Once bitten
Nigel Farage is claiming that a Reform government will double the size of our fishing zone, so as to force out those nasty foreigners.
Any and all voters in coastal areas, or elsewhere, who fall for this deserve all they get. Farage has done more harm to the fishing industry than any one else. He made our exports, and we export the vast majority of what we catch, more difficult. It was impossible to not give the EU some fishing rights in our waters because they had us over a barrel, the total opposite of what Farage claimed and not to be unkind, but fishing is a minute industry in the UK and ruining our relationship with Brussels over this is madness.
But it illustrates a wider point, Farage wins not because of his policies but by just being a repository for disgruntled voters.
Amazingly enough the very voters who support him are disgruntled because of 45 years of Thatcherism. Low pay, lower pensions, less job security, lower benefits, a run down NHS, more crime, fewer police, austerity and all the rest are what has ruined many people life chances and security.
But their reaction is to vote for someone who boasts of making it worse. He wants the privatise the NHS, make us Singapore on Thames, let in American food, slash taxes for the rich and destroy our relationship with Europe even more.
Fishing is just camouflage, the industry if it had any sense would invite him to a press conference and then throw rotten fish guts at him.
But they won’t, they are Farage’s useful idiots and will play the role to the very end.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.