### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 4th August 2024 ###
Dear Editor,
I read John Crace’s piece on Nigel Farage’s “conspiracy-laden ego trip” (The Guardian, 31st. July 2024, link below) and although, yes, Mr Farage’s questions were somewhat intrusive, I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with requesting that clarification. And, in the end, exactly that was necessary to quell wild online speculation.
Mr Crace asserts that Mr Farage’s actions are straight out of “The Trump Playbook”, something which I doubt because Trump is a “bull in a china-shop” so would certainly have been far more bombastic than Mr Farage. But for me this assertion itself is out of the “Trump-Biden Playbook”. Let me explain …
Trump and Biden were like two boxers who slug it out with each-other. This has been my frustration for months now: Rather than talk about policy, it has all been about “bashing Trump”. Here, regardless of how “bash-worthy” Trump is, personality-centric politics (whether Trump or Farage) is completely counter-productive when it comes to solving real-world problems. Of which we have plenty.
Now we have the brutal murder of children and riots on the streets and so deciding to do some “Nigel Bashing” might shift the guilt but it is a distraction which doesn’t help to solve anything.
The rioters, disaffected and angry white men, are certainly thugs, and attacking police is completely unacceptable, but surely a priority now should be to understand the root causes of this madness?
I recently read “The Victorians” by A.N. Wilson: At the start of Chapter 11, which investigates why the European revolutions of 1848 failed to spread to the UK, one Chartist-leader describes how he had accidentally “knocked over an old woman’s apple-basket” and experienced her anger. The author surmises that this “ownership of commerce” is the reason why England did not experience the riots and the revolutions that swept through Europe: As Napoleon proclaimed, England is a “country of shop-keepers”. So we can assume that in 1848 they were busy looking after their shops.
So who owns those shops (and commerce) these days? Here in Cologne citizen-, family- and locally- owned businesses are closing down and being replaced by “The Corporates”, either as physical outlets, franchises, or online services whose products are either streamed in or produced/delivered by wage-slaves. With the “March of the Corporates” being even more advanced in the UK.
Whether we recognise it or not, every one of us is experiencing a period of dwindling control with even our elected politicians having to yield to the demands of oligarchic corporate interests. So it does not surprise me that those “at the bottom of the pile”, even if they don’t directly own the commerce, sense the loss of control and experience growing frustration.
A demand of the rioters is that “We want our country back” with them assuming that immigrants and foreigners are to blame. Here I would say that they have identified “the wrong culprits”: It is not the migrants but rather “Rapacious Global Corporatism” which is busy wrestling control from both governments and from citizens.
My urgent suggestion would be to tax and regulate the aggressive (and often tax-avoiding) business strategies of “The Corporates” so that there is more space for citizens to be engaged in commerce and craftsmanship with the idea being that people who are busy producing, building, selling or repairing things have a certain level of fulfillment and “community” and so are far less prone to riot.
Yours,
Alan Mitcham
Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/31/southport-has-suffered-enough-without-farages-conspiracy-laden-ego-trip
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