Don’t normalise Farage. He is anything but normal
Opinion
News outlets must properly interrogate Reform on how effectively they run things, not report uncritically on the social division they stir.
The media is facing enormous challenges over how it reports on two important continuing stories — one domestic, the other foreign.
The first is how the Reform party and its leader Nigel Farage are questioned and held to account after their unexpectedly strong showing in last week’s local elections in England.
There is a danger that Reform — with its tally of 677 local council seats, 31% of the vote and the narrow six vote majority at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election — will now be normalised, when it is anything but normal.
However, we have to listen to Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, when he argues that Reform can no longer be dismissed as a short-lived protest vote.
At least in these particular local elections the party has reached a threshold where it can benefit from the first-past-the-post electoral system, combined with the ability to cluster votes in particular areas.
Heed the American warning
Reform did well in areas that supported Brexit, voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 and where more than half the electorate have few, or any educational qualifications.
The warning from the US is stark. The media — and television in particular — normalised Trump, treated him as an orthodox candidate deserving the normal standard of balance rather than calling out his lies and many misdemeanors (if that is not too polite a term).
The parallels from the US are far from exact and the echoes of warning from there are weak but they are all too real, and Farage is a Trump acolyte.
If, as Farage argues, Reform has broken up the old two party system, then Farage and all his works have to be subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as Labour and the Conservatives.
The BBC should have a lot on its conscience for, in effect, helping to create the public persona of Nigel Farage. Not least by having him on Question Time 39 times when for most of that time neither Farage nor indeed any of his many parties held a seat in the House of Commons.
Reform is largely a one-issue party running on an anti-immigration ticket with most of their other policies, to the extent that they exist, incoherent and uncosted.
Farage rails about broken Britain without accepting, critics say, that he did more than anyone else to break the country though Brexit — a continuing annual charge of around £100bn in lost trade.
Keep current events in context
Reform has never run a council and the early signs do not look good.
Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Dame Andrea Jenkins, now the Reform Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire promised to sack all Lincolnshire staff involved in diversity the moment she took over power.
The only problem is there are no such staff to sack at Lincolnshire Council.
Local government in the UK has been squeezed financially for years and although some waste can always be found it is unlikely there will be enough to make much of a difference.
Perhaps the most surprising example of normalisation came from the new-look Observer, no less, featuring the women of Reform.
As investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr noted tartly: “It’s not Bake-Off. It’s a global far right insurgency,” although she may well not be warmly disposed to The Observer at the moment.
The media has to keep current events in context. There are 6,395 Labour councillors and the Conservatives have 4,507 compared to Reform’s 677, and the Liberal Democrats have 72 MPs compared to the Reform total of five.
Above all else Farage and Reform should be properly interrogated on how efficient and effectively they actually run things rather than reporting uncritically the stirring up of social division and appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Reframing needed in Ukraine
In a rather different way, there has been an almost accidental imbalance in the way Ukraine’s courageous response to the Russian invasion has been reported although the consequences are serious — accidental, but serious all the same.
The cameras are there in Kyiv, as they should be, recording the nightly bombardment and the daily tragedies.
Partly because of the difficulty of access and the different nature of the targets, hitting Russian ammunition dumps and even bringing down Russian war planes with naval drones does not have the same news, or emotional impact.
The overall impression could be that Ukraine is losing the war, and perhaps more importantly that it cannot possibly win — something that feeds into the Trump narrative that suggests ceding captured Ukrainian land to Russia.
The reality is rather different: Russian now controls around 20% of Ukrainian territory compared to more than 30% at its peak, at a cost of more than 100,000 Russian deaths.
The biggest factor which is difficult to convey in images is the increasingly fragile nature of Putin’s war economy.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the economics facility at Kyiv University, believes the Russian economy is now “tanking” and is in worse shape than that of Ukraine.
As the BBC’s excellent Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg reports, Russians are facing unprecedented rises in utility bills, huge price increases in basics such as butter and potatoes plus a tripling of the country’s deficit. Ironically because of Trump’s negative effect on the world economy and Saudi Arabian plans to cut the price of oil, Putin’s revenues from oil could be further squeezed.
The effect could be intensified if there are further sanctions against the ghost ships carrying Russian oil in the Baltic.
It is difficult to show the significance of all this in dramatic pictures.
However, praise is due for The Sun’s Robin Perrie who reported from Ukraine this week that Zelensky had launched a new offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.
The attack was almost certainly designed to prevent Putin from claiming that Ukrainian troops had all been expelled from Russian territory ahead of Russia’s Victory Day celebrations on Friday.
As with the need for scepticism about the rise of Farage story, so the media should keep alive the thought that the ingenious Ukrainians could do even better against the Russians in the future with increased support in money and weapons.
The Coalition of the Willing should be encouraged to demonstrate they really are willing to act rather than talk. Better analysis and more comprehensive reporting would help.
The future of many Western democracies could depend on it.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.