The War No One Wants - and the People Calling for It

Farage and Badenoch are beating the drums for escalation. The public response appears to be: abso-fucking-lutely not.

There seems to be something that happens when you become a politician, and it’s something that feels like it’s nearly ages old - being “out of touch.”

Photo by Seth Weisfeld on Unsplash

There have been whole adversarial political campaigns launched on the basis of someone supposedly not having their finger on the pulse of the populace, and for the most part, those campaigns have been successful because they’ve been largely true.

In the US, the rise of Donald Trump was fuelled in large part by the sense that millions of Americans had been ignored by establishment politics for decades. Factories closed, wages stagnated, communities hollowed out - while the political class talked about the success of globalisation.

The result, I would say, was not subtle.

We’ve been seeing this happen in the UK more and more as well - on both sides of the political divide. We all know that the 14 years of Tory mismanagement has placed the country in an incredibly precarious position when it comes to the subject of public services, wage growth and the general wellbeing of the population, and while the Labour government coming into power in 2024 gave some hope, there is, yet again, the feeling that things are not changing.

This has been a lifeline for the likes of Nigel Farage who is incredibly adept at tapping into that public grievance and weaponising it into a political force¹.

His entire brand that he has carefully cultivated over decades, rests on one single proposition - that he, unlike the Westminster elite, actually listens to ordinary people.

He, and he alone, is the man in the pub, pint precariously in hand, saying what you, the common man in the high-vis vest is thinking. The anti-establishment crusader² who reads the room whilst the political class reads briefing papers.

Nigel Farage, for all his numerous faults³, has been exceptionally good at this - all of which makes his recent little performances on Iran all the more catastrophic in the scale of his misjudgement.

Because when it comes to bombing Iran, Nigel Farage has managed to achieve something quite remarkable - he has finally become the sort of out-of-touch, warmongering establishment figure he’s spent his entire career railing against. Not only that, he seems to have packed in Kemi “The Bellicose” Badenoch along for the ride.

Because if you have a look at the general public’s feeling towards the Iran situation, there seems to be a massive chasm that has formed between what Nigel wants, and what is on the minds of the people.

According to YouGov polling, 59% of Britons oppose the strikes, which is not a slim majority - that’s a commanding rejection. A paltry 8% actually want the UK to actively join in.

Eight percent.

You’d get higher polling numbers on whether people wanted to actively lick batteries.

And yet since the outbreak of this latest conflict we’ve found Farage, practically salivating at the prospect of regime change, banging the drum for military action in support of his friend in Mar-a-Lago⁴.

Badenoch, never to be outdone and always rearing for a fight, has been putting on her best Thatcher performance, all hard stares, harder rhetoric and a pugilism that’s constantly jarring, seemingly convinced that what the British public is crying out for is yet another Middle Eastern military adventure.

The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.

Here’s a man who has railed numerous times over the years against foreign wars, who has positioned himself as the voice against elite overreach, now cheerleading for exactly the sort of interventionist foreign policy that the establishment he claims to despise would be proud of.

What makes this even more exquisite is that Farage’s own voters aren’t particularly buying it either.

Yes, 81% of Reform voters think Starmer is handling the Iran crisis badly⁵ - but here’s the thing that seems to have escaped both Farage and Badenoch’s notice: thinking Starmer is handling something badly doesn’t automatically translate into wanting to bomb Tehran into the Stone Age.

The British public, it turns out, are perfectly capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously - that the government might be making a hash of things and that military escalation is a spectacularly stupid idea. It’s a level of nuance that appears to have sailed clean over the heads of our self-appointed tribunes of the people.

The polling trajectory itself just reinforces - In just one week, opposition to the strikes jumped from 49% to 59%. That’s not a mere trend, that’s positively a stampede in the opposite direction to the one Farage and Badenoch are sprinting.

The British public looked at the situation, considered the options and decided, quite sensibly, that what they simply do not want was to get involved in another Middle Eastern quagmire. Meanwhile, Farage was already mentally measuring the Downing Street curtains, convinced he’d found his Falklands moment.

He really, really hasn’t.

By 9 March, even Reform seems to have noticed they’d catastrophically misread the room.

Robert Jenrick was hastily walking back Farage’s regime-change rhetoric, performing a reverse ferret that must have had Farage and Tice apoplectic, considering they had spent days already at their jingoistic best.

The party that prides itself on “telling it like it is” suddenly discovered that perhaps they’d been telling it like it wasn’t, actually, and could everyone please forget what they’d said last week?

It was, and remains, an embarrassment.

This kind of U-turn that would usually have had Farage howling with derision had it come from any other entity, but when you’ve spent years building a brand on being the authentic voice of the people, discovering that you’ve completely lost the plot on what the people actually want is rather more than awkward - it’s existential.

Badenoch, for her part, seems to have learned nothing - she’s happily continued to position herself as the hawk’s hawk, aggressively convinced that what the faltering Conservative Party needs to win back voters is more aggression, more certainty, more willingness to commit British forces to conflicts that the public overwhelmingly oppose.

It’s a strategy that might work if we were living in 1982 - except that we’re not.

The truth that neither Farage nor Badenoch seem willing to confront is that we as the British public have actually learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve watched two decades of failed interventions, wasted blood and treasure, and destabilised regions. We’ve seen the promises of quick victories turn into endless occupations. We’ve buried the dead and paid the bills.

And we’ve decided, not again, not thank you, please do fuck off.

I don think this is pacifism or weakness or ignorance - rather it’s hard-won wisdom, the kind that comes from experience rather than ideology. The British public aren’t opposed to defending the country when necessary, but we can spot the difference between genuine national security and geopolitical adventurism dressed up in the language of necessity.

Farage and Badenoch, however, appear to have mistaken the public’s frustration with the status quo for a mandate to drag us into another war. It’s a category error of spectacular proportions, and one that reveals something fundamental about their populist political project.

For all the talk of listening to ordinary people, of being anti-establishment, of representing the forgotten, when it actually matters - when the question is whether to send young people to kill and die in a foreign war - they default to exactly the same hawkish instincts as the establishment they claim to oppose.

Turns out, they’re not the voice of the people after all, they’re just the establishment with better PR and worse judgement, and on Iran, the British public have seen right through them.

1. To note, while Farage is excellent at diagnosing just how pissed off people are, he’s just as adept at avoiding any sort of responsibility or accountability for why that might be.

2. A “crusader” who has spent roughly thirty years appearing on television, advising governments, influencing policy and enjoying a level of media access most actual outsiders could genuinely only dream of, but sure. Anti-establishment.

3. Writing all these out would likely require a series of books, so forgive me if I keep to understatement for the purposes of brevity.

4. A friend who regrettably couldn’t make time for poor Nige after he flew 4,500 miles to the US for a quick spot of dinner. How sad for him.

5. Though considering the people being asked, this number is even lower than I would have expected.