Part of Farage’s tired old populist schtick is the constant rant about unelected bureaucrats running roughshod over our lives. Most often this has been done in the context of the European politics, where such a sentiment would be, at best, of dubious accuracy.
Nonetheless, never one to let facts get in the way of winding people up into any frenzy that plays to his advantage, one of his arguments for why the immense failure that is Brexit would actually have been good was exactly that.
Leaving would mean that we would be taking back control. That those we elect as MPs would be the ones who make and decide our laws, rather than a bunch of unelected old men in Brussels who most people cannot name and who we cannot vote for or remove.
He had particularly strong words to say against European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at one point:
So an unelected, retiring bureaucrat says: No extension, take this new treaty or just leave. He is overriding the Benn Act. The EU shows itself to be a thuggocracy – power without accountability
Of course now that he feels like he’s close to the ability to appoint people to the very powerful British cabinet positions that are traditionally held by directly elected MPs, the eternal hypocrite has changed his mind.
“Power without accountability” moves from being a bogeyman to being an aspiration.
He recently told an LBC interviewer that:
…we’re stuck in this mindset that the cabinet must all be politicians in the House of Commons. Why? It’s nonsense.
Instead, unsurprisingly as sycophantic to the current US administration as ever, he thinks we should look towards America for guidance, where he regards the entirely unelected Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as doing a good job.
Naturally he came out with the tired and inaccurate old trope that:
I really do think that you’ve got to think a little bit more about running the public finances as if you’re running a business.
Quite literally it would seem. The Independent reports Farage as having told the FT that the biggest jobs in a Farage government would be going to “top business leaders”.
Per their bulletin:
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is attempting to attract business leaders by promising them ministerial positions if the party wins the next general election.
Corruption concerns aside, it’s hard to imagine that these wouldn’t include some perfect examples of the “unelected old men who most people cannot name and we cannot vote for or remove” that he apparently recoiled from in the past.
As Luke Robert Black commented via Twitter:
A man who spent years campaigning against the democratic deficit of the EU and the Commission, now advocating for exactly the very same system of unaccountable leaders and bureaucrats – who you can’t remove at the ballot box
Does this man believe in anything?
Dave Lawrence adds:
The desperately politically inept just trying to follow the orange blob from the US – we elect our MPs and our Cabinet for the very purpose that they are then accountable to the people
Some fantasy US dream run by money men and dubious think tanks is not how we do business
And even our mild-mannered Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, raised an objection to the idea, calling Farage a “wolf in Wall Street clothing” who “has no idea what he’s talking about”.