Nigel Farage knows how to seize on a moment and how to spin a line.
He came to Washington to declare that Britain had “become North Korea.”
I’m not sure if he has been to North Korea, but I have, and I can report that Britain is not North Korea.
But then it makes a good headline and Mr Farage knows that. And to underline his point, he was gifted a moment with the news of the arrest of Graham Linehan two days ago at Heathrow.
But perhaps Mr Farage met his match over here on the other side of the Atlantic and on the other side of the political divide.
At a committee hearing in Washington – examining the perceived threat and impact that UK and EU online safety laws have on free speech – Mr Farage was given what liberals will likely regard as an evisceration by a number of Democratic Party politicians.
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American politicians know how to drive a sound bite. One lawmaker called Mr Farage a “fringe politician”. Another, Representative Jamie Raskin, described Mr Farage’s appearance as “a drive by hit against a Democratic ally to benefit a Donald Trump sycophant and wannabe…”
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Mr Raskin went on to address the British people. “To the people of the UK who think this Putin-loving, free speech impostor and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in your country, come on over to America and see what Trump and MAGA are doing to destroy our freedom.”
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There is a curiosity around this hearing. The right in Britain (Farage) and the left in America (Raskin et al) are using this moment to warn of what they both see as the erosion of freedom of speech in each other’s countries.
Frankly both are using the moment to score political points for their own side in their own countries – you’d expect nothing less.
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Interestingly though, when I put it to Mr Farage that there is more than a small dose of hypocrisy going on given that Trump’s administration has been accused of stifling any speech that it disagrees with (books in schools, content in museums, social media on phones, reporting in the media) he didn’t push back.
Instead he said he was here to warn against the stifling of any free speech; and to warn America of where he thinks it leads: “‘authoritarian Britain” in his mind.
Speaking to the committee, Mr Farage said: “I’ve come today as well to be a klaxon, to say to you, don’t allow piece by piece, this to happen here in America.
“And you would be doing us and yourselves and all freedom-loving people a favour if your politicians and your businesses said to the British government, ‘You’ve simply got this wrong, at what point did we become North Korea?'”
