Farage and the patriots who hate Britain

Some patriots have a funny way of showing how much they love their country.

For Nigel Farage, patriotism means undermining Britain’s most beloved institutions on behalf of overseas chums. Already hell-bent on replacing the NHS with a system that would enrich US insurance and pharmaceutical companies, he has spent the last few days sucking up to Donald Trump by kicking the BBC over the Panorama affair.

On his GB News show, Reform’s leader could barely contain a grin as he recounted how, in a meeting with Trump last Friday, the president had asked, “is this how you treat your best ally?” Farage did not reveal what he had said to Trump in response, but it is clear that he didn’t do what a patriot would have – tell him that the BBC was an object of national pride that sometimes made mistakes, and that he might just want to wind his neck in.

Instead, Farage has wailed to all and sundry that the BBC has “deeply offended the leader of the free world”, a man without whose support Britain would be “helpless”. He says that as a result the national broadcaster, “institutionally biased for decades”, must now be “slimmed down” and that “the licence fee, as it is, cannot survive.”

And all this because Farage is upset that the BBC does not amplify far right views in the way that his own GB News propaganda channel does, with such a shameless disregard for objectivity.

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Another patriot is Robert Edmiston, a multi-millionaire Tory peer who donated £1m to pro-Brexit campaigns, including £850,000 to Vote Leave before the 2016 referendum, but then spent much of his time in semi-retirement in Portugal, an EU country.

Edmiston now says he is likely to move full-time to Australia, because he is dissatisfied with the NHS (“there’s some sacred cows in there”) and because he thinks he’s paying too much tax. “If you win, they tax you heavily, and you don’t keep much of it,” he moaned, and indeed poor old Edmiston is now estimated to be down to his last £855m.

This great Brexit patriot will no doubt be as sorely missed as his colleagues Nigel Lawson (chaired Vote Leave in 2016, took up French residency in 2018) and James Dyson (shilled for Brexit in 2016, moved his company to Singapore for “strategic reasons” in 2019). Like those fireworks that ignite with great excitement before quickly fizzling out, it seems that the best place to observe Brexit is from a safe distance.

And no wonder, when a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research think tank suggests that the damage that leaving the EU inflicted on the nation’s finances is far worse than originally thought. While the Office for Budget Responsibility has long talked of a 4% hit to GDP, the NBER now says that “by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%.”

It turns out that despite all those flags and all that sovereignty, Brexit wasn’t very patriotic after all.