Starmer’s feverish Faragephobia reveals his hatred of the masses

You can always tell when a centrist is crapping himself: he plays the Hitler card. He goes rummaging in the darkest moment of modern times in search of an insult to fling at the person who’s put the wind up him. Witness David Lammy’s mad claim that Nigel Farage once ‘flirted with Hitler Youth’. It’s not true, of course, but it revealed a truth – that Labour is flailing like crazy in response to the threat posed by Reform UK to Keir Starmer’s government and the very foundations of British politics.

It was after Sir Keir’s speech at the Labour conference in Liverpool on Sunday that Lammy dropped the H-bomb. In a vain effort to sound more passionate, but coming off like a short-circuiting android, Starmer slammed Reform’s promise to scrap indefinite leave to remain for immigrants as ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’. Later, on the BBC, Lammy was asked if he thought Farage was racist. It’s even worse, Lammy hinted – he’s Adolf-adjacent. ‘I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgements about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger’, he said.

To which every sane viewer, if the Beeb has any left, will have responded: ‘You what?’ Some might have pictured a young Nige sneaking a fag in his brownshirt and swastika armband round the back of Dulwich College. It is bunkum, of course. It springs from allegations made in 2013 by someone who had ‘no personal knowledge of Farage’ but who heard on the rumour mill that he liked to march through ‘quiet Sussex villages’ singing ‘Hitler Youth songs’. Sounds legit! Farage called Lammy’s rehashing of this laughable lie ‘disgusting and libellous’. Lammy has since walked it back.

This is reckless behaviour from a senior government official. It’s one thing for a teen midwit in a keffiyeh to shout ‘Hitler!’ at people he hates, but the secretary of state for justice? The deputy prime minister? Prior to those positions, Lammy was foreign secretary. Is it too much to ask that the man who until recently oversaw the foreign affairs of our once great nation should not bandy around the fascist slur? That he should not cheapen political discourse and demean historical truth by reducing the Nazi era to a soapbox from which he might rip the piss out of his opponents? The Holocaust is not your prom dress, David.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a politician who once accused the BBC of racism because it wondered if the smoke from the Vatican would be black or white also thinks liking ale and wanting better border control makes one Hitleresque. But they’re all at it. Faragephobia was the core theme of the Labour conference.

Choose my ‘decency’ over Farage’s ‘division’, said Starmer. Coming off like a Temu Winston Churchill, he said to Farage: ‘You are the enemy and we will fight you.’ On the beaches? In the fields? Starmer’s readying of the Labour troops for war against the ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’ Farage generated some of the most batshit newspaper headlines I’ve seen in years. ‘Starmer vows Labour will never surrender Britain to “enemy” Farage’, cried the Independent, conjuring up an image of wet, woke hacks sobbing into a warm beer and playing ‘Nimrod’ on a loop as they vow to defend Britain – well, Hackney Wick – from the menace of Faragism.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood clearly got the memo about madly obsessing over Farage. She told reporters that what Farage is doing is actually ‘worse than racist’. So he’s ultra racist, super-racist, the most racist? With his promise to get tough on immigration, he’s blowing a ‘very, very loud dog whistle to every racist in the country’, she said. For heaven’s sake, can we please retire the ‘dog whistle’ slur, that grossly elitist vision of the masses as a canine-like mob just waiting to be sprung into depraved action by a coded cry from one of their demagogic controllers? It’s still true, it seems: scratch an ‘anti-fascist’, find a classist.

What is Labour playing at? Who is this feverish Farage-hate for? The only people who still get a thrill from mimicking Rick from The Young Ones and shouting ‘Fascist!’ at Farage are those tossers who belly-laugh at Led By Donkeys stunts and use words like ‘Brexshit’ and ‘cockwomble’. You think you can rebuild your knackered party on the votes of balding Remoaners who get their moral guidance from Marina Hyde columns? Okay, good luck with that.

Others, including vast swathes of the working class, have turned to Reform. And not because they’re Hitler fanboys, or ‘worse than racists’, or dogs who’ve been let off their leashes by a sneaky whistle from Master Farage. No, because they want change. They feel failed by both Labour and the Tories, so they’re willing to take a punt on a politician who promises to control the borders, restore national integrity and knock down wokeness.

The BBC says Starmer’s government is keen to ‘draw a distinction’ between Farage and his supporters. When we call Reform’s policies ‘racist’, we are not ‘using the same label about the party’s supporters’, they say. Bollocks. We’re not as dumb as you think. We know the real reason you dread Farage is because of that army of ‘dogs’ whose interest in politics has been rekindled by his campaigning. You hate Farage but it’s that rabble you truly fear.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy