ANDREW NEIL: Seeing Farage as a return to conservative values is incorrect

A storm has engulfed Nigel Farage‘s election campaign ever since the BBC reminded the Reform party leader in an interview last week that he once said he ‘admired’ Vladimir Putin.

His angry response was to claim that the West had provoked the Russian dictator’s invasion of Ukraine by expanding Nato and the European Union eastwards, a critique of Western policy he has made before and on which he doubled-down as the row swirled around him.

It is a curious feature of the populist Right, which has put down such strong political roots on both sides of the Atlantic this past decade or so, that it has a soft spot for Russia in general and President Putin in particular.

Farage, of course, was peddling well-worn Kremlin propaganda in blaming the West for Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. But he’s far from alone in spreading such nonsense.

It’s long been a common view among Farage’s ideological soulmates in other countries, including those even further to the Right than him.

His American mentor, Donald Trump, has long been a Putin fanboy (‘He liked me. I liked him. I got along with him great.’) and some of this has no doubt rubbed off on The Donald’s British protege.

As Russian tanks roared into Ukraine in February 2022, Trump opined that Putin was a ‘genius’ and ‘pretty savvy’. While showering the tyrant with praise, Trump has disparaged American’s closest allies, saying earlier this year that he’d encourage Russia ‘to do whatever the hell they want’ to any Nato nation that was not, in Trump’s view, spending enough on defence. It gave new meaning to the phrase ‘giving comfort to the enemy’.

Granting the Kremlin the benefit of the doubt while undermining Nato is almost the default position of the populist Right. Across the Channel, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Right-wing National Rally which is likely to emerge as the largest party in France’s upcoming National Assembly elections, is a long-time Kremlin apologist and no friend of Nato.

A French parliamentary inquiry last year concluded that she regularly resorted to the ‘official language of the Putin regime’ when taking the Kremlin’s side and should be regarded as a ‘communication channel’ for Russian propaganda.

Her party once borrowed campaign funds from a Kremlin-friendly Russian bank. She supported Putin’s illegal annexing of Crimea, describing it as merely a ‘reattachment’. It was only after Putin attacked Ukraine that her love-in with the Kremlin cooled.

But it didn’t put off Hungary’s hard-Right strongman, Viktor Orban, perhaps Putin’s most reliable ally in the West.

A few weeks before Russia unleashed its onslaught on Ukraine, he was in Moscow for a friendly summit with Putin. Only pandemic restrictions stopped them from hugging each other, but the camaraderie was still palpable. Orban’s support has never wavered since, no doubt reinforced by a long-term energy deal with Russia which has kept Hungary’s gas supplies cheap and plentiful.

Compared with others on the populist Right, Farage’s sympathy for Russia is clearly less full-throated. But those who see him as a return to the ‘proper’ conservative values of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could not be more wrong, especially when it comes to foreign policy.

Far from being Kremlin apologists, Thatcher and Reagan stared the Soviet Union down, winning the Cold War and freeing all of Eastern Europe in the process.

They would never have ‘admired’ a despot like Putin. Or repeated Kremlin propaganda. Or made excuses for anything like the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. And they stood shoulder to shoulder in recognising Nato as our best defence against tyranny. Farage’s posturing would have been anathema to them.

Ironically, Farage has more in common with the Corbynista Left than he does with Thatcher or Reagan. The far-Left shares a soft spot for Russia. It might no longer be communist but it’s still anti-West and that’s what matters to the far Left.

That’s why Jeremy Corbyn was always ready to give it the benefit of the doubt, even when the Putin regime was trying to kill people on British soil.

It’s why France’s very own Corbynista, Jean-Luc Melenchon, whose Left-wing Popular Front could soon be the second largest grouping in the French National Assembly, shares Farage’s view of why Russia invaded Ukraine.

Perhaps the most telling example of this strange Left-Right symbiosis came when our very own Left-wing firebrand, George Galloway, interviewed Farage on Russia Today, the Kremlin TV mouthpiece, in 2016. Galloway repeated the familiar Kremlin complaint, which Farage shares, that the EU had incited Putin to annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, adding: ‘I respect Putin and I think he’s very popular in Russia.’ To which Farage, instead of knocking this back as any proper conservative would, merely responded in agreement with: ‘Of course.’

So what is it that drives Farage and the populist Right to end up aping the far-Left? In seems strange until you realise they often see the world through the same lens.

For a start, they share a dislike of so-called global capitalism, which in reality is no more than the rules-based environment which the US created, with important British support, after World War II and which has given us 75 years of the greatest economic growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But on the populist Right, as on the populist Left, it is synonymous with sinister globalism in which the world is dominated by shady, secretive characters and dodgy institutions, like Nato, the EU, the IMF, the OECD, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

There’s plenty wrong with all these organisations, but the idea they’re all part of some great global conspiracy against the rest of us is the kind of paranoid nonsense best confined to the madder parts of the Twitter-sphere.

But Putin is against ‘globalism’, standing for national sovereignty, not multilateral cooperation — and so worthy of populist adulation.

Even more important is the populist penchant for a strongman. Trump has never met one he didn’t like: Putin (of course), but also China’s Xi, the Saudi Crown Prince, Turkey’s Erdogan, Brazil’s former leader Bolsonaro, even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (Trump’s Rocket Man).

Populist leaders of the Right often fancy being something of a ‘caudillo’ (as they call military and political strongmen in Spain and Latin America) themselves. So it’s only natural they rather admire the real thing.

The populist Right also hates the perceived decadence of the West. They see Putin as a champion of traditional, Christian values, a social conservative who stands up to the woke, gay, trans, ethnic, even feminist lobbies.

He represents a return to supposedly traditional cultural values after which Right-wing populists also hanker.

Of course he’s a tyrant without a shred of Christian compassion in his body. But walk down a boulevard in Moscow and almost everybody is still white, just like Britain in the 1950s.

Though they’d never admit it in public, many Right-wing populists wish Britain was still like that. Putin, they think, stands up for what we’ve supposedly lost.

It’s not so much a conservative view of the world as a deeply reactionary one, a pining for a past that can never return. It leads to absurd claims, like the West provoked Russia into invading Ukraine by expanding the EU and Nato. True conservatives need to take this nonsense head-on. As Reagan and Thatcher would.

For a start, countries don’t join Nato because they want to annoy Russia. They do so because they feel threatened by Russia, with good reason. Just ask Finland and Sweden, neutrals throughout their modern existence who felt compelled to join the alliance because Russia had become dangerously revanchist under Putin.

Second, it was the new democracies of Eastern Europe which clamoured to be members of Nato and the EU. Were we to deny them? Having thrown off the Soviet yoke they wanted to consolidate their democratic future by joining institutions that would guarantee it. This is why, above all, Nato expanded. It was for the protection of democracy, not a threat to Russia.

Farage must realise that, even if Moscow doesn’t. It is to his shame that he knowingly peddles the lies of an evil dictator, like so many on the populist Right, rather than standing up for the defence of democracy, on which all our futures depend.