Two speeches, 20 years apart, show Starmer how to tackle Farage

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Did Farage just lie to US congress under oath?

James Ball

Though the topics were different — Britain’s place in Europe and freedom of speech respectively — there are enough commonalities to give Keir Starmer a clear indication in how to combat the man currently trouncing him in the polls to be our next PM.

But first, let’s take a moment to enjoy the moments when Farage truly met his match.

In a speech to the European Parliament, PM Blair was so wound up by the then UKIP MEP’s whining about the cost of EU membership, he hit back with not just rhetoric but an almost physical menace. He leaned forward, jabbed his finger and grin-snarled. For a moment it looked like he might just jump down from the podium and wrap that cheap neon-blue tie of Farage’s around his clenched fist.

“Let me just tell you, sir, and your colleagues,” Blair seethes, like Reggie Kray as played by Tom Hardy. “You sit with our country’s flag. You do not represent our country’s interests. 

“This is the year 2005, not 1945. We are not fighting each other any more. These are our partners, our colleagues, and our future lies in Europe.”

Since that day twenty years ago, many others — myself included — have had a good go at Farage, but never with such one-sided success. Until this week, in Washington D.C., at a congressional hearing on censorship.

Step forward Democrat Jamie Raskin — the congressman and constitutional lawyer who led the second attempt to impeach Trump and sees Farage as a fellow traveller of those illiberal nationalists who brought about the insurrection of January 6. In his opening statement, Raskin shredded any pretence that Farage is “some sort of free speech martyr”.

“There is a free speech crisis in America today, but there’s no free speech crisis in Britain,” he said. “UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has not shut down GB News where Mr Farage has his own show just because Mr Farage has used his airtime to call for banning peaceful protests that he disagrees with.

“No one has stopped him going on Russian TV seventeen times and saying the one world political leader he most admired was Vladimir Putin, even though Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a dictator who has regularly interfered with other countries’ democratic elections.

“No one has stopped Mr Farage from parroting Putin’s absurd talking points like when Farage claimed that Nato, the US and Britain provoked this war in Ukraine.

“For a man who fashions himself as some sort of free speech martyr, Mr Farage seems most at home with the autocrats and dictators of the world who are crushing freedom on earth.

“Mr Farage wants to get rid of the Online Safety Act in his country. A law shepherded by the Conservative Party and implemented by the Labour Party, which bans child pornography online, protects children from harmful content, forbids non-consensual pornography and other unlawful content. 

“He should go and advance the positions he’s taking here in Congress today in Parliament, which is meeting today, if he’s serious about it.

“To the people of the UK who think this Putin-loving free speech impostor and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in your country, come on over to America and see what Trump and MAGA are doing to destroy our freedom.”

Bravo! Besides the aggression and the nous to use their moment with the microphone to maximum effect, what lesson can Keir Starmer take from these two demolitions to combat the threat Farage poses to his chances of a second term?

It’s all about patriotism, or lack of it.

“You do not represent our country’s interests,” said Blair. You’re a Putin-loving, Trump sycophant, said Raskin.

Farage’s strategy of flag-waving populism — and its inherent weakness to be exploited — depends on him actually rubbishing the UK: to us, to foreigners, to anyone who will listen.

This week in Washington, he compared Britain to North Korea, a country where his kind of dissent would be answered with a close-up interview with an anti-aircraft gun. 

He also literally lobbied US corporations to sanction his own country. 

And note well, incidentally, how throughout all this Farage wore not a Union Flag on his lapel in front of Congress, but a GB News badge. His is self-interest, not national interest.

At PMQs on Wednesday, in a sign that perhaps his Phase Two comms team have got both the idea and the urgency of the situation, Starmer was on point calling out the absent MP for Clacton: “You cannot get more unpatriotic than that.”

Farage’s cheerleading of Trump; his cosying up to Putin; his leading role in the national catastrophe that is Brexit; his low-tax, light-regulation policies that sell out British workers; his perpetual running down of our country to foreign media — these are all a nasty, treacherous vein of character to be exploited. 

Brits might be fed up about the state of the nation, but they do not like being humiliated abroad. 

If Starmer can work on developing a bit of that Blair/Raskin snarl and their sense of menace, he might yet find a way to nail Farage’s true colours to the mast for all to see.