Why are they are so desperate to smear Farage as a 'Putin apologist'?

The political class has rounded on his comments about Russia because they are running scared from his arguments on everything else.

So, the media finally have a stick with which to beat Reform Party leader Nigel Farage. His comments during his BBC Panorama special election interview - that the West had ‘provoked’ Russia into the war in Ukraine - were met with gleeful howls of outrage. The home secretary, James Cleverly, said Farage was ‘echoing Putin’s vile justification’, while Labour’s shadow defence secretary, John Healey, called him a ‘Putin apologist’. I’ve personally been outspoken on the crucial importance of supporting Ukraine (see here and here) – but I find these attempts to smear Farage as rather desperate.

From the reaction, you’d have thought that Farage was supporting Putin’s invasion. Farage, as was clear to anyone who watched the interview, had quite the opposite view. The invasion, Farage said, was wrong and outrageous. Farage explained quite clearly what he meant: the West ‘was giving this man, Putin, a reason to say to his Russian people, “they are coming for us again” and to go to war … he’s used what we have done as an excuse’. In other words, as Farage says in his Telegraph article, the West had given Putin the ‘excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway’.

The outrage over the comments is more a product of the fact that it seems Farage has won the argument on almost all of his other policies. Policies which previously would have been enough to sideline him – a freeze on immigration, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, ditching Net Zero –  are now very much a part of mainstream debate. Unable to respond to his core policies, the media and political class have jumped on the Russia issue.

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Of course, this ‘Russia playbook’ has been the favoured means of attempting to squeeze out populists across the Western world. They tried to discredit Trump’s victory in 2016 with claims of ‘Russian interference’. The Brexit vote was tarred by the accusations of ‘Russian bots’ and every populist leader in Europe - from Viktor Orbán to Marine Le Pen - is outed as a ‘friend of Putin’. Such attacks were never particularly convincing to begin with – more a product of Trump and Brexit Derangement Syndrome – but they have become more tired each time they have been tried. Wheeling them out against Farage is unlikely to make much of a dent in his popularity.

In fact, the shameless way in which the media have tried to twist Farage’s words – from a warning about how dangerous and unhinged Putin is into a justification for Russia’s actions – will likely further alienate people from the media mainstream. Farage’s actual words are easy to look up. When even the Daily Mail felt the need to run an anti-Farage hit-piece – ‘Fury as Nigel Farage blames the West for Ukraine war’ – the comments were full of outraged readers explaining what Farage had actually said, and why the West has plenty to answer for, too.

And yet, despite all this, it is hard not to wonder if Farage has made a rare misstep. Clearly, he wants some credit for his consistent position and – if he is to be believed – his prediction about the war. But not only does his self-congratulatory tone come off a little arrogant and bog him down in a debate he doesn’t really need to have, the accusation of ‘provocation’ is both incorrect and unhelpful.

Of course, the West is certainly not blameless. The disasters of Western ‘shock therapy’ after the collapse of communism, the humiliations heaped on Russia, the inconsistencies in NATO expansion, the failures of will and imagination to make the idea of a ‘common European home’ a reality – in all of these, the West was complicit. So, too, did the West tear up ‘international law’ time and again to launch invasions and bombings. All of this raised serious concern in Russia, although Russia was too weak for too long to do much about it.

Then came the West’s cheerleading of the Maidan revolution. Claims about an American ‘coup’ are fantastical, but the West certainly made no effort to respond to Russia’s concerns about a change of government on its doorstep. In fact, Americans liked to at least give the impression they were behind it all. The West also deserves some serious criticism for the way it has continually dangled EU or NATO membership in front of the Ukrainian populace who, eager to avoid the stagnation and corruption of being a client-state of Russia, have struggled for freedom from the old colonial power.

But none of this was any bigger ‘provocation’ than Russia’s stoking of a civil war in Ukraine (which quickly turned into Russia’s ‘hybrid’ war) or its annexation of Crimea, and many have made the point that it seems unfair at best to call demands for NATO expansion from former Soviet colonies a form of provocation.

Indeed, the whole notion of provocation seems misplaced. The way the term is used in relation to the war is designed to exculpate Russia: as if to say, ‘they had no choice, they were provoked’. In any case, the point is that provocation is no defence: a provocation is not a physical threat. However much a Westernised Ukraine might have hurt Russia’s pride, it did not threaten it. This is especially true in relation to the fact that, despite the endless words, there was no realistic prospect of Ukraine being ever actually admitted to NATO or the EU. What Russia’s full-scale invasion really came down to was Putin’s increasingly paranoid, lockdown-fuelled fantasies and his dreams of cementing his place in history before age caught up with him.

Nonetheless, it is clear that Farage uses the idea of provocation in a slightly unusual way. This is not the ‘Realist’ critique of the West that says Russia has rationally responded to increasing Western power and defended its ‘existential interest’ in Ukraine with weapons. Farage’s usage is more about not enraging a madman – as he said in a European Parliament speech, ‘don’t poke the bear’. Such a view of Russia as an easily offended, prideful animal – one is almost tempted to call it Orientalist – is actually quite common, especially among Central and Eastern Europeans.

All of this aside, it remains to be seen what, if any, the public reaction to the comments will be. Certainly, the mood in the UK is much less unambiguously pro-Ukraine than it once was. Defence of Ukrainian sovereignty is no longer such a feel-good story when the UK is increasingly hemmed in by its own problems, the stuttering deliveries of Western weapons, and Russia’s booming defence-industrial economy. On the other hand, the simple identification many of Farage’s prospective voters felt with Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty – a concept Leave voters understood very well – will not have vanished.

Either way, however this media storm plays out, the fact we are having the debate at all is clearly a sign of how terrified the ruling classes are of Farage’s insurgent party. On the core issues – the economy, immigration, national sovereignty – the establishment have largely lost the argument. They have no stomach, and no ideas, to fight Farage on these issues. Most importantly, we cannot let the debate on these issues get shut down by hysterical claims about ‘Russian interference’ or ‘pro-Putin sympathies’. Thankfully, it is not possible to pull the wool over people’s eyes. As Farage keeps saying, ‘something is going on out there’. Time to make that something into something real.