The real establishment
Populists claim to be outsiders. They usually aren't
Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist Reform party, is standing in a by-election in the seat of Clacton. The election was triggered by Farage himself, who resigned in the face of allegations about donations that he received. Farage has said that the election will be a battle between “the people” and “the establishment”.
But who is “the establishment” in this case? Farage’s main opponent is a comedian who stands under the moniker “Count Binface” and wears a bin on his head. The count’s manifesto includes the abolition of auto-renewals on subscriptions, a promise to build at least one affordable home, and a proposal to limit the cost of 99 ice creams to 99p (it’s a British thing).
Farage went to a private school (Dulwich College) before spending 20 years working in the City, as a commodities trader and then broker. He has been a serving politician since 1999 when he was first elected to the European Parliament. Since then he has led three political parties, UKIP, the Brexit party and now Reform. City-boy turned politician is a classic establishment career path.
As for his funders, Christopher Harborne, a billionaire businessman with interests in the crypto industry; his background includes education at the elite Westminster private school, followed by a degree at Cambridge, an MBA at Insead, the French business school, and a spell working at McKinsey, the management consultants. The other source of funding that has caused controversy is the family of George Cottrell, a long-term associate. Cottrell is known as “posh George” for a reason; his father was a landowner who went to Gordonstoun, the same school attended by King Charles, while his mother actually dated the future King. His maternal grandfather has the title Baron Manton, while his uncle is the third Baron Hesketh. These are very establishment backgrounds that are a lot more upper-class than Count Binface.
On the other side of the pond, Donald Trump is a rich businessman who was the son of another rich businessman, and who attended the Wharton business school. He has surrounded himself with other rich people such as Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent, who made their money in finance. He briefly put the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, in charge of cutting public spending while many other billionaires were front and centre at his inauguration.
So we are not talking about working-class heroes who are planning to overthrow the class system or redistribute wealth. Indeed, one of the most significant acts of the first Trump administration was a 2017 tax plan that was heavily skewed towards the rich. Trump was once a deep sceptic abut cryptocurrencies but is now a huge enthusiast who has made a lot of money from them; Farage has called for London to “embrace” crypto.
Regular readers will know that I am not a believer in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was set up in 2009, two years after the introduction of the iPhone. while most of us will have some sort of smartphone in our pockets, few of us will have ever had a practical use for a cryptocurrency. They are mostly used for speculation and tax avoidance.
Indeed, there is a “magic beans” element to the whole affair. Someone creates a digital unit with no asset backing and invites others to buy it; when they buy it wealth is apparently created (in reality, it is a transfer of wealth from outsiders to insiders). Enthusiasts claim the value of cryptocurrencies stems from their limited supply but this is not true in aggregate (there are thousands of them). And a limited supply is meaningless unless the product has value; my nasal hair is also limited in supply but no one is bidding for it.
What cryptocurrencies do well is to make the founders very rich and this “new money” wants to make its mark, and to influence power. In the 18th century, Britain had “court” and “country” parties; those politicians who were close to the reigning monarch and those who were not. Occasionally, these groups swapped places but their differences were not primarily ideological. Nor were they the least bit interested in advancing the interests of the non-voting masses.
The populists are really the new wealthy who may share the same backgrounds (private schools, finance) as the old wealthy but who either feel disrespected by the old elite (a key motivation of Trump) or want the rules altered to make them even wealthier.
Since western countries are now democracies the new rich must gain power through the ballot box and they do so through advancing a nationalist message that they think will appeal (even though their own money, or their backers, may be based overseas). They don’t represent “the people” at all, just their own interests. Worse still, because their illusory appeal comes from being apparent outsiders, they want to throw out everything the mainstream believes, from the reality of climate change through the benefits of vaccination to the importance of international cooperation.
Count Binface, by contrast, has a much more sensible manifesto.