Fight for his party to the right: Nigel Farage

This episode focuses on Nigel Farage's political maneuvers as he announces his candidacy for MP, aiming to reshape right-wing politics in the UK.

1. Nigel Farage's candidacy could significantly impact the Conservative Party's performance in the upcoming general election.
2. Farage's political agenda includes stringent immigration policies and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.
3. The episode explores the potential for Farage's Reform UK party to split the right-wing vote in the UK.
4. There is a deep ideological split within the Conservative Party regarding Farage's potential inclusion and his political strategies.
5. The broader implications of Farage's influence reflect a significant moment in the trajectory of British right-wing politics.

1: Introduction to the Episode

Overview of the episode's theme focusing on British politics and Nigel Farage's impact. Jason Palmer: "Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world."

2: Farage's Political Strategy

Discussion on Nigel Farage's candidacy and its implications for the Conservative Party. Matthew Hull House: "It's that endemic risk of right-wing voters splitting away from the Conservative party nationally, that is the greater worry for the Tories."

3: The Popularity of Populism

Exploration of the rising popularity of populist movements in Western politics. Nigel Farage: "It is globalism against populism, and you may loathe populism, but I tell you a funny thing, it's becoming very popular."

4: Impact on Conservative Strategy

Analysis of how Farage's actions might force strategic adjustments within the Conservative Party. Jason Palmer: "What relationship, if any, to have with reform and what to do about Nigel Farage and what to do about all the voters who follow him."

5: Voter Sentiment in Clacton

Insight into the mood and political leanings of the electorate in Clacton, where Farage announced his candidacy. Matthew Hull House: "And it's a place that Nigel Farage has come to time and again over the past decade."

1. Stay Informed: Follow local and national political developments to understand potential shifts in policy.
2. Engage in Political Discussions: Encourage open dialogues about the impacts of populism and globalism.
3. Participate in Elections: Exercise your right to vote to influence political outcomes directly.
4. Research Party Agendas: Understand the political agenda of parties and their impact on national policies.
5. Support Transparent Politics: Advocate for transparency and integrity in political campaigning and governance.

Britain’s pint-sipping rabble-rouser of the right has joined the campaigning ahead of a general election. Win or lose, he will make an impact. America’s stadiums and arenas are often built using taxpayer dollars; they are also often terrible value for money (10:08). And a tribute to William Anders, an astronaut who snapped one of history’s most famed photographs (17:15).

People

Nigel Farage, Jason Palmer, Matthew Hull House

Companies

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Content Warnings:

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Matt
Hi, this is Matt and Sean from two black guys with good credit from a local business to a global corporation. Partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com banking for business to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.

Jason Palmer
The Economist hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

On some level, many american sports fans know that their tax dollars have helped to build the stadiums and arenas that house their local teams. What many of them might not know is that those are pretty consistently terrible investments. And in 1968, William Anders thought he was going to walk on the moon. In the end, his mission was just to swing by and snap some pictures of it along the way. Our obituarys editor says he got an unexpected chance to take perhaps historys most famous photograph.

But first, british politics is for the most part, a two party race. Wartime aside, its been more than a century that the government has been led either by the Labour party on the left or the conservative or Tory party on the right, which is why the latest national opinion poll from YouGov is so notable. The Reform UK party has just overtaken the Conservatives three weeks before a general election. You might know this outfit by its former name, the Brexit party, and you might remember its leader from back then, Nigel Farage. We have to get a grip.

Nigel Farage
It is the major issue of our times. The population explosion has devalued the life of ordinary Britons in just the most extraordinary way. Mister Farage has been the polished id of Britain's populist eurosceptic right since. Well, since the EU was there to be skeptical about before the Brexit party. He led the UK Independence party for a full two decades.

Jason Palmer
He tried to agitate from within, elected as a member of european parliament, there's. An historic battle going on now across the west, in Europe, America, and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism, and you may loathe populism, but I tell you a funny thing, it's becoming very popular.

Now. The YouGov result is just one data point. The Economist's own poll of polls still gives the Conservatives a clear lead, but it has rattled the politicos here, which is just how Mister Farage likes it. Hes been shaping the rightmost flank of british politics for years without himself winning a seat in parliament. Yet in an emergency general election announcement last week, Nigel Farage made the move that many conservative politicians had been dreading.

Nigel Farage
Ill be launching my candidacy at midday tomorrow in the Essex seaside town of Clacton. So midday tomorrow, Clacton at the end of the pier. Matthew Hull House is the economist's british political correspondent. This will be the 8th time that Nigel Farage has stood to be an MP. But really, whether or not he gets elected, his candidacy itself has the capacity to totally change the dynamics of this election.

Jason Palmer
Okay, so before we get too much into the who, let's talk about the where you recently visited Clacton. Tell me about it. What's it like? What's the mood like? Clacton is a town on Britain's east coast, looking into the North Sea, about 90 minutes from London.

Matthew Hull House
And it's a place that Nigel Farage has come to time and again over the past decade. So he was there in 2014 when a conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, defected to Ukip, which was the party that Farage ran, and then triggered a by election, which really became a sort of mini referendum on the conservative party's Europe policy and helped accelerate the pace towards the Brexit referendum. He was there again in 2019, this time leading a party called the Brexit Party, really when he was sort of laying siege to the Theresa May government and helping to accelerate her downfall. And then he was again, this time really announcing that he was launching a new venture as leader of reform that was really trying to oust the conservative partys monopoly effectively on right wing voters in the UK. And you said his candidacy alone was something that the Conservatives were dreading.

Jason Palmer
Why is that? So theres two things we need to think about. One is the narrow prospects of reform winning seats, and actually, it looks pretty marginal. So Farage may win. It is possible that they could win in one or two other places, but theyre going to struggle really beyond that threat to the conservative party from reform is that they just shave votes off the conservative party across the board, and that they help to hasten what looks like a fairly, at this point, looking at the polls, inevitable defeat to the Labour party.

Matthew Hull House
They actually sort of accelerate and they make that worse. So we did some fairly rudimentary number crunching with our model, which suggested that, you know, if Viraj was able to lift reforms, polling by just three points across the board, exclusively from the conservative party, which is actually where the reforms were, appears to be coming from at this point, that that would cost the Tories 40 seats. So it's that endemic risk of right wing voters splitting away from the conservative party nationally, that is the greater worry for the Tories, rather than losing individual seats. So the picture you're painting here is a sort of zero sum game on the whole of the right of british politics. Is Mister Farage's goal here sensible?

Jason Palmer
Do you think he can get what he wants? It's not implausible for the reason that we know that the conservative party is fairly deeply split on the issues which Efraj campaigns on. So Efraj is in favor of withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, which a chunk of the conservative party agrees with. He's in favor of a much more restrictive migration policy, effectively net zero migration to the UK. He's in favor of a much more rapid regime for the deportation of irregular migrants.

Matthew Hull House
A big chunk of the conservative party in parliament agrees with that agenda. It's one that splits the party, actually. We know conservative figures who hope to be the next leader, such as Cirilla Braverman, are open about the prospect of Farage sort of being welcomed into the conservative party. We know that others senior figures in the party are actively opposed to that. They see Farraj as an entrist.

And so should the result of the election be what the polls suggest it is? And should Nigel Farage win the seating collect? And this debate about what relationship, if any, to have with reform and what to do about Nigel Farage and what to do about all the voters who follow him is going to be sort of the number one essay question that the conservative party has to grapple with after the election. But let's remember the Reform party started life as the Brexit party, right? No one seems to be talking much about Brexit now.

Jason Palmer
How do you think reform voters feel about that, given the way people have sort of cooled on the whole notion and the way that it's gone? Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, the Reform Party has sort of been a bit like doctor who reincarnating, and that he began as the UK Independence Party, or before that, the anti Federalist League. And that was all animated towards getting a referendum on the European Union and then leaving it. And it was really interesting event, the rally in Clacton, because despite leaving the EU having been the animating cause of Raj's career, he didn't mention it that much.

Matthew Hull House
I went round the crowd, as you do at this sort of events, and talked to people and lots of people didn't really bring up the European Union spontaneously. And when I did raise it, they sort of went, well, you know, it's been a bit of a disappointment. It's not really worked out very well, but they didn't hold Raj responsible for that. There's certainly no sign of regret. The line was that it had been betrayed or failed by people in Westminster, people in the civil service, you know, effectively sabotaged from within, you know, people saying that to a greater or lesser degree of conviction.

Jason Palmer
So voters in Clacton, anyway, are ready to forgive Mister Farage any shortcomings of the Brexit project. But as you say, the electoral prospects aren't the important part here for the Reform party. That's right. And when you look at the priorities of people who voted for the conservative party in 2019, they do tend to say that immigration is the number one issue for them. Over the past year or two, immigration has been much, much higher than it has been in previous years under this government.

Matthew Hull House
So it is not surprising that almost a single issue party such as Reform UK should be doing quite well at taking chunks out of that conservative 2019 vote. It's important to note, actually, that when you look at similar polls on Labour's vote, it's a much, much lower priority. So the Labour Party has said that it wants to see immigration come down, you know, has its own sort of law enforcement led agenda on this. Something that lots of people in the Labour party say to me is, even though they may sort of be quite delighted by the state of the conservative party's polling, they're looking at the trajectory of the european right. They're looking at the success of people like Maloney.

And there is a very strong sense that we are at a really important moment in the trajectory of the british right. And a figure like Nigel Farage has the potential to remake it in quite substantial ways if the election goes as Paul suggests. Matthew, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.

Janice Torres
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Jason Palmer
The baseball fans who come to see the Kansas City Royals play in Kaufman Stadium pay close attention to where their money goes.

Improbably, you can still get a hot dog for a buck, $1.

And back in April, nearly three fifths of the city's voters rejected a sales tax that would have helped pay for a newer, better stadium. So the Royals may choose to up sticks and go elsewhere. And wherever they end up, taxpayers will probably end up footing much of the bill for their new digs. Virtually every new stadium arena professional sports facility in America is built with public funds. Simon Rabinovich is the Economist's us economics editor.

Simon Rabinovich
That's been true for decades, but the public funds going into them are getting bigger and bigger, and that is despite ample evidence that these are almost always lousy investments for the government. So the Royals are clearly looking for a new stadium, but that's kind of a common thing, right? Yeah. There are a lot of teams that are in the midst of either building stadiums or planning stadiums or thinking about stadiums. Academics at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, ran the numbers, and their basic expectation is that about as many as 40 different facilities might be replaced this decade.

Stadiums tend to be used for just about 30 years, and if you look at the median age of stadiums and arenas around America, it's about 25 right now, and there's tons of examples. So in baseball, Tampa Bay is building a new stadium. Oakland is hoping to move to Las Vegas. In american football, Buffalo is building a new stadium. So is Nashville, for the Tennessee Titans, the Chicago Bears, to build a new one.

And basketball, Los Angeles has just built a new arena. Philadelphia and Oklahoma want to do the same, and there are many others. And you started off by saying that that's going to be a lot of public funds going in. The academics at Kennesaw who've looked at this anticipate that the cost of the public might end up running to about $20 billion. Now, there is some good news, which is that in the 1960s and 1970s, local governments were often paying 100% of the cost of the new stadiums days.

There's a realization that the owners of the teams ought to bear some of the costs. So public funding typically covers maybe 40% of the total costs. The issue is that stadiums have gotten bigger, brighter, more lavish, more bells and whistles. So even though the portion of public funding has declined in absolute terms, even controlling for inflation, subsidies are roughly three times today what they were in the 1980s, the last big construction wave. So typically, governments are on the hook for about $500 million per sports facility.

Jason Palmer
The stadium owners make money off of these facilities. The teams are businesses in their own right. Why does the city need to foot any of the bill? In general, three separate economic arguments are used to justify government subsidies for stadiums. Number one is the idea that big stadiums and sports teams generate thousands of jobs.

Simon Rabinovich
The second is that once you've got the sports team up and running, you have a sustained source of consumption for the local economy, a big, popular entertainment venue that gets people out of their houses spending money. The third point is that that stadium can be the anchor of a thriving neighborhood. The problem is that when you look at the evidence of the last half century, all three of these arguments are a little bit wanting. Okay, go on. Why is that?

So let's take each of these arguments in turn. The first one, the idea that they create a lot of jobs. Well, the vast majority of the jobs come during the construction phase. But once the stadium is actually built, you're left with a facility that maybe has a few hundred permanent employees, the ticket takers, the maintenance staff. It's equivalent to a mid sized department store.

The second point is that the consumption boost is not all it's cracked up to be. Yes, people are spending lots of money on going to see sports, but if the sports team was not there, they'd be spending on other things, instead going to a movie, to a restaurant. So this is not necessarily new spending. It's spending that has been displaced from other parts of the economy. The third point, and I think this is really the most important one, is that if you look at the stadium as a fulcrum for community or neighborhood development, there are lots of before and after studies that conclude that actually the relationship between the arrival or the departure of a team team and the local economy is basically insignificant.

All that money going to the sports teams could have gone to something else. It could have gone to better roads, it could have gone to better schools, many of these things would have generated better return on investment for the government than just plowing the money into a sports team. Well, look, if all of this is clear in the numbers, why is this even a debate? It's coming up recently because there have been a few cities that effectively have rejected these subsidies. Kansas City had a vote on whether or not to extend a sales tax to support the construction of new stadiums for their baseball team and their football team.

Nearly 60% of local residents in a city that really is a sports mad city rejected the subsidy. And so some optimists are saying the public and elected officials are beginning to back away from subsidies. And that's good news. The problem with that argument is that for every instance that you've had an elected official or a local public saying they don't want to do the subsidy, you've got somebody else somewhere else coming up with the money. So what's happening right now in Kansas City is the vote was in the state of Missouri.

That's where the rejection was. Just across the border in the state of Kansas. Local officials are trying to concoct a big subsidy for the teams to move their stadiums across the state line. I think the root of the problem is really fandom itself for voters. Their sense of civic identity is really caught up in the idea of their local sports team.

In Kansas City, many of the people that I spoke to, they're not so crazy these days about the Royals, the baseball team. They love the Chiefs, the football team, which has just had back to back Super bowl victories. One of the views that was expressed to me was that had the vote just been about attacks that would benefit the football team, absolutely, the yes side would have won. So I think that we're stuck with stadium subsidies. As long as people love their sports, politicians are going to continue to dole out the funds.

Jason Palmer
Simon, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason.

Ann Rowe
Bill Anders had high hopes of going to the moon. Ann Rowe is the economist's obituaries editor.

Jason Palmer
Houston here, Apollo eight, go ahead. He'd been training in the lunar landing vehicle, but the mission he was actually assigned to, Apollo eight, was never meant to go to the moon. Instead, they were going to test fly the lunar module around the earth, and the lunar module turned out not to be ready on time. So NASA decided instead they'd turn Apollo eight into a lunar orbit mission. This was an extraordinary risky move because humans had never been outside Earth orbit before.

Ann Rowe
Bill Anders thought their chances of succeeding were very low, not more than one in three. He expected they probably wouldn't get back. But all the same, NASA was determined to do it, because rumor had got round that the Russians were determined to do it. Pretty soon they got to get there first and show who was number one. So they went off to the moon, leaving the lunar module behind.

Bel Anders was sorry about that, and he was also pretty disappointed when he came to the moon itself. To his mind, it wasn't anything like the shining orb of the poets. Instead, it was grey and barren, Stark, ugly, he often said. But they had to do their work of finding the proper landing sites for the mission that was doubtless going to follow when they would get a man on the moon. So all of them were equipped in some way or another to take photographs of it.

He was photographing as normal when suddenly something shocking came into the corner of his eye, and it was color.

He had not seen color for a long time. He'd been focused on a grey and dark grey place, and he wondered what on earth this little bit of color could be, and suddenly saw that it was a shining blue marble that was rising above the moon, wreathed in cloud, a really beautiful sight. And it was the earth rising.

He felt very emotional to see this sight. And he shouted to his colleagues, oh. My God, look at that picture over there. There's the earth coming up. Wow, that pretty.

Oh my God, look at that picture over there. Wow, is that pretty. The minute he said that, the other two, Lovell and Boorman, absolutely dived for cameras. Boorman's camera, though, would only take black and white film, and Lovell's the same. So Anders realized he had the best camera to take this, but he needed color film, he hadnt loaded it.

So he crazily grabbed around to get Lovell to send him some color film, and then he needed to put on a telephoto lens, and at last he seemed to be ready to take the picture. But he didnt have a light meter in the spacecraft, so he had to guess at that. So he said his wonderful photographic technique was just a point. His camera at the earth click the f stops and change the aperture with every click. And that way he caught three wonderful photographs, which eventually became known as earthrise.

He only took three, and he would have liked to take a lot more, but Bormann had told him right at the start, this isn't in the flight plan, it's not scheduled. They had to save their film to photograph landing sites, and they couldn't just expend it where they wanted to. So he actually ordered Anders and Lovell to go to their couches and try to sleep. But Anders found he couldn't sleep at all, because he just wanted to look out of his window and look at the earth.

He reflected that down there on that beautiful, fragile surface, looked as fragile as a Christmas tree ornament. And actually it was Christmas Eve anyway, so he had those thoughts in his mind for thinking how delicate it was. But down there on that planet, there were wars raging, especially the war in Vietnam. America's campuses were alight, riots were convulsing Europe, forests were burning, people were at each other's throats. And it was hard to believe, because this delicate planet really needed caring for.

It did not need people to be treating it that way. And besides, when he looked at it space wise and looked at the distance between Moscow and Washington, these fervid space rivals. They could be spanned with his finger and thumb together.

This view of the earth as a really precious object was overwhelming to the astronauts. And thanks to his photographs, that message was really strongly delivered to the world as well. Because the picture earthrise was very soon featured on stamps in America. It ran in magazines and in newspapers. It became a poster that decorated countless college walls, and it kicked off the green movement.

There was one quote in particular that was always being said or read back at him, something that seemed so poetical that he wondered, he could possibly have said it. They went all the way to the moon to discover the earth.

Jason Palmer
Ann Roe on William Anders, who's died aged 90.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Jon Joe Devlin and our sound designer is will rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Languk. Our senior creative producer is William Warren.

Our producers are Maggie Khedifa and Benji guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta Macfarlane. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence.

Matt
Hi, this is Matt and Sean. From two black guys with good credit from a local business to a global corporation. Partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bank of America.com banking for business to learn more. What would you like the power to do?

Bank of America na copyright 2024.