Last year, in return for abstaining in a key Senedd vote, Plaid Cymru extracted a promise from Labour to introduce a law before the 2026 election that would disqualify any Senedd member found guilty by independent scrutiny of deliberate lying and deception. Such a law would make the Senedd the first parliament anywhere to take this step and would hugely boost Wales’ infant democracy. Moreover it would be an inspiring and bold counter measure desperately needed in a world of calculated misinformation, bot farms and tyrannical politicians who routinely and brazenly lie as a strategy to flood the public realm with so many bogus assertions that checking and refuting becomes impossible (for example, it has been calculated that Donald Trump made an astonishing 30,573 misleading and false claims in his first term as US President).
Unsurprisingly, Eluned Morgan’s pathetically comatose Labour administration has reneged on that supposedly binding promise, kicked it into the long grass and come up with a typically toothless and timid alternative that changes nothing while throwing in a vague intention to take action at some unspecified date in the far distant future (i.e. never). In short, Labour lied. Yes, the ‘accountability’ bill currently going through the Senedd turns out to be yet another of Labour’s specialities: an ineffectual, pussy-footing waste of time designed not to perturb their colonial bosses in London. But this is all that can be expected from a party that contains a fat fib in its very name: ‘Welsh Labour’ does not actually exist; it has no autonomy whatsoever, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK Labour Party in England, doesn’t select its own candidates, doesn’t decide its own policies and isn’t even permitted to have its own bank account.
Starmer’s authoritarian control-freaks at Westminster invariably stamp out any radicalism and good ideas generated in supposedly-devolved Wales, and now they have stymied the possibility of taking the wind out of the sails of Reform UK should they snatch a clutch of Senedd seats at the 2026 election. Given that the entire edifice of Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage is built upon lie after lie, a law against lying in the Senedd would neutralise the far-right creeps in no time.
Farage is a blatant charlatan. His carefully constructed public persona of plain-talking, down-to-earth, beer-swilling, blokeish man of the people is pure bullshit. He is actually a privileged, preening, privately educated, posh Tory, the son of a stockbroker born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Packed off to boarding school (Dulwich College), he developed a reputation, alleged in detail by over 20 of his fellow pupils, as a nasty bully partial to despicable neo-fascist opinions and extreme racism. Apparently, the patriotic Brit was fond of asserting “Hitler was right”, serenaded Jewish boys at the school with ‘Gas ‘Em All’ to the tune of Bless ‘Em All and became notorious for his vicious, persistent tormenting of other boys, particularly if they were gentle and academically-inclined and didn’t stand up to him. The template was set: the classic bully’s tendency to pick on the weak and crawl to the strong, to kick down rather than punch up. Farage, of course, attempts to diminish these formative years today and write his behaviour off as long-ago ‘banter’ while gracelessly conceding he may at times have ‘misspoken’. But people’s characters are well established by their teens; they don’t reform.
He was a card-carrying Tory member by the time he was 14 and at age 18 the lazy oaf, far too thick to go on to tertiary education, relied on daddy pulling strings to get him work in the City of London’s parasitic financial sector. In adulthood his life has been marked by his abiding bone-marrow racism combined with massive egotism which prompted him to leave the Tory Party (far too soft on ‘foreigners’ for his liking) and create his very own political parties: first UKIP, then the Brexit Party and now Reform UK. Somehow the utterly charmless slime-ball elbowed his way into public life (largely thanks to the reliably dreadful BBC giving a platform to neo-fascism under the guise of ‘impartiality’ and allowing him to became their go-to talking head when civilised and humane opinions had to be ‘balanced’ by thuggery and ignorance). Boorish bar-room bigots had always existed but now, instead of being a laughing stock, such people’s foul propaganda went mainstream.
For 20 years he raked in big salaries and wallowed in publicity as a member of the European Parliament until he had the pitiful Tory Party in his pocket and, largely due to his avalanche of propaganda, forced Cameron, May and Johnson to do his bidding – aided and abetted by the complete lack of scrutiny and critical analysis from the UK’s vile rightwing media. His Brexit dream was duly achieved in 2020 and the outcome five years later has been the polar opposite of Farage’s preposterous promises: the UK economy has so far shrunk by 8% and counting, losing a staggering £90 billion a year in an unmitigated economic disaster that has delivered the very ‘broken Britain’ that Farage now has the bare-faced gall to bewail and posit Reform UK as the solution! Meanwhile his xenophobic racist dog-whistling has only resulted in the replacing of European migrants and visitors with hosts of illegal black migrants fleeing poverty and wars instead – the very people that his supporters hate the most.
So far all his political parties have collapsed in the chaos of clashing egos, mentally ill activists, inbuilt contradictions, inability to draw up plausible manifestos and widespread criminality. But that doesn’t stop Farage: he openly betrays his beloved Britain by slagging it off in the USA, he crawls pathetically to his heroes Trump and Musk, he denies climate change is happening despite all the irrefutable evidence, he hires misogynists, bible-bashers and assorted other fruitcakes, he solves the problem of being clueless by not bothering with coherent policies, and even when his old mate Nathan Gill, his personal choice as Reform UK’s leader in Wales, was sentenced to 10 years in prison this month for bribery in what amounted to treasonable collusion with the warmongering Putin regime in Russia, Farage wriggled and weasled and washed his hands of the matter by utilising his usual lame excuse: it was nothing to do with Nigel.
Having been elected as an MP for the first time in 2024 (for Clacton, the poorest place in England, revealing the nature of his support in the UK – the uneducated and the easily fooled), he is now the highest paid of all the 650 MPs in Westminster (£1 million a year) while making not the slightest difference to the dirt poor people of Clacton. Much of his filthy lucre comes from GB News. The far-right TV channel, which regulator Ofcom permits to completely ignore the ‘impartiality’ demanded from other channels, pays him a fortune to scrape the barrel on his very own despicable prime-time show, while he only bothers to put in an appearance at Westminster (salary: £94,000 + expenses) when there’s an opportunity to spread some divisive lies or vote for one of his reactionary hobby-horses.
His oft-repeated claim that Reform UK is some sort of revolutionary break with the establishment elite has been exposed as just more unremitting lies as his Party gathers vast financial support from the very epitome of the capitalist establishment: overseas backers linked to tax havens and hedge funds; super-rich millionaire donors; fossil fuel industries; financial services and shady rightwing think tanks. In Wales, Reform UK is already using these riches to bombard households with fabrication-packed propaganda over six months ahead of next year’s election – and presumably the same thing is happening in Scotland and in England’s local councils where there are also elections next year. A leaflet from Farage came through the door of every home in Wales only this week. Here are a few of the many lies about Wales it contained:
●”Crime is skyrocketing” UNTRUE: it has fallen by around 1% in each of the last two years.
●”26 years of Labour rule in the Senedd, supported by Plaid Cymru” UNTRUE: Plaid have been in coalition with Labour for just four of those years (2007-2011).
●”Plaid champions the right of men to use women’s changing rooms” UNTRUE: Plaid merely opposes discrimination against all minorities.
●”Plaid would open Wales’ borders to all asylum-seekers” UNTRUE: Impossible, as immigration is not devolved.
●”Plaid demands less free speech online” UNTRUE: any ‘demand’, in what is also a non-devolved matter, is for the torrent of outright lies and misinformation on the internet to be policed by the Tech companies.
●”Labour’s best-known achievement in Wales is the worse-than-useless 20mph speed limit” UNTRUE: what about free prescriptions, the end of council house sales, registration and regulation of private landlords, the Wales coastal path, free school breakfasts, re-opening of rail lines, scrapping school league tables, rejecting PFI, free bus travel for pensioners…and so on, and these advances have happened despite endless cuts to the Welsh budget by London, and I am most certainly not a Labour supporter. As for the 20mph (selective not blanket) speed limit, it has already resulted in over 200 fewer people being killed or injured on the roads – is that “useless” Farage?
●”I will not let you down” UNTRUE: yes he will, that’s what Farage always does (for instance, he is silent on the £2 billion loss to Wales so far caused by the Brexit he engineered).
I could go on, but there’s little point since every line in the leaflet contains some sort of venal distortion of the truth. I notice that he no longer advocates turning the clock back a couple of centuries, re-raping our land, re-pillaging our resources and re-opening the coal-mines of Wales: perhaps one of his advisors broke it to the idiot it would cost gazillions and be impossible anyhow.
The people of Caerffili, who resoundingly voted to reject Reform last month – which Farage glosses over – saw through his anti-Wales lies. Those who still buy into his toxic vacuity should check out his real opinion of Wales, revealed by his horrified reaction when Reform UK’s candidate in Caerffili dared to speak a few words of Welsh at a public meeting. It is vital over the coming months that the people of Wales unite to build on the intelligence and principled decency shown in Caerffili and stop this terrible man and his mob of destructive wreckers having any say in Welsh affairs.