Yes. Not A Clever Call, Nigel.

Nigel Farage's mistake Covid-contrarianism is not the germ of a new popular movement Melanie Phillips Nov 2 Nigel Farage Nigel Farage single-handedly changed the course of British politics. Without the pressure he piled on the Conservative party through his campaign for the UK to leave the EU, David Cameron would not have been sufficiently spooked to call the referendum on EU membership that he assumed he would comfortably win. The rest is (almost) history. The Brexit vote in 2016 demonstrated that Farage possesses awesome political acumen. He exhibited this again when, once more single-handedly, he forced onto the agenda earlier this year the issue of illegal migrants crossing the Channel in ever-escalating numbers, over which he piled pressure on the government to stop this traffic (which it still hasn’t managed to do). Now he has announced that he is rebranding his Brexit party in order to oppose the restrictions that have been imposed upon the population to combat Covid-19. This is a mistake. The reason why he changed the course of British politics is that he understood — intuitively, viscerally and correctly — the mood of the silent majority.  He understood that there was enormous unspoken public anger about Britain’s continued membership of the EU. He understood that a majority of people were deeply unhappy that they were being deprived of their basic right to be governed by laws passed by their own democratically elected and sovereign parliament which should be answerable to them and to no other power. And he also understood that those who felt like this had been abandoned by an entire governing class which was wholly detached from the public’s concerns and which, worse still, denounced and disdained those who expressed them. But over Covid-19, Farage is not articulating unspoken anxieties. He is not championing those suffering these anxieties against those who disdain them. On this occasion, he’s actually going against the public mood, aligning himself instead with those who say the public are too stupid to understand the available evidence and that they have been terrified out of their wits into behaving like sheep being herded to the libertarian slaughter. Polling suggests that more than 70 per cent of the public support the lockdown. That’s a reduction from the 93 per cent who supported the first one in March; but that drop is almost certainly due to the understandable loss of trust in the government for having so demonstrably messed up by constantly changing its mind, doing too little too late and then introducing belated initiatives in a muddled, chaotic and contradictory way. If Farage had chosen as his platform criticism of the government for its failure to  adopt clear, decisive and more effective measures as the only way to achieve the only honest and moral objective there can be at present — ie, to depress the incidence of infection and thus the levels of serious illness and death in order to protect life and buy time for health provision to cope until effective vaccines eventually come on stream — he would be speaking for the majority. Instead, he has chosen to dump on them by suggesting the restrictions they support are unjustifiable, and by making claims that are simply wrong.