The Old Lie Repackaged

Ben Wildsmith

Meandering home from Australia, I’ve spent the past couple of days in Singapore.

You’ll remember that during the Brexit campaign, Farage et al were keen on the UK, by which they mean London, becoming ‘Singapore-on-Thames’. A bonfire of trading regulations was supposed to catapult the UK into position as the hub through which all the riches of the west flowed.

Watching the container ships coming and going into Singapore, backed by the priapic skyscrapers of competing investment banks, you can see why Farage, a City trader to his Church’s brogues, would see this as plausible.

The UK is not, formally at least, a city state. Outside of London there remain millions of inconvenient voters whose worldview wasn’t informed by a desire to clean up in the markets, unless with a broom – you know, actual work.

Trading hub

Creating a trading hub requires flexibility when it comes to the movement of goods, capital, and people.

Singapore is rammed full of people who weren’t here last week and won’t be next week, that’s the nature of commerce. It’s the easiest country to pass immigration into by a country mile. You fill in an online form and, unless Interpol are after you, come on in.

That doesn’t sound very Nige-friendly, does it? You’d think the camel-coated gammon whisperer would have a fit of the vapours at such a notion.

Johnny Foreigner just waltzing through the airport without so much as a strip search under fluorescent lights? What can they be thinking?

That is, I suggest, to underestimate the utter duplicity of his project, latterly dressed up as Reform UK and eyeing up the Valleys with bad intent. I put it to you that Farage doesn’t care about immigration at all. Brexit was sold to slow learners as a vehicle for stopping the inflow of people, but it was only ever going to prevent EU citizens from coming to the UK, and even they were repelled more by disgust at what we had done than any positive moves to eject them.

The rest of the world was entirely unaffected by the UK’s secession from the EU, and Farage’s ranine smirk has remained intact.

London-centric

The kind of UK that Farage seeks would be absolutely dependent on the rapid import of labour as required to service changing trading conditions. His problem is that such a UK would be even more London-centric than the current version, so selling that to voters in Blaencwm, Rochester, Barnsley and the rest of forgotten Britain requires some creativity.

The tried and tested method is to ramp up racist rhetoric and keep policy under wraps.

I hold on to the hope that there aren’t enough credulous people in Wales, or the wider UK, to allow this obvious con trick to result in real power.

Last week, Leanne Wood and a couple of friends attempted to question Reform UK at a publicly advertised meeting. The meeting was quickly redesignated as private, and they were refused an audience.

If Reform UK had any real offer to Wales, beyond being a tuneless trumpet through which people can blow their discontent, its representatives would welcome debate with figures like Leanne Wood. Instead, they seek to enlarge their bubble of support in a vacuum within which no scrutiny is permitted.

Crime scene

To walk through Singapore’s Chinatown is to visit one of the British Empire’s most egregious crime scenes. Wretched ghosts haunt the former coolie houses, opium dens, and brothels that funded the banking houses of London and their royal patrons.

The false rectitude of Victorian Britain sat upon oceans of misery that stretched around the globe, impervious to suffering, and shameless in its hypocrisy. Singapore-on-Thames? No thanks, Nige.