In a sludgy, slow-motion trajectory, the pale yellow milkshake found its mark: Far-right political candidate and Donald Trump acolyte Nigel Farage, on the inaugural day of his insurgent campaign for a seat in the British Parliament.
But no display of airborne voter displeasure was going to prevent one of the country’s most gleefully polarizing public figures from shaking up what had until then been considered a fairly sedate contest between Britain’s two biggest parties. In a surprise announcement in early June, Farage inserted himself as the ruling Conservatives were already forecast to lose decisively to the left-leaning Labor Party.
Some observers believe the return of Farage, 60 — political flamethrower, a key architect of Brexit, leader of a small, stridently anti-immigration party — could lead to a MAGA-like takeover of the Conservative Party, which has played a preeminent role in British politics for nearly 200 years.
Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration Reform U.K. political party, plays a game at an amusement arcade below his party’s office in Clacton-on-Sea, England.
And his high-profile presence re-introduces an insistently clamorous voice to what has lately been a nationalist-populist upswelling in Western Europe and beyond, one whose full import may soon become clear.
“He’s good at getting attention, and he sees himself as a disrupter, someone who wants to overthrow the established order,” said Mark Wickham-Jones, a political science professor at the University of Bristol. “There’s not much coherence to his policies, but in terms of his support, that really doesn’t matter.”
Public opinion polls suggest Farage’s party, Reform U.K., will come nowhere near victory in Thursday’s general election. But after seven straight losses, he appears poised to succeed — finally — in winning election to the House of Commons, the 223-year-old lower house of Parliament.
Farage, who hails from a leafy village on London’s outskirts, is making his eighth parliamentary run in Clacton-on-Sea, a down-at-the-heels seaside town whose jangling arcades, shuttered storefronts and scuffy, darting seagulls can lend it the air of a distorted funhouse mirror. (In Britain, parliamentary candidates do not have to live in their constituencies.)
Boys on bicycles hang out near the main street in Clacton-on-Sea. The town and its surrounding villages are afflicted by high unemployment and poverty.
People walk by one of the many amusement arcades near the beach in Clacton-on-Sea.
“Something is happening out there — momentum!” Farage recently told a group of sweaty, enthusiastic supporters at his tiny local headquarters, situated above one of the many garish amusement arcades lining a seaside street.
“It’s like millions of simultaneous conversations are going on, at the breakfast table, at the bingo hall, at the pub — ‘Oh my God, we were just talking about you!’” he said, sounding almost giddy.
In many ways, Clacton is an electoral venue tailored for Farage.
The town and its surrounding villages, while containing some affluent pockets, are afflicted overall by high unemployment and poverty rates. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, 70% of the constituency voted to leave the European Union. Two years earlier, Reform’s predecessor, the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, won a parliamentary race for the first time — in Clacton.
In a political pattern that has become familiar in the United States and continental Europe, voters in Clacton, which is home to relatively few migrants, tend to be far more vociferous than the general population in demanding that immigration be cut dramatically.
Farage “has been able to play on people’s fears,” Wickham-Jones said, “and concerns about identity — a sense that society has been changing rapidly.” Other politicians, he said, have struggled to articulate a counternarrative about the social benefits of immigration, or less drastic ways of curtailing it.
David Allum, right, canvasses for British politician Nigel Farage outside Reform’s office, above an arcade center in Clacton-on-Sea.
The Labor candidate in Clacton is a charismatic 27-year-old named Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, who was born in the English town of Nottingham and is of Jamaican and Ghanaian heritage. He is seen as having little chance of overtaking Farage, although some political observers believe his quick-witted, social-media-heavy campaign style marks him as someone who could ascend the national stage at some point.
On a Clacton side street, Pushkar Dhasmala, a 40-year-old immigrant from India, said he supported Owusu-Nepaul but knew that most of his neighbors did not.
“The care sector is dependent on immigrants,” said Dhasmala, who works in a privately run assisted-living facility. Farage’s opponent, he said, “understands the situation” faced by those newly arrived and trying to make a home in Britain.
Labor’s expected dominance in the national parliamentary vote bucks a recent trend of nationalist-populist success elsewhere in Europe. The party has been buoyed by a wave of public disaffection with the Conservatives, whose nearly 15 years in power spanned the pandemic and Britain’s chaotic exit from the European Union, formalized in 2020.
Over the years, the Conservatives imposed hard-edged austerity measures that have gutted Britain’s public sector, including the revered but deeply troubled National Health Service. The Conservative-held prime ministership changed hands repeatedly during the tussle to enact Brexit, culminating in the scandal-plagued reign of Boris Johnson, who stepped down in disgrace in 2022.
Johnson’s successors fared little better: First came the hapless Liz Truss, the shortest-serving leader in modern British history, whose 50-day tenure inspired memes of whether she would outlast a wilting head of lettuce, and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who called the upcoming vote when it became clear that cratering Conservative support could plunge even further.
Nigel Farage plays an arcade game. The anti-immigration politician, who hails from a leafy village on London’s outskirts, is making his eighth parliamentary run in the down-at-the-heels seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea.
The reemergence of Farage — who jumped into the parliamentary race after first saying he would not run — coincides with bruising times for mainstream political leaders elsewhere in Western Europe.
There has sometimes been a certain synchronicity in American and British politics — Brexit’s narrow approval came months before Trump’s 2016 presidential victory — and prominent Trump backers have taken delighted notice of far-right gains in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere.
Before, during and after the former U.S. president’s turn in office, Farage worked strenuously to insert himself into the Trumpian orbit, albeit as something of a distant satellite.
Nigel Farage’s sloganeering echoes Donald Trump’s — “make Britain great again.”
In a recent interview with Britain’s ITV, Farage declared that Trump had likely “learned a lot” from his own incendiary, insult-laden speeches in the European parliament, where he previously held a seat — but added, magnanimously, that the tutelage went both ways.
Farage’s sloganeering echoes Trump’s — “make Britain great again” — and he relishes describing the country as being in a state of terminal decline and branding opponents “boring idiots.”
Some political commentators, and Farage himself, have suggested the voting results might leave him positioned to essentially capture a hollowed-out Conservative party — a scenario likened by some to events across the Atlantic, where Trump’s MAGA movement has seized control of the Republican establishment.
“Post election, there may be a bid for forces from Reform to stage some kind of takeover of the Conservatives, perhaps involving Farage if he is elected” as a member of Parliament, said Andrew Blick, a politics and contemporary history professor at King’s College London.
“I don’t know if this will be successful, but if it were, the Conservatives would look more like the Trump-era Republicans,” he said. That would leave a victorious Labor party and prospective new prime minister, Keir Starmer, facing a far more extremist and intransigent political opposition.
For all the fandom that can be seen out on the campaign trail, Farage triggers strong negative pushback from across much of the political spectrum. He has been pilloried for saying NATO provoked Russia’s war against Ukraine, for blatantly misogynistic remarks, and for repeated expressions of what critics call thinly veiled racist sentiments.
“You don’t have to watch sheepdog trials to hear a dog whistle,” former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said of Farage, speaking to the Times of London.
On the day Farage began his campaign in Clacton, a young female onlooker, who was later arrested, splattered him with a milkshake on the steps of a well-known seaside pub, the Moon and Starfish. This was not the first milkshaking of Farage’s career, and he handled the incident with a degree of aplomb, grinning for cameras later that day with an order of banana milkshakes in hand.
Three weeks later, though, the man who made bellicosity his political trademark was clearly still harboring a grudge.
“Politics has changed,” he said. “People hurl things at you.”
His divisiveness was attested to by a Clacton couple who were dining on a recent afternoon on the terrace of the pub where the milkshake episode occurred.
Paula Bracegirdle, a part-time cook who said she hoped to retire soon, had qualms about Farage — “a bit extreme, I think,” she said. But her husband, Paul, 60, who works part-time with elderly people with dementia, called him a truth-teller.
“I think he’s straight with what he says,” he said.
They disagreed on Brexit, too: She voted in 2016 to remain in the EU. He supported the Leave campaign that Farage helped spearhead, and like Farage, he now blamed the Conservatives for having failed to manage the departure effectively.
The pair agreed on one thing, though: Clacton, they both said, was no better off than before.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
