This week, the dam seemed to have finally broken that somehow held back the tide of criticism of Nigel Farage’s acceptance of a £5m payment from a cryptobillionaire. Was it for his personal security? He hasn’t been shot dead by a Leave supporter, like Jo Cox, but he did once have a milkshake thrown at him. Or was it as a reward for driving the unmitigated disaster of Brexit that bulldozed our economy and international standing and destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation? Even LBC’s supine opinion-catheter Nick Ferrari asked this simple question, and ventured a rare moment of disloyalty to the Clacton absentee landlord.
“With all due respect, what’s it got to do with you? It’s an unconditional gift. I can spend it on Ferraris if I want,” said Farage, presumably thinking of Ferraris because he was talking to someone called Ferrari. It’s lucky the interview wasn’t being conducted by Canadian hardcore punk drummer Chuck Biscuits, the comedian Jasper Carrott, the actor Timothy Bottoms, the Damned’s Rat Scabies, or X-Ray Spex’s late Poly Styrene, or Farage’s five-million-pound shopping basket would have looked very different.
Who is moronic or evil enough to be still lending this cynical charlatan their vote – and is it ethical for you to deny them access to their grandchildren, drinking water and basic local GP services? One would imagine, in the week the world grinds to a halt in the face of the undeniable reality of climate change, Reform’s refutation of its objectively observable reality would finally do Nigel Farage’s climate-change denialists in, but maybe some people still hate Pakistanis more than they like being able to breathe, sleep or not die.
In Norfolk, a county traditionally troubled by the cognitive deficiencies caused by cautiously documented interfamilial overfamiliarity, Reform councillor Austen Moore was due to chair a meeting intending to scrap King’s Lynn and West Norfolk borough council’s support of the climate emergency declaration. But the assemblage had to be called off as temperatures exceeded 30C and the fens began to boil as a result of something Reform deny it is necessary to address.
Just as the Taxpayers’ Alliance mainly seeks to help the super-rich avoid tax, something like the Institute of Kitten Warming usually turns out to be an organisation for feeding baby cats into a furnace
It’s easy to be a metropolitan liberal elitist and laugh at a Norfolk Reform councillor for being a fool with a comical regional accent, but the same stupid arguments were due to be platformed with apparent impunity by supposedly respectable characters with expensive educations on the streets of our heat-paralysed capital this week, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s London conference. As with the shady Tufton Street lobbying outfits, the more reasonable the name of an organisation of this nature, the more likely its actual purpose is to be utterly horrific. Just as the Taxpayers’ Alliance mainly seeks to help the super-rich avoid tax, so something like the Institute of Kitten Warming usually turns out to be an organisation dedicated to feeding baby cats into a furnace.
“This conference is a call to the builders. To those who choose gratitude over cynicism. To those who see calling, not catastrophe. To those who create, not complain”, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s website declares, with arrogant grammatical impunity, “To those committed to human flourishing. The decisions we make in the coming years will shape the world for generations. This is our invitation.” The Olympia venue should be ashamed of hosting the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and when I go there in November to see a punk rock legend double bill of the Damned and the Saints I must remember to make sure to vandalise the toilets as thoroughly as possible.
Among the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s co-founders are the vegetable-eschewing far-right philosopher Jordan Peterson and the billionaire Paul Marshall, who owns the bubbling filth-sluice GB News, the Gove-edited hate-sheet the Spectator, and the superficially respectable opinion website Unherd, which was founded by the Reform refugee-Tory Trembling Tim Montgomerie, and which uses intellectual flattery to persuade the grumpy goth grandad Nick Cave to sell reactionary ideas to 6 Music dads. Marshall is also the father of the former Mumford & Sons member and far-right vlogger Winston Marshall, who all the kids call, unfairly in my opinion, Banjo Hitler. But none of that need concern us here.
The first day’s top turn was Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, who has just threatened to quit the International Energy Agency unless they stop talking about green energy transition. Nigel Farage’s adviser James Orr, the Cambridge academic theologian who favours a blanket ban on abortion, is also in attendance, and opposes all net zero ambitions. Over two-thirds of Reform plc’s income comes from donors neck deep in oil and gas interests, but, to be fair, it’s none of our business what Reform do with that money. They can spend it on biscuits, carrots, arses, skin infections and packaging materials if they want.
A Byline Times piece on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference points out that co-founder Paul Marshall’s GB News launched 953 attacks on climate science during the 2024 election alone, and that his hedge fund holds over $2.2bn in fossil fuel interests. The website quotes DeSmog’s Geoff Dembicki saying that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is “a global gathering of people who want to bring populist rightwing policies and values all over the world … [and] one of the key areas where we’re seeing this coordination in learning is on the fight against net zero policies globally”. And we’re seeing this in the week the west must surely, finally, wake up to the undeniable reality of climate change.
As they sweat on the Olympia sun terrace, will fellow attendees Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage, Sarah “too many black faces” Pochin and Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson even take a moment to join the dots?
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel.