Alphen, Netherlands. 8
May. Last night Nigel Farage and UKIP
held their last and purposely multicultural pre-election rally in
London. The British Electoral Survey also
confirmed yesterday that 60% of those who intend to vote for UKIP in the
elections to European Parliament on 22 May will also vote for the Party in the
May 2015 British general election one year hence. UKIP is clearly a political force to stay in
British and indeed European politics. Farage
is essentially engaged in a battle over power and legitimacy in twenty-first
century Europe. It is not the first time
this has happened in European history.
Recently I have been
re-reading a history of the Roman republic (as I am wont to) and I am struck by
the striking similarity between Farage and one of the great, tragic figures of
Roman history Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Tiberius took on the Roman patrician
establishment between 138 and 133 BC to fight for the right of landless
peasants, particularly the veteran legionnaires who were the backbone of Rome’s
famed armies.
The struggle of
Tiberius was essentially between the rights of the ‘plebeian’ citizenry and what
patrician aristocracy regarded as their natural ‘right’ to lead and indeed to benefit
from Rome’s then expanding empire. Like
today both groups campaigned publicly under the banner of ‘freedom’ and again
like today’s EU elite Roman patricians demanded the ‘freedom’ to govern in the
name of the republic and by extension the people. Indeed, for the patricians that was the
implicit meaning of SPQR – Senatus
Populus que Romanus.
Like Farage Tiberius
was no man of the people. Indeed,
Tiberius was just about as blue-blooded a Roman aristocrat as one could find. His mother Cornelia was the daughter of Scipio
Africanus who had defeated Hannibal and Carthage in the Second Punic War at the
Battle of Zama in 202 BC. Tiberius was also
the cousin of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus who destroyed Carthage in the
Third Punic War which finally confirmed Roman power in the Mediterranean.
Tiberius was particularly
concerned about the growing distance between patrician power and the people and
the abuses of power such distance was generating. This is not unlike Farage’s concerns about
the growing distance between the citizen and power in the EU as law-making
authority is now routinely transferred to Brussels without popular assent or
consent. Nor, judging from the huge
amount of very deliberate dirt (and worse) being flung at Farage and UKIP by establishment
politicians and their friends in the establishment Press is today’s response
much different from that of Rome’s patricians.
It is a mark of people’s concerns in Britain that Farage’s popularity
increases with each smear. Today’s patricians have clearly lost the confidence
of huge swathes of the people and rightly so.
It was the issue of
broken trust that Tiberius championed and which Farage is successfully
exploiting. The EU is simply not seen as
being politically legitimate by huge numbers of British people. Worse, they feel their ability to influence power
is being systematically threatened by the EU.
What is the point in voting for national politicians with no power? That is little different to how Roman
citizens and veteran legionnaires felt about Roman patricians in the second
century BC.
Therefore, if the
political Establishment, be it in Britain or elsewhere across the EU is going
to stave off the growing popular revolt Farage is leading they must for once
honour their word. They must openly and publicly stop the ever onward and
insidious march of the illegitimate European federalists and return control of
the EU’s destiny to the member-states and the people where it belongs. That means doing not merely talking.
The stakes then and now
were and are enormous. Like Farage today the struggle Tiberius engaged in over power
and legitimacy was enormous. By the
second century BC the patrician class had successfully eroded the rights of the
Roman citizen in much the same way the EU has successfully diluted the ability
of the average European citizen to exert influence over Brussels.
The tragedy for
Tiberius was that his struggle far from saving the Republic paved the way for
its destruction. His eventual defeat confirmed
the patricians in power and over the following century led to the dictatorships
(Roman legal term) of Sulla, Pompey the Great and eventually Julius Caesar and
Augustus. All of whom claimed falsely to
be acting in the name of the Republic and betrayed it. The claims of the current EU patrician elite
(and Brussels insiders really are a patrician elite) has a strikingly familiar
ring at times when they claim to act on behalf of democracy, Europe and the people. Indeed, I used to be a great fan of the EU
until I worked for it and saw too many of today's self-serving patricians (not all) at close quarters.
And hopefully Nigel
Farage will not suffer the same grizzly fate as Tiberius. In 133 BC he was clubbed to death in the lee
of the Capitoline Hill by a mob set on him by his arch-enemy (and cousin) Nasica. His headless body was then tossed into the
Tiber.
It is precisely the distance of distant power that patricians exploit - then and now.
Nigellus Tiberius
Farageus?
Julian Lindley-French
