continent, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid South Africa, to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, to the juntas of Latin America, to Marcos and Suharto, to the Duvaliers, to Franjo Tuđman, and so on. Nick Griffin’s father, Edgar, was a Vice-President of Iain Duncan Smith’s Leadership Campaign. He answered what was listed as one of its official telephone numbers, in his house, with the words “British National Party”. Then we had a confidence and supply agreement with Ulster Resistance, with Theresa May’s majority of one provided by the daughter for whom Noel Little had proudly campaigned and who had thanked Loyalist paramilitary organisations in her acceptance speech. Then we had Toby Young and the London Conference on Intelligence. Then we had certain members of the 2019 intake. And this afternoon, Jordan Bardella will address the annual conference of Reform UK, of which Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a ritual to British party conferences now, shared alike by the establishment and the insurgents who claim to despise it, though nobody standing at the lectern will ever admit as much. The hall fills and the delegates cheer on cue, so that for a fortnight the party looks larger and more formidable than it really is. Then the cameras leave. The pollsters return to their spreadsheets. The number shrinks.

It happened to Keir Starmer’s Labour, whose collapse in public confidence eventually cost him the keys to Downing Street. It happened to Zack Polanski’s Greens, whose favourability has never recovered from his own ill-judged retweet about the police response to the Golders Green terror attack. It has been happening so quietly, for so long, to the Liberal Democrats that the title they currently hold, Britain’s least disliked party, describes indifference rather than affection. This week it is Reform UK’s turn to test the rule, as Nigel Farage arrives at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham determined to prove that raw defiance can outrun arithmetic. It cannot. In British politics, the closer you look, the less you tend to like what you see, and Farage’s conference is about to demonstrate why.

Reform’s three day gathering, running from Thursday to Saturday, has been billed by the party itself as a dress rehearsal for government, a preview of the first hundred days of a Farage premiership. He is due to tell delegates on Friday that a Reform government would declare a “national emergency” on its first morning in Downing Street, forcing Parliament to sit through the summer “seven days a week” until a backlog of legislation is cleared. Ministers who miss their own hundred day targets will be sacked without ceremony. And to the judges, peers and civil servants who might stand in the way of any of it, the message from the platform will be blunt: obstruct Reform, and you will “discover just how determined we are.”

None of this is simply a pledge to build more homes or clear NHS waiting lists, though Reform will offer plenty of that too. Robert Jenrick, the party’s economic spokesman, wants a budget within a hundred days that cuts £80 billion a year from public spending. Richard Tice says he can strip £250 off household energy bills by scrapping carbon levies on generators, and describes Britain’s high streets as being in “a state of national crisis.” What Farage proposes on top of all that is something else entirely: the suspension of the ordinary machinery that stops any government, of any colour, from simply doing whatever it likes. The late Tony Benn used to say there were five questions worth putting to anyone who wields power. What power have you got. Where did you get it. In whose interests do you exercise it. To whom are you accountable. And how can we get rid of you. Farage’s Birmingham pledges fail the fourth question by design, and in failing it, they quietly answer the fifth as well. A prime minister who can force Parliament to sit on his own timetable, sack ministers on his own say so, and warn off judges and civil servants who resist him, has spent his first hundred days dismantling the very mechanisms the public would need to get rid of him.

Farage has his reasons for reaching so hard for the theatrical. This has been a wretched summer for Reform. YouGov’s voting intention poll of 30 and 31 August put Labour and Reform level at 23 points apiece, a dead heat that would have seemed fanciful to Reform’s own strategists twelve months ago. The underlying numbers are worse. The proportion of Britons who say they would even consider voting Reform has fallen six points over the year to 24 per cent, while those naming it as their first choice are down five points to 16 per cent, both figures back to where they stood before the party’s breakthrough in the 2025 council elections.

Farage personally has fared no better. His net favourability rating now stands at minus 44, down sharply from a peak of minus 27 last summer, and the proportion of Britons who think he is doing a good job leading his own party has collapsed by 51 points in a year, from plus 18 to minus 33. Only 19 per cent of the public now see him as a prime minister in waiting, down seven points since June, and for the first time since YouGov began asking the question, he trails Kemi Badenoch on the same measure. Much of the damage is self inflicted. Farage has spent the summer fending off questions over an undeclared £5 million gift from the Thailand based cryptocurrency entrepreneur Christopher Harborne, and over donations linked to George Cottrell, a former aide and convicted fraudster who served eight months in an American federal prison, and Cottrell’s mother Fiona. Farage denies any wrongdoing and has dismissed the reporting as an “establishment hit job,” but the affair was serious enough that he resigned his Clacton seat and fought a by-election over it, a move most voters told YouGov they opposed. Even inside his own coalition he is under pressure. Rupert Lowe’s breakaway Restore Britain is viewed favourably by 44 per cent of Reform’s own voters, a genuine threat on Farage’s right flank that Richard Tice waved off at conference with a dismissive “Rupert who?”

None of this means Farage’s underlying complaint about Britain is baseless. When he says fourteen years of Conservative government left the country’s basic institutions broken, he is telling the truth. Courts are gridlocked. Councils totter on the edge of bankruptcy. Working class communities have endured a decade in which wages barely moved while public services were stripped to the bone. Parliament often does feel maddeningly slow, weighed down by its own procedure. The diagnosis is sound enough. The prescription is where the danger lies. Paralysis in British public life was not caused by MPs taking weekends off or civil servants secretly plotting against the popular will. It was caused by four decades of deregulation, chronic underinvestment and the steady hollowing out of democratic accountability, and stripping away judicial oversight and parliamentary scrutiny in the name of an emergency will not build a single house or fund a single hospital bed. It will simply hand unchecked power to whoever is standing at the despatch box, and history offers vanishingly few examples of governments that, having acquired such power, ever handed it back.

Farage’s prediction that Andy Burnham “wants 10 more” years of Labour misrule lands at an awkward moment for the Prime Minister, whose own honeymoon shows the first hints of the same disease. Burnham took office on 20 July, succeeding Keir Starmer after two exhausting years in which Starmer’s premiership unravelled amid policy reversals and the row over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to Washington. His personal ratings since have been extraordinary. YouGov’s tracker, running for a decade, has recorded only one higher favourability score for a serving prime minister than Burnham’s latest figure. Yet even his own side is beginning to ask what lies beneath the popularity. At his first Prime Minister’s Questions on 2 September, it was not Kemi Badenoch who landed the sharpest blow but his own backbencher, the Labour MP Tan Dhesi, who told him bluntly that “vibes alone just isn’t going to be enough.”

Dhesi could have been talking about most of Burnham’s programme so far. The Prime Minister speaks often of “public control” while carefully avoiding the words public ownership. His flagship early policy, a return to the £2 bus fare cap from January, undoing the £3 fare Rachel Reeves imposed in her first Budget, is a genuinely popular move for the millions who depend on buses. But roughly £400 million of its £500 million cost is being met by converting international climate finance from grants into loans, a switch the charity Debt Justice has condemned as “a slap in the face” to countries such as Malawi and Zambia, already burdened with debt and facing a climate crisis they did little to cause. Burnham’s regional charm has been sold to the country as economic transformation. What it delivers, on this evidence, is corporate management with a Manchester accent: careful never to threaten the interests that hollowed out the country’s wealth in the first place, content to manage the decline more gently and with a friendlier face, funded where necessary by quietly moving the bill somewhere the British public will not think to look.

It is precisely this gap, between the scale of Britain’s crisis and the smallness of what mainstream politics is willing to offer, that gives Farage his oxygen. When Labour governs as though public ownership were an embarrassing word rather than a serious policy, when the Greens implode over their own leader’s misjudgements, when the Liberal Democrats settle for being the least objectionable name on the ballot paper, something has to fill the space, and lately that something has been a man promising to rule by decree. Examined honestly and up close, none of these parties survives the encounter with much credit. That is not cause for despair so much as clarity. The trouble runs deeper than any single rotten party. A governing class across the whole spectrum has confused presentation for substance, and the public, given enough time to look properly, keeps noticing.

Britain does not need a prime minister who claims the right to bypass courts and Parliament the moment they become inconvenient. Nor does it need a government content to hand back a pound on the bus fare while the ownership of water, energy and rail stays exactly where the last forty years left it. Real renewal means breaking up the corporate monopolies still extracting wealth from working class communities that have already given everything they have to give. It means returning core utilities to genuine public hands, and subjecting economic power, not only political power, to democratic oversight. Anything less simply adds another chapter to a story British voters already know by heart: a leader arrives promising to be different, is applauded from a safe distance, and is found wanting the moment anyone dares to look closely.

When a politician tells the country he must smash the machinery of accountability in order to save it, ask a simpler question: who is actually being rescued. Not the country. Almost never the country. Just a diminishing man, chasing his own diminishing returns.

And:

There is a scene in the Channel 4 footage that tells you almost everything you need to know about the state of British politics in 2026. Nigel Farage, the man who has spent three decades telling the working class he is one of them, sits over oysters and wine in his own constituency of Clacton, thanking a fictional American businessman for bankrolling his party. “It worked,” he says. “Boom.”

He was right. It did work. The polls his party quietly paid a stranger to fund made headlines in the spring, helped carry Reform into the local elections in May, and were presented to the public as independent evidence of the nation’s mood. What Farage did not know, as he raised his glass in Essex, was that the whole thing was a set-up. “William Lockwood” and his wealthy American father did not exist. They were undercover reporters working for Verbatim, an investigative outfit founded by journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting, and their footage was verified and broadcast by Channel 4 News on the eve of Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham.

By Friday morning, two of Farage’s closest lieutenants were gone. Dan Jukes, his long-serving media aide, and James Orr, the party’s head of policy, had both stepped down “pending the outcome of an internal investigation.” Reform’s chairman, Lee Anderson, told Sky News there was “no chance” either man would return. The party has been reported to the Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission, not only by the Liberal Democrats but by Labour too, over what the Lib Dem MP Lisa Smart described in her letter to the Met’s specialist unit as “the acceptance and concealment of a donation from an impermissible donor.” A former chief executive of the Electoral Commission, Bob Posner, has gone further, telling Channel 4 the evidence points towards “serious criminal offences.”

Oysters, wine, and a £32,500 secret

Strip away the theatre and the facts are straightforward. Earlier this year, Orr and Jukes arranged for a US-registered company to fund three opinion polls commissioned by Reform, at a cost of £32,500. Under British law, that is not a grey area. Foreign companies are not a permissible source of political funding, and that prohibition covers research and polling just as much as it covers cash in an envelope. The public was never told the polls were paid for this way, nor that the party had gone looking for an “off the books” backer to do it. When the undercover team later raised the prospect of a further £500,000 donation, one of them made clear the money would be funnelled through the UK-based “son” so it looked domestic, even though it originated with the American “father.” That arrangement, first proposed by Jukes at an earlier meeting according to the Channel 4 investigation, is exactly the kind of concealment that section 61 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 exists to catch. Farage’s own reply to the offer, captured on camera, was simple: “thank you,” then “both of you, thank you.” 

Reform’s response has been to attack the messenger. The party has dismissed the story as “a hoax perpetuated by foreign-funded, climate change activists posing as would-be party donors” and insists it operates “a robust vetting process for prospective donors approved by the Electoral Commission.” Farage told LBC on Friday morning that the party had “broken no laws” and had “not taken any dodgy money or anything like that whatsoever,” calling the operation “a clear case of entrapment.” The Metropolitan Police, for its part, has said only that it is “aware of media reporting” of a potential breach of the 2000 Act and will “assess this matter and any information provided.”

It is worth taking the entrapment argument seriously before dismissing it, because a free press does not get a free pass simply because its target is disliked. Undercover journalism using deception is a blunt instrument, and Ofcom has already had cause to examine a previous Channel 4 sting on Reform canvassers in Clacton. Deceiving people into saying things they would not otherwise say is a genuine ethical hazard, and the Tribune does not pretend otherwise. 

But entrapment is not what happened here, because nobody was tricked into breaking a law they did not already understand. Orr and Jukes were not goaded into inventing an illegal funding route on the spot. According to the Channel 4 reporting, Orr had told the undercover team earlier in the year that Farage “would not need to know” about the polling payments. That is the language of a man managing a paper trail, not one confused about the rules. In a separate recording, Orr went further, dismissing the regulator itself as “completely useless” and boasting that the party “could easily get away with it.” Nobody put those words in his mouth. The deception in this story was not the journalists pretending to be American donors. It was Reform’s own officials pretending, to the public and quite possibly to their own leader, that £32,500 of foreign money had never entered British politics at all.

The Party of the People: Funded by the People it Claims to Oppose 

What makes this story more than a passing conference-week embarrassment is who it happened to. Reform UK’s entire political identity rests on the claim that it is the insurgent outsider, the party of the man in the pub against the man in Brussels, of the fishing village against the financier, of Clacton against Canary Wharf. That is the pitch. It is why Farage can stand in a working men’s club in a former mining town and be believed when he says the old parties sold their voters out. 

The trouble is that the money behind the insurgency keeps turning out to be exactly the sort of money the insurgency claims to be against. This is not the party’s first funding controversy of the year. Farage is already the subject of a parliamentary standards investigation into a £5 million gift from the crypto financier Christopher Harborne, received shortly before Farage was elected to the Commons in 2024 and which he insists was a personal security gift that never needed declaring. The Tribune covered that case in July, when Farage compared the scrutiny to trial by ordeal. Since then, Harborne’s giving has only grown. Electoral Commission figures show a further £9 million from him in a single quarter this year, the largest donation ever made to a British political party by a living person, a sum that alone dwarfed the combined quarterly totals of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Reform was also the first British party to open its doors to cryptocurrency donations, courted Elon Musk over a rumoured nine-figure gift at Mar-a-Lago, and now finds its deputy leader, Richard Tice, fielding separate questions of his own over undeclared gifts.

And then there is the man who just resigned. James Orr is not some council-estate organiser who talked his way into Farage’s inner circle. He is an Oxford and Cambridge-educated philosopher of religion, a former City lawyer at Freshfields and Sullivan & Cromwell, appointed head of policy as recently as February, succeeding Zia Yusuf in a role that has now changed hands twice within a year. Reform sells itself as the party of people who feel unheard by a remote, credentialled establishment. Its head of policy, until Friday, was about as establishment as it is possible to be. 

Tony Benn used to say there were five questions worth asking of anyone who wields power: what power have you got, where did you get it, in whose interests do you exercise it, to whom are you accountable, and how can we get rid of you. Reform’s answer to the second question, on this evidence, increasingly runs through Thailand-based crypto fortunes, offshore financiers and now, however briefly, a fictional American willing to hand over half a million pounds for the right kind of thank you. That is not a smear invented by a hostile broadcaster. It is the party’s own accounts, and its own recorded voice, telling the story.

The Rot in British Political Funding Runs Through Every Party 

None of this should be read as Labour or the Liberal Democrats occupying the moral high ground, and this paper has never pretended otherwise. Labour has taken its own dark money too, most notably £4 million from Quadrature Capital, a tax-haven hedge fund with stakes in oil and arms that insisted the gift was “values-based, not political.” The rot in British political funding runs through every party that has held power or hoped to. What the PPERA foreign donation ban exists to protect is not any one party’s reputation. It exists to protect the basic democratic principle that only people entitled to a vote in this country, or companies genuinely rooted in it, should be allowed to pay for the arguments put in front of the electorate. That is not a partisan demand. It is the same sovereigntist instinct that objects to unelected foreign institutions setting British rules, applied with equal force to unelected foreign money buying British elections. 

The Electoral Commission has said plainly that any attempt to evade the controls on donations is a matter for the police, not for a party’s internal review panel. Reform’s own investigation into itself, launched the same evening the story broke, will not settle what a criminal inquiry now must. Two resignations on the first morning of a conference is not accountability. It is triage. 

There ought to be a donation cap that makes stories like this one structurally impossible rather than merely embarrassing when they surface. There ought to be an Electoral Commission with the enforcement teeth to match its warnings. And there ought to be a political culture, across every party, in which a man who postures as the voice of the overlooked does not need a fictional millionaire to remind him whose money he is actually spending. 

Farage said it himself, on camera, raising a glass to a stranger who did not exist. It worked. Boom. He was talking about the polling. He might just as easily have been describing how the whole system now runs.