William Davies

The Brexit Party is a mixture of business startup and social movement; it serves as a pressure valve, releasing pent-up frustration with traditional politics into the electoral system. Farage is in full control of the valve. He now possesses exceptional autonomy, quite free of the constraints that the media, party machines and constitutions have imposed on ambitious leaders in the past. Rival parties can neither ignore nor negotiate with this new presence. It makes the political weather.

It is​ received wisdom about referendums that ‘yes’ has an advantage over ‘no’. Alex Salmond didn’t get the wording he wanted for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum – the Electoral Commission considered ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ too much of a leading question – but he did at least make sure...

The phrase​ ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families...

‘OK,​ we’ve been speaking for an hour and fifteen now, so you have a choice. Either we go to questions from the audience, or we carry on for another 45 minutes. It’s up to you.’ Jordan Peterson squints out into the gaping darkness of the O2 arena. ‘Everyone who’d like to go to Q&A, cheer now.’ Half-hearted cheer. ‘And everyone who’d...

It’s almost as if, on discovering that law alone was too blunt an instrument for deterring and excluding immigrants, the Home Office decided to weaponise paperwork instead. The ‘hostile environment’ strategy was never presented just as an effective way of identifying and deporting illegal immigrants: more important, it was intended as a way of destroying their ability to build normal lives.