If you screw up your eyes and look four years into the future, can you imagine a Prime Minister Farage standing victorious on that No 10 doorstep? I\u2019m afraid the answer is yes \u2013 just about. I can see that ghastly grin. If everything that can go wrong does go wrong, then it\u2019s not inconceivable, and everyone had better believe it.<\/p>\n
The showman had on his serious face to talk about the economy in today\u2019s speech. He had some pretty heavy lifting to do, heaving out impossible promises made only a short time ago. Gone was his \u00a390bn tax cut bonanza<\/a>. Public spending will be slashed instead: Reform has already put 100,000 civil servants \u201con notice\u201d. Farage the chameleon now says his is both \u201cthe party of workers\u201d and one that is \u201cpro-business\u201d. Reform had also briefly posed as the party of poor children with a suggestion<\/a> that it would end the two-child benefit cap, but Farage rapidly cut back eligibility: now it\u2019s only for couples, only when both work, and only for British nationals<\/a>. He also promised spending cuts and big cuts to the benefits bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n His mercurial shapeshifting comes under a little more scrutiny now he tops the polls, but not much. His will be the greatest party of \u201crisk-takers\u201d, plunging the country into crypto<\/a> like Donald Trump. (Might he, too, launch his own token<\/a>?) With undisguised glee he predicts an economic collapse in 2027, forcing an election to sweep him to power. He mentions \u201ca self-induced act of financial stupidity\u201d. At last! Among all his backflips and reversions, is this the confession we deserve from the man who instigated the great Brexit calamity? No, of course not. He is talking about the non-dom tax he would remove to lure back wealthy expats, including some of the quarter of a million Britons now in Dubai.<\/p>\n On Brexit, since the popular mood has turned against it, all we get is a grumble that others have \u201csquandered\u201d the opportunity it provided to reduce regulation. Expect nothing on the thousands of extra civil servants hired to replicate tasks done in Brussels<\/a>. Nothing either on \u00a380bn in tax revenues lost annually<\/a> due to Brexit, a costly price for \u201csovereignty\u201d. How absurdly he poses as the friend of Brexit-stricken business. Labour has, at last, taken off its self-imposed gag about Brexit<\/a>. It needs to hammer home the damage this man did to the economy.<\/p>\n The only reason we listen to Farage, and the only reason he tops the polls, is his prowess in pumping animosity towards immigrants<\/a> to the top of the political agenda. This one-man band has only his xenophobic dog whistle to signal his party\u2019s course into government, the same one sweeping the right in across the democratic world. Without that, who would care about his views on anything else? He has pledged \u201cnet zero migration\u201d. In a deeply angry country, other sources of discontent may well fill his sails, but however hard he tried to promote other policies today, immigration is his only proven winner. As he takes up the mantle of the next popular issue, he buries his own perverse political predilections: his choice of Putin as his most admired leader<\/a>, his fondness for Trump, and his frequent calls to replace the NHS with private health insurance. Despite all this, his only calling card with voters is a toxic loathing for foreigners.<\/p>\n He may have reached his peak. The political scientist John Curtice tells me that having scooped up older, socially conservative voters, Farage is less popular among the young, especially female voters, who are \u201calmost all socially liberal on diversity, graduates and non-graduates alike\u201d. Nor will Reform\u2019s record in its 10 county councils back up Farage\u2019s national promises of vast efficiency.<\/p>\n Farage answered every question after his speech, except one. The Guardian asked if he still adheres to his lifelong support for proportional representation. Silence. It\u2019s become clear recently he has changed his mind, now that our wildly distorting first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is his only path to power. FPTP is becoming his \u201cfriend\u201d, he recently told Sky News Australia.<\/p>\n Shamefully, there is silence from Labour on this, too, despite majority support<\/a> for electoral reform. If Farage should win, it will not be because of any image transformation, but because Labour\u2019s failure to reform our electoral system would give Reform victory on just over a quarter of the vote<\/a>. That, after all, is why PM Farage is in any way imaginable.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you screw up your eyes and look four years into the future, can you imagine a Prime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,164],"class_list":["post-260287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}