Yves here. Richard Murphy explains below how the disabled in the UK are set to become early sacrifices to the god of war, here in the form of rearmament plans. What is particularly ugly is the position Labour is taking on the role of the disabled. Murphy describes how Starmer is dog (DOGE?) whistling that the disabled are not working out of choice, as in are malingerers.
Statista points out the obvious, using US data, that the disabled find it hard to land jobs. Notice the significance of those with “ambulatory disabilities”. There ought to be many desk jobs they could perform. Nevertheless:
The most common type of disability in the U.S. are ambulatory disabilities, which affects a person’s mobility. In 2022, an estimated 4.6 percent of those aged 21 to 64 years and 30 percent of people aged 75 years and older had such a disability. …Because disabilities affect a person’s ability to perform everyday activities, they can significantly impact one’s ability to work. In 2022, the employment rate among those with a disability was 44.5 percent, compared to almost 79 percent for those without a disability. Those with hearing disabilities are employed at higher rates than any other disability, with around 58 percent of this population employed, compared to 51 percent of people with a vision disability, and 39 percent of those with a cognitive disability.
Murphy points out that disability has been rising in the UK, including among prime age adults, but then IMHO goes a bit overmuch into “‘Tis a mystery!” mode.
Yes, he mentions microprocessed foods. But the slope of the line has increased in the post-Covid era. Long Covid is a form of disability, even before getting to the fact that repeated Covid infections increase vulnerability to other ailments.
Other possible perps are changes in parenting resulting in sedentary behaviors starting earlier than in the stone ages of my youth (is walking to and from school aggressively discouraged as in the US?), binge drinking, particularly among women, and environmental toxins.
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future
Labour is delivering its sickening messages as fast as it can right now. The one that has its MPs most worried right now is the news that disability benefits are going to be subject to significant onslaughts, presumably to fund defence spending.
Starmer apparently said last night in defence of this plan, which will fall mainly on the vulnerable claimants of Personal Independence Payments (PIPs), the total payments of which are increasing significantly, saying, according to the Guardian, that the current system was “discouraging people from working”.
They added that he noted:
The numbers of young people out of work meant “a wasted generation”, with one in eight young people not in education, employment or training. “The people who really need that safety net [are] still not always getting the dignity they deserve.
“That’s unsustainable, it’s indefensible and it is unfair, people feel that in their bones,” he said. “It runs contrary to those deep British values that if you can work, you should. And if you want to work, the government should support you, not stop you.”
Starmer also said:
“This is the Labour party. We believe in the dignity of work and we believe in the dignity of every worker, which is why I am not afraid to take the big decisions needed to return this country to their interests whether that’s on welfare, immigration, our public services or our public finances.”
Let me unpack that.
First, it emphasises what Labour has been saying of late, which is only working people matter. Unless you are a cog in the machine, Labour thinks you are unaffordable, a burden and a cost to be reduced. This is, of course, pure neoliberalthinking. Elon Musk would be proud of it. This is a policy of dehumanising those with disabilities, which those with PIPs have, because, as many tales told on this blog and elsewhere make clear, it is very hard to claim. From my own experience I know how hard it was for someone with Parkinson’s to get it. Labour has not the slightest concern for such people. It is as if ministers have had an empathy bypass.
Second, if there are so many young people with disabilities, the role of Labour is not to berate them or to pretend that they are faking their situation. It is to ask why that is the case. In fact, this goes for the population as a whole. Could it be, for example, that well over four decades of ultra-processed foods might be the cause of this problem, and that we have a population that is being progressively poisoned by our food industry to the point that many simply are unable to work? The evidence for this is very strong, but Labour is in complete denial of it, both on the issue of benefits and in the NHS. The cost of that denial is reaching the point where action is demanded, but the required action is not to punish the victims, but is instead to ban the processes that are making people sick, even though they do happen to deliver considerable profit for the manufacturers of toxic foodstuffs.
Third, Labour was never about the dignity of work. It was set up to deal with the exploitation of the worker, and not to extol the virtue of work, come what may, even if it degraded and abused the person forced to undertake it. What Starmer is defending is the right of the employer to extract value from the person who they engage because that person is given no choice but to work through their suffering because Labour is planning to deny them the benefits that they need.
Once upon a time Labour stood up for people. Now it stands up for those who abuse them, ministers included. They really are charlatans who are a disgrace to their forebears in that party who would, I am quite sure, be ashamed of what these people are doing in the name of the political cause that once had pride, but now is the enemy of the vulnerable.
And, as I keep saying, none of this is necessary. The total cost of the benefits that Labour is so aggrieved about is £70 billion, which happens to be the exact cost of the subsidy to the savings of the wealthy that Labour is happy to provide to them each year without fuss being raised. £5 billion of that subsidy goes to ISAs and £65 billion to pensions. As I note in the Taxing Wealth Report (page 67):
In total tax and national insurance contribution relief on pension contributions by the highest [10 per cent of] earners in the UK are likely to amount to £38.6 billion per annum (£13 billion of national insurance and £25.6 billion of tax per annum). The remainder of the population enjoy a subsidy of £28.7 million between them. In other words, the wealthiest enjoy a subsidy of more than £8,750 per annum on average towards their pension savings each year and the rest of the population enjoy a subsidy of almost exactly £1,050 per annum each based on the number of taxpayers in 2020/21.
To put these figures in context, the basic universal credit allowance a year is £4,416 per annumin 2023/24 for a person over the age of 25 and the basic old age pension in that year is£10,600 per annum, or not much more than the subsidy given each year to increase the value of the pension of the top income earners in the country, on average.
If there is a group in society who need to forego their state benefits, it is the wealthy. Labour is choosing to make the poorest and most vulnerable do so. The question that needs to be asked is why that is the case.
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Labour are toast. Dad and I saw through them years ago. Mum voted for local candidate last year cos he was glamorous gay guy *sigh*. Now she has seen his voting record she trolls him on social media…..
Labour just look worse and worse. Are they actively TRYING to make Notts Reform UK central? Sheesh. Dad is business owner, progressive and thinks Labour are out to destroy him.
Plus I’m unable to work due to Long COVID…… have been warned that the path to getting carer benefits to enable me to care for mum will be horrid.
Our Labour MP was elevated to a House of Commons Subcommittee IMMEDIATELY on election. That never used to happen….. even when the Tories were being the nasty party.
We are in trouble. No viable electoral option. Green Party does have some sensible stuff re MMT and land value taxation in its manifesto….. but unfortunately it just concatenated views from 200ish people from focus groups leading to a contradictory mess.
Anyone who says he is not afraid to take big decisions is in reality afraid. It’s a classic case of protesting too much. Starmer is a pure conformist to whatever the latest “thing” happens to be.
Labour is obviously no longer the party of the “working class” (to the extent that is still meaningful), as the new phrase “working people” (whatever that means either) clearly attests to.
Link this to the “Right to Die” policies and what we have is a technocrat’s dream. Always worth remembering that the technocratic PMC of the Third Reich was very supportive of Action T4, for example. The propaganda film “I accuse” was even created presenting assisted suicide for a multiple sclerosis sufferer as a “choice”. Seeing people as valuable only if they “work” is a very slippery slope.
When you boil it down, these policies are not so inconsistent with DOGE and the Trump regime either, as you imply. Politics across the West really are about not much more than rival “elites” vying for the booty under the cloak of ideology.
Labour’s new slogan: “Arbeit macht frei”
A not so small part of the so-called “progressive” european elites were very interested in eugenics – in 1922 G.K. Chesterton wrote an interesting book about that (“Eugenics and Other Evils”)
I saw an interview with the Swedish finance-minister.
She was asked how Sweden would meet the spending target of 2% of GDP, her answer was to grow GDP. I am not sure if she understands basic math or if she was just rambling incoherently. As far as I can tell the only way to meet a target where 2% of GDP needs to go to defense is to re-allocate more of the existing or future GDP to defense from something else. Or alternatively shrink GDP and maintain current defense-spending and the proportion spent on defense would increase…
By the looks of it then it seems Labour in UK has realised that the percentage-target is a target of re-allocation and that is what they are about to do.
If the targets were alone the lines of:
x amount of planes in airforce
y amount of tanks
z amount of artillery etc etc
then maybe growing GDP would be some sort of ‘solution’ but I suppose there is less opportunity/risk of corruption/graft/waste when there is a spending target as a percentage of GDP rather than something more tangible.
“Grow GDP”…. the Target of a moron. They infest two countries I’ve lived in….UK and SWEDEN.
Agreed.
I suppose she could have said to re-allocate private spending by increased taxation and use the increased tax-revenue to spend on defense thereby increase proportion of GDP going to defense rather than private consumption. But since she is representing the party traditionally supported by the upper middle classes then that isn’t an option.
Or
She could have said to increase spending on defense by borrowing for that (current?) spend but her party claims to be fiscally responsible and therefore borrowing isn’t an option.
So I guess what is left is to do like in the UK and re-allocate spending from spending on un-deserving Swedes to instead go to the glorious defending of Sweden but Swedish voters might not agree to it if such plans were made public. Probably some attempts to do it in plain sight will be made while accusing anyone who who oppose their plans of being acting on behalf of a foreign nation.
I’ve yet to see good outcomes of spending targets. What I have seen is that the first priority is to spend and the second priority is that the money is spent well. Audits to verify if money was spent well will be opposed (how are the audits of the Pentagon spending coming along?) and boondoggles are inevitable.
Thank you, Yves.
One can detect Reeves, some, but not all, of the brains behind Starmer, behind this cruelty, as per https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/anger-after-reeves-tells-benefit-claimants-labour-is-not-for-you/. Reeves said similar around 2010, but after a safe seat was fixed for her by influential Yorkshire Labour connections, her sister and fellow minister Ellie and Ellie’s Cryer hubby and in laws, and as she promoted austerity, hoping to curry favour with then ministers Alastair Darling and Ed Balls and get fast tracked up the Labour ranks. Liz Kendall, whose partner is a City financier and lives in a posh part of town, is similar.
It’s interesting how New Labour attracted so many people devoid of empathy for those less fortunate. They feel that they have to show that off, too. A friend and former colleague, a City solicitor and socialist, was scathing about these types, especially after two Labour in the City events about 10 years ago. She also harrumphed to me, “What is it about new money?” I agreed.
Not unrelated: NC has just published https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/blackrocks-takeover-of-panama-canal-is-another-victory-for-trumps-americas-first-policy.html. This link, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/09/27/readout-of-2024-partnership-for-global-infrastructure-and-investment-pgi-investor-forum/, caught my attention. Why? Some of the private sector participants are involved with the government’s measures to reboot, really privatise, the UK. This is why I don’t think the government will align with the EU in opposition to Trump / the US. In any case, this engagement with US big finance predates Trump’s election.
With regard to the cruelty, I reckon that ministers want to show off how tough they are to that US audience and its cheerleaders, partly in expectation of needing their money after the 2029 election.
Ah, yes. New money, same as the old. It’s debt, debt all the way down.
But methinks the 2026 US elections will be more determinatve than the 2028. At his present rate of efficacy, Trump will lose one, if not both houses of incestuous congress. The US will return to a stable state of rigormortis.
disability benefits are going to be subject to significant onslaughts, presumably to fund defence (sic) spending.
That one sentence, to my mind, relegates the people in power to the ash heap, the mechanism to get them there can’t manifest soon enough.
The spelling is correct.
For some reason that recognition of British English made me laugh.
Even though the general policy by Starmer is disgusting and I have never held him in lower regard than during the last few days.
I’m actually genuinely puzzled….. this is demonstrably insane and I wonder if covid-sequelae have affected him. If this carries on his local toadie MP might face physical violence…… which worries me……I don’t want this to turn into anti gay violence just because our gay MP is demonstrably awful.
Are Labour ‘toast’? What they seem to be doing is extorting votes from the ‘worried’ middle classes under the guise of threat inflation. Then, once it becomes evident that the threats are largely baseless, they will ascend the escalation ladder in order to give substance to the rhetoric.
This is the old John Ford trick (‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’): “This is the West, Sir! When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend!”
Moreover, the middle classes will be mollified because they will not have to pay for the turn to militarism via higher taxation or funding increased public debt; instead the poor and vulnerable (whose votes can be taken for granted) will underwrite the costs. After all, what Labour needs is a large enough section of the middle class in order to gain office, and what better to reassure the middle class than openly screwing the poor? This is life and death in the Land of Sharp Elbows.
Try living in the red wall. It’s awful. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Labour will go down to historic defeat at next General election.
Plus I made money on predicting May losing her majority before so I have form.
Please…… come here and chat to locals.
I’m with Terry here, Froghole. The middle class as traditionally constituted, the socioeconomic A’s and B’s, is livid (the professions, local business, what Lambert calls American gentry).
These are basically men of property and noblesse de robe, the local 10% who run things and have houses (plural), staff (gardener, cleaner, nanny), children in private school, skiing holidays etc. They are seeing the cost of maintaining this lifestyle raised to unheard of levels and there are no payrises to compensate:
– national insurance rises increases the cost of staff;
– tenant security increases affect their buy to let portfolio – bit not as much as high interest rates (0% house price growth in London) and capped interest deductibility on residential mortgages zero deductibility on owner occupier mortgages) and increased capital gains tax to 28%.
– pension contribution tax relief has been capped at 40k (I think it may have been increased to 60k) and undrawn pensions will be subject to inheritance tax
– school fees now have VAT at 20% and your children require financial support at University of £10k fees plus 10k rent plus 10k or more living expenses and often courses are four years.
– you are entitled to no universal benefits other than the state pension and use of the NHS and the latter is so bad you have to pay for private care on top for any elective services.
Every item of middle class privilege and social reproduction for the 10% is being soaked for tax: property, pensions, education etc. And every benefit of the state is being withdrawn. They are very angry.
There is a meme about “[young man’name], 35” with a young man with his head in his hands and arrows showing where his taxes go. It is an ugly meme designed to encourage resentment of refugees, the sick and infirm, the old, the young and school age etc. But it is effective because even well meaning bien-pensant bourgeois feel soaked….
It was last this bad in the 1970’s but there was:
– mortgage interest relief.
– universal benefits. There were grammar schools (through which wealthy neighbourhoods could get free, high class education and Oxbridge entry) and grants for University living expenses and no course fees.
There were also loopholes. My father paid 102p in the pound because of Super Tax so as a result he bought a racehorse so he could write his racing meetings off against tax. All those loopholes have been closed.
The tax code has been pulled very tight around the immobile propertied bourgeoisie, whose real wealth is place-based (local gentry, connection, social capital, family ties and assistance). Whereas HMRC has given up with international capital. The local middle class are very resentful of people who behave like British people and are here through the Season but are technically resident elsewhere and pay no tax here on their great estates and penthouses. And the government has no interest in attacking its donor class hence the fiction that inheritance is taxed when most of the great fortunes are owned offshore since 1972 and current rule changes do not touch them…..
If you took these taxpayers to the US, they would not pay anything like these taxes, what with higher allowances even if marginal rates are similar, and they would have higher gross salaries to boot. The same in many countries, for example Switzerland has generous tax allowances.
The question is whether this pain is reaching Mondeo Man, the C1’s and C2’s, the US- defined lower middle class successful tradesman with a mortgage and a fancy pickup truck. He is feeling the interest rate pain on his mortgage but he doesn’t behave staff or school fees or buytolet mortgages. My hunch is he feels the cold wind blowing for his rich customers and for his own aspirations.
Labour is toast and so is the UK unless we can find a new political class at the back of the drawer. One needs the House of Commons to go on a Ukraine fact finding tour and catch an Iskander or three…).
«If you took these taxpayers to the US, they would not pay anything like these taxes, what with higher allowances even if marginal rates are similar, and they would have higher gross salaries to boot.»
Possibly, although you also have to consider U.S. private taxes like medical care and the transportation tax, which, if not paid in the form of automobile ownership, relegates one to N-word status.
Many thanks and I don’t disagree, but the Right is split between Reform and the Tories. Labour can therefore afford to be pretty unpopular, and they can offset at least some of that unpopularity by posing as a patriot party and/or by frightening people into voting for them by invoking the threat of invasion or subversion. Some of their policies are designed to drive a wedge between Reform and the Tories – planning being a case in point.
Of course, there are other factors which will be alienating the middle class vote, such as changes to the planning regime (which may impair housing equity in some places) and, above all, the termination of the IHT relief for defined contribution pensions. That relief was especially important, given that it helped equalise (or go some limited way to equalising) returns between defined benefit and defined contribution savers, the latter having no indexation protection and being subject to the vagaries of the markets.
However, provided that Labour continue to deliver house price inflation they may still gain a sufficient portion of the owner occupier vote to allow them to scrape through or remain the largest party at the next election (those adversely affected by welfare reforms are more likely to stay at home rather than vote Reform or Tory). Credit will continue to flow freely into the housing market at the expense of industry. Much of the Tory base has still not forgiven the party for the 2022 gilts strike which briefly choked off the flow of credit into the residential mortgage market.
I should add that I live in a Red Wall constituency, and I have visited all but a very few parishes in England and Wales, and a great many in Scotland.
I see where British Economist Gary Stevenson has predicted both Labour in Britain and Trump in the USA will fail, because they do not address the biggest underlying problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc
The 2nd time around Trump is not even tryng to hide the corruption. I almost expect him to try and replace the gold in Fort Knox with another asset, like his crypto coin.
Starmer has probably never been unemployed.
Otherwise, he’d know it’s demoralizing, soul crushing even, and he’d know most people in the real world *want* to work. Besides, as Richard points out, disability benefits aren’t enough to live on, tend to be well below poverty level. Or he may know this, but not care.
The strategy of marginalizing, scapegoating and demonizing the weakest in society is a strategy for a reason. And it’s the same reason people see DEI and any kind of movement toward inclusiveness as problematic. To take away the ability to exclude others is to take away self-righteousness, the ability to say we’re better than those others.
>>>And it’s the same reason people see DEI and any kind of movement toward inclusiveness as problematic.
We need to be careful with the pseudo-inclusivity that separates and weakens people to favor the rich and powerful; DEI is an ideology that refuses to look at class, being as it is willing to exclude those not of the favored categories, but rather is an ideology that overlooks poverty and want to focus on immutable physical features.
Its an ideology, but not that.
The ideology can be traced to all of the world’s major religions, back to Christ’s “Love your neighbour as yourself”, or to the Jewish Proverbs 14:31 – “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” The ideology is quite simply kindness, inclusiveness, for the disadvantaged. I would argue DEI initiatives are as old as the hills.
And the modern manifestation does consider class and poverty. For example, a common DEI initiative is to remove names, genders and addresses from resumes and job applications so class or poverty does not come into play during screening.
Another is to train hiring managers to identify common biases and assumptions which traditionally had come into hiring decisions – such as “she’s a young woman, in a few years she’ll be taking mat leave, no hire”, or “parents always put their children first, will have high absenteeism rates, pass” or “the applicant is Muslim, probably needs to pray five times a day and engage in terrorist activities on the side” or “the applicant is disabled, will need handholding”. If you remove these biases and assumptions, these unfounded generalizations, unjustified beliefs, about classes and categories of people, now you are considering the applicant on merit alone rather than class, right?
Many people think if a woman has a job, she must have been a DEI hire. But if whole committees are reviewing the qualifications of an exec, and they’ve all been trained to identify biases, and the organization has good leadership, then anyone making the above sorts of statements will be met with “we won’t consider that” or “that is not a merit based consideration” and, voila, this is how in the modern world women now get to be execs where they were previously locked out.
Love this :) saving it to read again on stormy days. Dankie
When I first read the title I thought that Labour as in workers, unions, labour movement is creating this distress for some reasons, even more jobs, be they in making bombs. But is the Labour Party, which is not acting nor speaking for the Labour. I think titles and executive sentence at the beginning should make that very clear.
Is it time to consider killing all the poor yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE (2:39 mins)
The UK political scene is in stall mode right now. Both parties have no solutions to offer as any solution would require taking money from the wealthy which they will never do. At the same time, both parties heavily suppress any alternatives like how Starmer suppressed and ejected the Left in the Labour party. Somethings gotta give.
Rev Kev, we’re trying to avoid killing all the poor, but it’s a complicated business, this. One needs many PhDs and MBAs, and in order to furnish these experts with a comfortable existence conducive to their best work, at the present time we can’t afford to give food and shelter to the poor. But if the poor can only hold on a bit longer, we are committed to finding a solution!
All leading to the British Civil War of 202x? https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/03/11/the-branch-may-break/
“So how might a British civil war begin? Mark Walsh, a trauma specialist who has worked in civil conflict zones around the world, offers a chillingly realistic scenario which he refers to as “Bloody Salisbury.” The scenario begins with another mass murder of children by a Muslim migrant. As happened in Southport, the Starmer administration attempt to hide the perpetrator’s background. The result is a mass protest which brings the town to a standstill, and which risks spreading to urban districts across Britain. To pre-empt this, Starmer orders the police to break up the protests, using force if necessary. But in response, the Chief Constable complains that he lacks the manpower to do so, and requests military support (Salisbury being close to several big army bases).
It is not clear who fired the shot, although the army would be widely blamed, even though several armed police units were in the area. However, someone opened fire – perhaps only intending to fire over the heads of the protestors – killing three people, one of which was a child.”
And no, it’s not going to be armies vs armies, in the neoliberal era, civil war will be neighbors vs neighbors. Hong Kong will soon experience an influx of returnees.
As someone who had the good fortune to be born immediately after the Second War, got a decent education for free, and by a combination of luck and contingency had the opportunity to make (mostly) the right choices in life, I enjoy what’s left of my years as relatively affluent pensioner in a, so far, 25 year retirement in an attractive part of the UK, albeit surrounded by postindustrial and rural poverty with many suffering from the sicknesses and disabilities from two generations of impoverishment.
I spent many years as a member of the Labour Party, even when living abroad. I have mostly voted Labour, sometimes with a high level of motivation (Harold Wilson, Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone) usually out of habit whilst holding my nose (Jim Callaghan, Neil Kinnock and Blair ’97) but also with a degree of hope with an underlying sense of deep despair (Michael Foot, Ed Milliband), and otherwise voted for the Liberals purely as a protest vote (which went radically wrong in 2010).
At the last election, having a degree of awareness of the kind of man Starmer is and what the Labour Party as an institution had become over the years, a tendency which under his leadership accelerated, I chose to vote Reform, along with many of my precarian neighbours, including the lady who cleans for me, which had the sole virtue of ensuring a Tory MP kept out a Starmer fanboy.
Blair was the hollow wooden horse the Labour Party allowed in and the New Labour machine created by Mandelson under Kinnock’s watch became – and remains in even more extreme form – the party of the PMC and rentier class and the greatest enemy faced by the lower-middle and working classes, women and the disabled, gutting the NHS, destroying well developed techical and higher education sectors, turning schools into a playground for profit seekers and crooks, and overseeing the collapse of the great public utilities into debt-ridden shells incapable of fulfilling their basic remit, but nonetheless Starmer’s government has managed to scrape up the wherewithal from the pockets of pensioners, the unemployed and the disabled to fling billions into the bottomless pit of a defeated Ukraine before leading a barely existent military into a confrontation with a Russia which has already killed three NATO armies and is enjoying a tasty dessert in Kursk.
Unless Galloway’s Workers Party takes off, an alternative grouping emerges on the Left, or a civil war takes out the bastards, I guess I will be voting for Reform or the equivalent at the next election, that is, if I’ve not not been called to stroll through the Great Gents Door in the Sky in the meantime.
If Labour do win the next election, it will be by the same method as the Tories in 2010–15: lowering public expectations to the point where anything short of total socioeconomic collapse can be spun as proof that the pain was worth it. Arguably Labour are now in a better position. The Tories had to blame everything on Labour profligacy (they couldn’t blame the bankers), while Labour can blame the Tories in the morning and the Russians in the afternoon.
Both could count on the sheer hopelessness of the alternatives. Right now, the Tories are still discredited and will be for some time yet. The Lib Dems and Greens are content with their current status as minor factions of the centrist establishment. Reform are a rabble led by a man with a history of abandoning his various political projects at the first hint of a setback; it’s anyone’s guess whether they will still exist in 2029, or what, if anything, will replace them if they don’t.
In their different ways, Brexit and Corbynism both seemed like desperate attempts to shake some life back into a moribund system. Reform, different again, are the third such attempt. If they fail, as seems almost certain, who on earth would think it worth the bother of a fourth try?
To give the devil his due, Nigel Farage reshapes or abandons parties but he has never abandoned his project: getting the UK out of the EU to enable it to trade freely to develop new and existing markets and to form new bilateral trade alliances. This singlemindedness is the source of his support and that any part he chooses to grace and has ensured that he is regarded as a man of principle by many electors including those who disagree with him.
Farage has made himself the most consequential politician in the UK since Clement Attlee by dint of sheer consistency and staying power and it is unwise to underestimate his abilities as a politician. Few will be surprised if the Tory membership decide that they want him as their Leader given that the alternatives hardly sparkle with charisma and a sense of purpose, and they might well decide to impose their will on the Parliamentary Conservative Party to ensure that he leads them to power at the next election.