A career just in politics? Baffling!

Flickr/Euro Realist Newsletter

Recently, I found myself agreeing with Nigel Farage. This was not a pleasant experience, as judging by UKIP’s manifesto (particularly the parts on increased military spending, reduced rights and more nukes) he appears to be a Saturday-morning cartoon villain that’s somehow become the leader of a minor UK political party. Probably as part of some 37 year plan to RULE THE WORLD. Unfortunately for paranoid right-wing extremists, in terms of charisma Farage is no Skeletor.

However, even Megatron has a point sometimes and escaped Captain Planet villain Farage (seriously, look at their environmental policies) said something that struck true even with a lefty like me who believes crazy things like that people should still have rights even if they’re poor or gay or foreign. Or any combination of the three.

Anyway, here it is (and remember, you can always read it in Skeletor’s voice…): Farage said that there was a “wholesale rejection of the career political class going on”. Now I’m fairly certain that no-one has ever taken the slimy career-political classes into their hearts and Farage might just have stumbled upon a popular bogeyman.

There is something inherently disingenuous about career politicians. That is, most politicians. They seem not so much born into the world as slowly oozed into it in chunks like mechanically recovered meat, straight into the mould of a suit. All speaking the same rhetoric; not the beautiful kind we celebrate in Shakespeare nor the grand, sweeping style of Obama or Lincoln but a twisty-turny sort that works well in debate with itself. It has to, it is an Etonian rhetoric and that’s where they all went. A rhetoric of softening blows, sugaring pills, and covering more arses than Calvin Klein. Farage may be dastardly, but he is at least passionate and genuine about his desire to return Britain to 1872.

For me, there has always been something suspect about someone who wants to rule for a career (and for all the modern phrasing of ‘leading’, that’s what it is). It seems despotic. Maniacal. If you were a careers advisor and a 16 year old came in to you and when you asked them what they wanted to do they said “I’d like to control a country and its citizens” you’d think they were power hungry and disturbingly driven to inflict their will on others, yet ”politician” is an acceptable answer. I’m not advocating absolute monarchy or anything, there is no better system unfortunately.

I once met a woman who’d met both David Cameron and Boris Johnson. She said Cameron seemed shifty and false, “too clever”, always scheming behind his eyes. She loved Boris. And that is his threat – against the slick and oily homonculi that lubricate Westminster Boris’ bumbling bluster endears him and makes him come off as genuine. But he is just as big a Tory as the rest of them – perfectly happy to blame the underprivileged for their own condition rather than, you know, societal issues thousands of years in the making ensuring they were born into it.

Boris is a Conservative though, and as such a lesser evil. Let’s return to Farage, and remember to give him his Skeletor voice: “They really do all look the same… they all go to the same schools, the same Oxbridge colleges”. Here too he has a point, and given that Labour recently supported the reinstation of slavery this seems more true than ever. Farage finishes: “None of them has ever had a job in the real world and not one of them is in politics for principle. That is what we stand for.” Indeed, the draw of power has filled the main two parties (and somehow the Lib Dems) with oleaginous clones. Principle—with its old fashioned lustre of saying what you believe and not what will get you votes—has been pushed to the edges and now lies in the hands of near-extremists like Farage.