Newsletter #42: Farage on Iran, Tice on the Bank of England, Zia Yusuf on the Britannia Card

PLUS: On the 'Women's Safety Initiative'

Good morning.

Today, we discuss three bad Reform policy pronouncements. I also give my views on the ‘Women’s Safety Initiative’.

This newsletter’s agenda: Reform UK jiggery-pokery: Farage on Iran, Tice on the Bank of England, Zia Yusuf on the Britannia Card (paid); The ‘Women’s Safety Initiative’ — not actually a good look (paid)

Reform UK jiggery-pokery: Farage on Iran, Tice on the Bank of England, Zia Yusuf on the Britannia Card

It’s not been a good week for Reform UK’s policy pronouncements. Three senior figures have made three separate and unwise (and indeed, inept) interventions. Firstly, last Wednesday, Nigel Farage was asked about his views on the Israel-Iran conflict. He informed us that he wanted to get ‘rid of [the] bloody awful regime… We’ve got some major global threats. China. God knows what will happen with Iran, hopefully they get wiped out very shortly… I am not pro de-escalation.’

While my personal views on this conflict are no secret — namely, that we should stay as far away from it as possible, and that further escalation is bad — I am just about willing to hear out friends who disagree. What is more concerning is that at least from this ill-considered comment, Farage seems to not have a single coherent foreign policy thought, other than that Britain should not be a part of the European Union. When Farage was purely an electoral irritant, with zero chance of becoming Prime Minister, this did not matter one bit; people pay far too much attention to foreign policy anyway. Now, however, it is starting to matter a lot more.

In theory, this could be refreshing. What could be better than a Prime Minister who, finding all of Britain’s problems at home to be intractable, didn’t decide to just retreat from these Isles to deal with more glamorous problems on the ‘global stage’? Unfortunately, in Farage, this total lack of interest in foreign policy exhibits itself rather differently; namely, in simply subordinating all of his foreign policy opinions to whatever Trump and his other friends in America have told him to think. Needless to say, this is not what pursuing the national interest actually looks like.

This century alone, Britain has hurtled into multiple pointlessly destructive and expensive conflicts as a result of the unthinking Atlanticism of our elites. Farage, much like Liz Truss, seems to think that offering an alternative, anti-establishment view is to say that this was not enough; that we need to follow the Americans into battle against much more dangerous, and much more distant (and distant from our real interests), foreign powers. Not just Iran, but also — so it seems from this comment — China too. For what? Who knows. But they get a friendlier reception when they visit Washington, so I suppose it must be worth it somehow.