When democracy sleeps in the pub by Emma Schneider

Nigel Farage is not a joke. He may be a walking caricature of pint-swigging nationalism, wrapped in a pinstripe suit and finished off with a Brexit smile, but make no mistake, he is not a joke. He is a dangerous, calculating political operator who knows the British psyche better than many of the parties still staggering around the Westminster maze. Yet, astonishingly, most political parties continue to treat him like a bad weather forecast, loud, annoying, but ultimately passing. This is political negligence at its worst.

Farage has weaponised the great British illusion that he's "one of us," the man at the pub who speaks his mind and “says what we’re all thinking” if what we're all thinking is usually a shallow pint of xenophobia garnished with performative patriotism. He’s the bloke who talks about sovereignty with a fag in one hand and a Union Jack in the other, conveniently ignoring that for years he worked inside the very EU institutions he claims to detest, cashing the cheques and attending the lunch buffets.

And now he’s back, not just as a commentator or a crank on GB News, but as a political force aiming for Westminster. He has the Reform Party dancing to his tune, and his resurgence is so loud it’s echoing in the Conservative Party’s panic room.

And yet... Labour yawns. The Lib Dems blink. The Tories flinch but still hope he’ll crash and burn on his own bile. They all assume that, eventually, people will “see through him.” Ah, yes. “See through him.”

The same magical seeing that was supposed to protect us from Boris Johnson’s bus-shaped lies, or Liz Truss’s lettuce-tier economics. The truth is, if people were as naturally resistant to lies and populism as Westminster likes to believe, we’d all be living in a Norwegian-style social democracy right now, riding our bicycles to universal healthcare appointments. Instead, we got Brexit, food banks, and Jacob Rees-Mogg explaining Victorian values on morning radio.

Farage isn’t building his momentum on policies, he doesn't need to. He trades in cultural grievance. His politics are the politics of vibes: “Britain used to be better, now it’s broken, and I’m angry.” He doesn't have to explain how it got broken (although foreigners are usually blamed), and he certainly doesn’t need a plan to fix it. He just needs people to be angry, scared, and nostalgic. Preferably all three at once. And let’s be honest: he’s good at it.

He knows that the political establishment fears appearing “out of touch” more than they fear being incompetent. So he wraps up his populism in anti-elitist gift wrap and hands it out like a cheap Christmas cracker, knowing full well that the punchline doesn’t matter, only the reaction does.

Where are the counter-narratives? Where are the bold, principled rebuttals? Instead, the main parties issue lukewarm warnings, blandly pointing out Farage’s inconsistencies or lack of detailed policy. It’s like bringing a wet flannel to a bonfire. Farage thrives in a vacuum of conviction. He feeds on political timidity.

This is not about disagreeing with his politics; it’s about the refusal to treat him as a serious threat. It’s about believing that British voters are automatically immune to demagoguery, despite every warning to the contrary. It’s about forgetting that Farage has already dragged the Overton window so far to the right that Enoch Powell would probably ask for a seat at the table.

And it’s about arrogance, the same arrogance that led to Brexit being dismissed as a fringe fantasy, or Johnson being seen as a harmless clown.

We have seen this movie before, and it ends with a hung parliament, a divided nation, and someone shouting about "betrayal" on national television while selling Brexit-branded garden gnomes.

If democracy is to survive the Farage mirage, the time to act is now. Not with eye rolls, not with sighs, and certainly not with silence. Call out his lies. Unmask the nostalgia. Offer something real.

Because if the only thing standing between Nigel Farage and power is the assumption that people will “see through him,” then Britain might wake up one day to find it’s been governed by the pub bore who made nationalism sound like common sense.

And by then, it’ll be too late to say, “Well, we didn’t take him seriously.”