How the media promotes Nigel Farage and George Galloway

The first demagogues we meet are in the city-states of ancient Greece. Just as the best democratic traditions can be traced to the Greek states 2,500 years ago, so can the worst manifestations of rule by the people. Originally, the word ‘demagogue’ merely meant a political leader to the ancient Greeks. Soon, however, the word attained far more negative associations. The historian Thucydides and the comic playwright Aristophanes painted the Cleon as a populist who stirred up the Athenians to pursue actions against their own interests.

A demagogue was one who used the dark arts of rhetoric to stir up base emotions, to appeal to fear or hate, and to exploit crises for their own ends. Adolf Hitler, for example, would fit into the category of demagogue, as one who used the methods of democracy. Hitler won popular support at the ballot box: over 17 million Germans voted for him in 1933.

The traditional English approach to demagogues has been ridicule. While the Nazi and Soviet machines were turning out vicious black propaganda, in the blacked-out corridors of the British Council, which was founded in 1934, our boys were crafting a comic song to the tune of Colonel Bogey about Hitler’s wedding tackle.

In 1938 PG Wodehouse considered the best response to our own homegrown Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and his Blackshirts, to be the creation of Sir Roderick Spode. Wodehouse parodied Mosley with the fictional amateur dictator and his pathetic tribe of ‘blackshorts’. According to Gussie Fink-Nottle, Spode’s followers wore black shorts because all the shirts were taken. Wodehouse describes Spode’s appearance ‘as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment’.

Where are the satires of today’s demagogues? In our anti-politics culture the rabble-rouser, appealing to the lowest common denominator, is lionised, not ridiculed. Though their politics bear no comparison with demagogues of the past, in Scotland, fantasist-nationalist Alex Salmond is not only taken seriously, but elected to high office, while in England, there have been those in both the East End and west Yorkshire who voted for George Galloway, a man whose attachment to the Palestinian cause did not allow him even to debate an Israeli student in Oxford last year, let alone a government representative. Yet he is someone who has also spoken approvingly of aspects of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Another modern demagogue, albeit from the other end of the political spectrum, is Nigel Farage. On the Greek definition, he fits the bill almost exactly. He appeals directly to the disaffected working class, over the heads of the political elites, with a message of fear. This appeal works as effectively with working-class former Labour voters as it does with former Tories. At the time of writing, opinion polls suggest 17 per cent of voters will back the United Kingdom Independence party. In the European parliamentary elections in May they may gain one in five votes, and win 10 seats.

Yet this nascent threat to our national wellbeing is not treated seriously. The media consider Farage to be an entertaining jester-like figure, with his beer and fags and casual xenophobia. Although the cognoscenti joke about it, it is actually a matter of grave concern that the producers of BBC Question Time consider the Ukip leader’s views so important that they offer him a prime-time platform on the show more than any other politician. In four years Farage has appeared on Question Time a staggering 15 times.

Consider the reaction to his repudiation of his own 2010 party manifesto. The Ukip manifesto, politics as imagined in the nation’s golf clubs and saloon bars, contained everything from grammar schools to banning immigrants. Farage claimed to have not read it and said, ‘the idiot that wrote it has now left us and joined the Conservatives.’ Just imagine if any other political leader had done such a thing. They would be finished. Yet, when Farage does it, the media attitude is ‘good old Nigel’.

The popular media, especially the broadcasters, create the modern demagogues. They provide for them endless opportunities, regardless of their actual levels of popular support. Media types sneer at mainstream politicians. They call intelligent, nuanced contributions on complex issues ‘boring snoring’. They ignore mathematicians, engineers and scientists in favour of rhetoricians and trouble-makers. The vitriolic soundbite and trenchant comment are king.

The real problem is that demagogues, of the left or right, can only prosper in a climate where the democratic system is judged to have failed. Farage and Galloway feed off the same cynicism and disaffection. They employ the same methods. They appeal to the same emotions of fear and anxiety. The more the media give a platform to promote the view that our democracy is a sham, the more self-fulfilling it becomes. To paraphrase another notorious demagogue, those who invite the demagogues onto the television because they are ‘box office’ are busily engaged in heaping up their own funeral pyre.

Our democracy is imperfect; many of the actors on its stage are flawed. Too much power rests in the hands of those least qualified to exercise it. Too many decisions are taken without accountability or opportunity for redress. But, as they will tell you in downtown Damascus or Tehran, the alternatives are much, much worse.

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Photo: European Parliament