The fact that Nigel Farage’s attitude to risk matches that of British establishment is no surprise or mere coincidence. Tony Blair was the first Prime Minister for more than a generation to have been brought up in this sense. He was only three in 1956 to remember Suez, but he was later able to recognise what it meant to the world to which he belonged.
Suez, which damaged Eden’s reputation, created a political benchmark against which he is widely judged by history. The Suez stigma offered a young Blair with an interest in politics a classic case study in the ultimate price to pay for political recklessness, whether it was the recklessness of those who embarked on a war they could not finish or the recklessness of those who opposed a war they lacked the means to prevent. Blair’s political career was defined by the urge to avoid all of this.
What distinguishes Blair’s Iraq, Eden’s Suez and Farage’s response to the “grooming gang” and the recent “daring” response to an Anti-Islamism Extremism March is the different attitudes towards the risk that each episode reveals. These differences are as telling as any similarities between them.
Farage described the development as “one of the most frightening scenes I have ever seen in this country.” He blamed it on soaring illegal immigration of “young men of fighting age coming into our country” without proper documentation, “so we have no idea of who they really are.”
Risk management is not entirely a product of rational thinking, and no politician can claim otherwise. Everyone’s perception of danger and uncertainty is shaped in part by what they are familiar with, and what they choose to recognise. This is one of the reasons why some politicians take the threat of terrorism so seriously. It is like a conditioned reflex.
Violent threat is what they are familiar with, so they see it as more threatening than other kinds of risks. But as well as being shaped by professional circumstances, individual attitudes to risk are also shaped by personal temperament. Different individuals have different risk temperaments. Some people like to take chances and others don’t. Some can afford to take chances on their health but can’t do so when it involves their money.
It is not easy to know what chances Farage has been willing to take in his private life. However, it is possible to catch a glimpse of that on the evidence of his Reform UK political leadership. Farage is a highly risk-averse politician who nevertheless likes to play for very high stakes.
Unlike some poker players, he does not wait until he has what he feels is a winning ticket before placing his bet on the table. The thought of impossibility as a motivation is what keeps him going.
His risk assessment approach is easily summed up by the popular proverb: “Better safe than sorry.” Like most proverbs, this one doesn’t help much if you don’t get down to details. Of course, it is better to be safe than sorry, and this is obviously an easy choice for anyone.
Beyond the surface, what this preemptive doctrine means is that if there is a chance you might be sorry, it is better to be sorry but safe. Wittingly or unwittingly, this has been the meat of Farage’s argument, though he wishes and hopes that his revelation of national security threat and argument that “Britain is broken” wouldn’t turn into an illusion, so that he wouldn’t even have to say sorry.
Reacting to a recent disturbing TikTok video from convicted Afghan immigrant Mada Pasa, who was recently sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly threatening to kill Farage, the Reform UK Leader wrote on his official Facebook page: “How is he allowed to continue posting these videos from prison? Britain is broken.” It is easy to see Farage as a student of Blair’s school of precaution when you consider the latter’s Sedgefield speech where he revealed his decision to surround Heathrow airport with security, although the feared attack never came. Almost dimming the strong field occupied by Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr, it was one of those rare moments of political inspiration as Blair seemed to have transited into another planet, taking his audience with him by the sheer power of his oratory. His shoulders rising and falling to the cadences of his speech: “Sit in my seat,” he said. “Here is the intelligence. Here is my advice. Do you ignore it? But, of course, intelligence is precisely that: intelligence. It is not hard fact. It has its limitations.
On each occasion, the most careful judgement has to be made taking account of everything we know and advice available. “But in making that judgement, would you prefer us to act even if it turns out to be wrong? Or not to act and hope it’s okay? And suppose we don’t act and intelligence turns out to be right, how forgiving will people be?” Keir Starmer has often reiterated his government’s commitment to return “anyone who comes into our country illegally.” The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently stated that deportation of illegal immigrants has “surged, with 35,000 people—a 13% rise compared to the previous year.” It equally admitted that “abuse of our immigration system is a serious threat to safety.”
Nevertheless, I am sure that the final answer to Blair’s startling questions is everybody’s guess. Yet the truth is nobody really knows until something happens. The evidence of the Manchester synagogue attack and the latest Cambridgeshire stabbing incident cuts both ways. While some people berate the government, others believe that no government can act on all the intelligence it receives without destroying the very lives it seeks to protect, as the care for human lives, and not their destruction, is the first and major objective of a legitimate government. And even when it does act, it cannot be sure that its actions will always be right.
However, what most Brits seem to mind most at the moment, if the surging political popularity of Farage is anything to go by, is a rush to action before the event rather than leaving anything to chance. Why take a chance? So much, then, for Blair’s claim that politicians should act “whatever the political cost.” It also seems to make sense that this is a weird political science that enables its adherents to see what others cannot see.
I am not telling you what you probably don’t know when I say that we are living in a world in which everyone, politicians not excluded, is conscious about personal risk but indifferent to collective fate. Politics in this light will inevitably become even more personalised than it is at the moment, as objects of politics reduce themselves to the subjects of media obsession. Politicians will not shy away from speaking for the country they purport to lead, but it is hard to see how it can be done with enough conviction, which makes the appearance of conviction even more deceptive.
The recent council elections across England offered a peep into the spectacle to come, not so much in the frail and fleeting success of Reform UK, though perhaps in that as well, but in the crashing of gears as the political machine moves at improbable speed from the personal to the impersonal and back again.
