Stay away from Farage and his Vampire’s Vortex

I didn’t intend to stay away from Farage and his Vampire’s Vortex as it swirled through my home town today, I just had no idea it was happening.

I feel the rush of excitement to see my home town on the front pages, and the grip of Fomo as I’m sat in the distant exotic place of Wakefield, trying to sort an art studio, and hopefully a small step towards a new life path (I’m feeling a little more myself already, but I know it won’t be easy).

But I should be glad I missed out. The Vampire’s Vortex has one aim: to suck you in and feed off your energy.

I don’t particularly want to speak about what Reform UK stand for, and try to unpack why it means one thing to some people, and something terrifying to others: “stay away from the Farage Vampire-Vortex” is the best advice I can give myself.

Of course, this only works if everyone else stays away from the Vampire’s Vortex.

All successful enterprises in our information economy have to be part vampiric: they rely far more on what we give to them than in what we get in return. If we ignore them it has no energy and dies.

In a more self-sufficient society, of strong communities, we could even ignore the General Election entirely, because we’d find it easier to do our bidding on the streets.

But on the streets all we can do is yell and lob bits of broken plaster from a construction site, from the despair of abject disempowerment. Farage Vampire-Vortex loves this.

Farage and his Vampire”s vortex love this.

It also loves the hate towards one another we project on the comments section – especially the hate towards the “scruffy-looking” lad who threw the objects, who, judging by a 5 second clip, and being from Barnsley, is a “unemployed scumbag”.

It’s the absolute pinnacle of the ‘negative solidarity‘ that permeates such an exhausted and atomised society. And it’s the kind of bait which is hard to resist diving into the comments section for, and the kind that gets the Farage Vampire-Vortex fat on our blood and guts that I wish we could use for something better.

For when we are blind we must be led

As the Far-right grows on the continent, the author and journalist Naomi Klein remains forever-rooted to a centre left position in a world where the Overton Window hasn’t merely shifted, but seemingly fallen into a ditch.

She has issued a warning to the UK Labour Party that if they do not implement something that addresses the most urgent needs of the country, such as a wealth tax to restribute at least some of the country’s wealth then this void will almost certainly be capitalised on by the Far Right.

The former prime minister Gordon Brown and even a former aide to Blair have stressed the same message.

Not for me to go all left-centrist, but genuine left-centrism, as in not simply more neoliberal technocrats, could save us from calamity.

Even those with contempt for small boats can still feel pain at the silent social murder of many on our town centre streets since austerity kicked in. You can appeal to people’s social spirit, or you can ignore it, and let the void be filled by the likes of the Farage Vampire-Vortex.

The artwork above is very David Shrigley, in that what looks at first like simple satire is very multilayered, and between these layers is love, perhaps even the desire to be led as if we were blind. Back in 2010 this poster almost got me voting for New Labour, even after all that had made me and many others my age so apathetic by the end of the Noughties.

Yet, as I chose to vote for a fringe left party, I can’t help wondering what the present would have looked like if Brown had remained in power.

And as we stand, after nearly half a century of Thatcherism, we are a blind society: we cannot see collectively

Because of this we still have to engage with what almost feels like the impossible mental gymnastics of voting in the hope of genuine change.

We aren’t going to do it ourselves, on the street, because we don’t know how to bring ourselves towards one another. The more atomised we become hereinafter, the more the far right will grow.

Somehow we need to be led together towards Social Sight.