A few years ago Britain’s Nigel Farage was a political curiosity, head of a fringe party, gadfly member of the European Parliament, an ex-commodities broker who never went to college, dismissed as a nutter by ruling elites in London and Brussels. On 23 June 2016, he was widely credited with a key role in the referendum favoring Brexit— Britain’s exit from the European Community.

“Our Nige,” his supporters call him—personable, chatty, good-looking, beer swilling, cigarette and cigar smoking—wants Britain, not the European Union, to govern British affairs. To flip an uncertain quote from his hero Winston Churchill, he has all the vices they admire, and none of the virtues they despise. He also has the Churchillian habit of saying exactly what he thinks, regardless of polls, focus groups and the establishment.

Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP officially, “kippers” to critics) has been rolling like the nascent Labour Party a century ago, which displaced the Liberals and dominated political thought until Margaret Thatcher’s time. In 2014 UKIP turned 21 years old—Labour formed its first government at age 23.

In 2013’s local elections, kippers finished third. Last May, UKIP became the first party since 1906 to out-poll Labour and the Conservatives nationwide, winning 24 of Britain’s 73 seats in the rubber-stamp EU legislature.

This October UKIP elected its first member of Parliament, Douglas Carswell, and nearly ousted a Labour member in a “safe seat.” In November it’s likely to elect another MP. The party’s rising 25 percent in national polls—a political tsunami suggesting they may eventually hold the balance of power. [Since the Brexit vote, things haven’t gone very well for the party, so as of 2016 this was very much up in the air.]

Mr. Farage insists he isn’t against trade or immigration—he wants national control over them. “Right now, we have an open door to 485 million Europeans, and can’t make our own trade deals. Iceland, with 350,000 people, has a free-trade agreement with China. You’re telling me 63 million Brits can’t do such things?” He wants more trade with the “Anglosphere”: the U.S., India, and “the Commonwealth we so shamefully deserted.”

Nothing fazes Nige, a razor-sharp debater who jousts joyfully with the “ghastly” EU bureaucrats. The 2009 appointment of Herman Van Rompuy as “President of Europe” was just so much red meat: Instead of a giant global figure, Farage said, “all we got was you…And I don’t want to be rude, but you know, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. And the question I want to ask is, Who are you?”

That earned him one of many fines, which, typically, he laughed off. “It’s been calculated that if I’m fined another 63 million times I personally will have paid the entire Euro bail-out fund.” A UKIP tea towel with Van Rompuy’s image proclaims, “genuine Belgian damp rag.”

UKIP has a libertarian agenda: lower taxes, an end to limitless debt and extremist environmentalism, drastic reductions in enterprise-stifling regulation, and no more military actions without a clue what the goal is: “What have we to show for our support of rebels in Libya, Syria, Egypt?” he asked American interviewer Lauren Lyster. “In Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re achieving, let’s be honest, nothing. I’m extremely tired of the UK joining overseas adventures where we never really think what the endgame’s going to be.”

With an understanding of reality American conservatives might emulate, Farage has learned that you can’t win big with a narrow base. He’s purged UKIP of extreme “full-mooners,” resisted the easy charge of racism. UKIP has an Indian-born Brit who says how hard it is to run a small business, a Caribbean-Brit who sounds like Adam Smith. Farage has a senior adviser named Raheem. In the 1980s there were Reagan Democrats; now in Britain there are Labour kippers.

Asked to advise Americans, Our Nige is careful: “I’m a guest in your country. [But] we both want personal liberty and the responsibility that goes with it. Yet your public finances are no better than the Eurozone’s.”

During the 2012 presidential debates he did venture what Romney might have said: “Look, Barack is a nice chap, but he’s proved he’s not up to the job. I have been successful in business….I’ve run a company, I’m the man you need…And let me tell you, it’s going to be tough. There’re going to have to be some very big cutbacks in the size of the state. But if you follow me, we’ll get this ship steady again.” One wonders if we’ll ever hear a U.S. politician campaign like that.

Of course he’s an easy target. “Farage makes me proud to be British,” wrote Alan Tyers on BT.com in May 2014. “UKIP’s popularity is testament to British tolerance. Where else would such half-baked views be granted so much airtime?” Four days later UKIP rolled up the European elections. People used to say such things about Ronald Reagan. And then…

The establishment parties are worried—“they’ve never held a job outside politics; they’re social-democrats, indistinguishable from each other”—and the media is digging. Recently, charges surfaced of Farage romancing a staffer—hotly denied by both. Then in October 2014, Farage’s “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy” (EFDD) Group in the European Parliament collapsed. EUP president Martin Schulz (“acting more like the president of a banana republic”) coerced the resignation of a key member and disbanded the group.

Undaunted, Farage replaced his loss and EFDD announced, “we’re back.” The new member was a Polish MEP from a right-wing party led by a Holocaust denier, though the man himself says Hitler was evil and deserved what he got. So it goes. Back on the offensive, Farage declared, “…this will be the last European Commission that governs Britain because within the end of this five years, we will be out of here.”

Clearly Nigel Farage is more than a blip on the radar now. How he handles his challenges may determine whether the EU revolt is real, and whether UKIP can redefine British politics.

But nobody who has seen him in action is counting him out.

Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”

Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.” Soames concluded: “But it doesn’t matter. The basis of this argument is mythology, not history.”

Churchill’s view on the Lords was more nuanced than Clegg stated, and certainly did change after passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which Churchill helped pass. It eliminated the Lords’ veto of money bills, restricted their delay of other bills to two years, and reduced the term of a Parliament to five years. You can look it up.

What to do about the House of Lords is a matter for the British people and their representatives. My task is merely to refute nonsense about Winston Churchill—which I will now respectfully proceed to do, quoting from Mr. Knowles’s treatise:

 • “We idolise Churchill because we don’t really know anything about him.”

Only sycophants idolize Churchill. But if they do, it’s not because they know nothing about him. He has the longest biography in the history of the planet. He has 15-million published words. There are a million documents in the Churchill Archives. One hundred million words were written about him. He gets 37 million Google hits. Don’t be silly.

 • “His finest hours aside, Winston Churchill was hardly a paragon of progressive thought.”

Churchill’s was at times so progressive that he was called a traitor to his class. His own Conservative Party never quite trusted him because they knew he continued to harbor principles of the Liberal Party he had been part of from 1904 to 1922. To cite examples would bore you. So let’s just say that he favored a National Health Service before the Labour Party did, and believed in a system of social security before the Labour Party existed.

 • “He believed that women shouldn’t vote – telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.’”

Churchill never said that in the Commons. It’s a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register in 1897, when he was 23. At that time the majority of British women themselves were opposed to having the vote. Churchill changed his view on women’s suffrage after observing the role women played in World War I—and when he realized, as his daughter said, “how many women would vote for him.”

 • “He was fiercely opposed to self-determination for the people of the Empire….”

Was the fierce independence Churchill admired in Canadians, Boers, Zulus, Australians, Sudanese, New Zealanders and Maoris a sham and a façade, then? Churchill did have a tic about the early Indian independence movement, with its Brahmin roots. Yet in 1935 he declared that Gandhi had “gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Churchill was proven right that a premature British exit from India would result in a Hindu-Muslim bloodbath—how many died is still unknown.

 • “….advocating the use of poisoned gas against ‘uncivilized tribes’ in Mesopotamia in 1919.”

That Golden Oldie has been refuted repeatedly for twenty years. The specific term he used was “lachrymatory gas” (tear gas). He was not referring to a killer gas like chlorine.

 • “Even his distrust of Hitler was probably motivated mostly by a hatred of Germans.”

Is this the same Churchill who urged that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany after the 1918 armistice, incurring the wrath of his colleagues, who wished to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked”? Is this the man who wrote to his wife in 1945: “…my heart is saddened by the tales of masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies”? Really, Mr. Knowles should be ashamed of himself.

 • “In 1927, he said that Mussolini’s fascism ‘had rendered service to the whole world,’ while Il Duce himself was a ‘Roman genius.’”

Lots of politicians said favorable things about Mussolini after he restored order to a reeling Italy in the 1920s. Churchill was among the first to realize and to say publicly what Mussolini really was. Churchill wasn’t always right the first time—but he was usually right in the long run.

 • “In 1915, he had to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disaster of Gallipoli.”

He had to resign because of the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli, which was someone else’s idea (and hadn’t yet become a disaster). Churchill initially was even doubtful about the plan to force the Dardanelles, but he defended it and was a handy scapegoat. He vowed never again to champion “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority; hence his assumption of the title “Minister of Defence” in World War II.

 • “His decision in 1925 to restore Britain to the Gold Standard caused a deep and unnecessary recession.”

There was already a recession. Churchill, Keynes and the Gold Standard comprise a far more complicated subject than Mr. Knowles represents. Among other things, the Gold Standard was insisted upon by the Bank of England. Churchill was certainly wrong to buy their arguments, and saw many of its effects coming; he was also incredibly unlucky in the way things transpired.

 • ”That led directly to the general strike in 1926, in which he was reported to have suggested using machine guns on the miners.”

Mr. Knowles confused his red herrings. It was the Welsh miners at Tonypandy in 1910 against whom Churchill is mythologically supposed to have sent troops—but top marks for the machine guns, a new twist on the old myth. (In fact, Churchill opposed the use of troops, in Tonypandy and in the General Strike.)

Mr. Knowles concluded:

Yes, he was, in the most part, a brilliant war leader. His role in the creation of the modern welfare state is also worth remembering. But his views on Lords reform are as irrelevant today as his views on India or female suffrage. This is a debate we should have based on principle, and on a practical evaluation of how well the House of Lords works. Citing dead men only muddies it.

Well, it is my instinctive feeling anyone who fails to do basic research can produce only what amounts to a national myth, divorced from reality.

Churchill was not always “a brilliant war leader.” He did help create what became the welfare state–and warned against its excesses. His views on Lords reform are not irrelevant, but they do require more study than we read in the Telegraph Blogpost. His views on India are still relevant to certain Indians who have written on the subject. (As one wrote, the Axis Powers had quite different ideas in mind for India than the old British Raj).

As for female suffrage, ask all the women who voted for him. Citing live Telegraph bloggers only muddies the waters.

Mr. Knowles has tweeted that “The whole point of the post was to take down Clegg. That piece is bizarre.” I certainly agree his piece is bizarre. But Mr. Clegg lasted until 2015.

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.

What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).

In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill

equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies. Churchill cost himself the election because he didn’t realize he was overplaying an issue that people were already damned serious about.

Er…not exactly, Mr. O.

Churchill did not use the “Gestapo speech” to oppose Labour’s national health plan, which, in general at least, he supported (see next post). He used it to describe—in what was later thought to be a poor analogy—the kind of compulsion citizens might expect under a socialist government:

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip? I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed.

It is an article of faith in “enlightened” circles that Churchill made a bad mistake by comparing the 1945 Labour Party, led by the kindly, self-effacing Clement Attlee, to Hitler’s political police. Maybe so.

But it strikes me as interesting when a friend in England, a confirmed Labour supporter, likens the tactics of certain modern Labour town councils in Britain precisely to those of the Gestapo: in their suppression of free speech; in their attempt to destroy those who disagree with them; in their vitriolic hatred of opposition media.

If Churchill’s words don’t put you in mind of certain recent developments in America, read on.

Olbermann now switches to the Churchill of 1936, who, he says,

made the greatest argument ever for government intervention in health care only [sic] he did not realize it. He was debating in Parliament the notion that the British government could not increase expenditures on military defense unless the voters specifically authorized it, just as today’s opponents of reform are now claiming they speak for the voters of today, even though those voters spoke for themselves eleven months ago.

Churchill’s argument was this: “I have heard it said that the government had no mandate….Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility [of Ministers] for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.”

And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life, of each citizen? We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us. But we can try dammit and government’s essential role in that effort facilitate it, reduce its cost, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours, seems, ultimately, self-explanatory. [sic]

We want to live. What is government for if not to help us do so? Indeed Mr. Churchill, the responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!

Leave aside the question of whether the current healthcare proposal would expand or shrink access to healthcare. To equate it with a threat to a nation’s existence is quite a stretch. But let’s start by quoting all of what Churchill said, on 12 November 1936:

I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact the prime object for which Governments come into existence. The Prime Minister had the command of enormous majorities in both Houses of Parliament ready to vote for any necessary measures of defence.

“The responsibility for the public safety is absolute.” Indeed so: the safety of the nation against those who would snuff it out. That is, inarguably, “the prime object for which Governments come into existence.” They do not come into existence to pass out largess until the public till is exhausted and the currency debased. The American government was not created to force every citizen to buy a good or service—which is part of the current healthcare proposal, but nowhere authorized by the United States Constitution. And has never before been mandated in history.

True, the President does have “the command of enormous majorities.” Yet he seems unable to make them “vote for any necessary measures.” Why?

It would behoove him, and the Congress, and the rest of us to ask. Is it, for example, because 75% of citizens are happy with their healthcare? Or because they prefer piecemeal solutions that are more easily monitored—tort reform and portability, for example—to a comprehensive plan that would inevitably lead to massive spending and rationing? Or because a large majority fear that like Medicare, which will go broke inside a decade unless altered, this amplification of Medicare will also go broke—or exclude many for whom Medicare is now accessible? Or because it will require punitive taxes? Or because they can see no example of anything run efficiently by government, from the Postal Service to the war in Afghanistan? All these are legitimate objections, and people are not Nazis to express them.

Salon.com, which agrees with Mr. Olbermann about health reform, says he did nothing to advance their cause: that his argument is self-defeating:

[He dug] up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people’s well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn’t remotely modeled on Britain’s National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform.

In the narrow sense, that’s a rejection of Olbermann’s argument. In a broader sense, Salon is also right. Churchill is dead. This is not 1936 or 1945. Lady Soames is often wont to remark: “You must never suggest what my father would do or say about any modern issue—after all, how do you know?”

What her father said about liberty never goes out of fashion, and here is the most memorable sentence in  his “Gestapo speech” of 1945: “I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual.”

Of course, Churchill’s times are often paralleled in ours. That’s the value of studying history—how Churchill reacted to challenges which may seem familiar to thoughtful people. And, since Mr. Olbermann likes to tell us what reminds him of Hitler, let me say what reminds me of Hitler.

It is people who think it appropriate to offer an email address where Americans can report anything “fishy” they might see or hear emanating from the thoughts and opinions of other Americans. That reminds me of the Gestapo.

It is a teacher who makes little schoolchildren chant, “Mm, mmm, mm! He said that all must lend a hand, To make this country strong again, Mmm, mmm, mm!
He said we must be fair today, Equal work means equal pay….Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
 For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say hooray!”—set to the music of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

That reminds me of the Hitler Youth.

Commentator Mark Whitting writes: “This is going beyond the beyonds, as this writer’s Irish granny used to say.”

That, Mr. Whitting, is putting it mildly.

If we are going to draw anything from Churchill’s “Gestapo speech” that bears on our current situation, it might be what Churchill said about gathering “all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

“And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?”