Latest news with #PortTalbot
The Independent
16 hours ago
- Business
- The Independent
Offshore floating wind farms to power millions of homes, minister says
New floating windfarms, set to be among the biggest in the world, will create thousands of jobs and power millions of homes, a minister has said. Turbines up to 300m tall will sit on platforms floating off the coast of Wales, powering some four million homes under plans revealed on Thursday. The project, which is jointly run by the Crown Estate, Equinor and Gwynt Glas, is expected to be completed by the mid-2030s, with several wind farms to be constructed. The turbines are expected to be assembled in Bristol and Port Talbot, from where they will be towed out to the final project sites. Jo Stevens, the Secretary of State for Wales, said the announcement was 'great news' for the country, and could create some 5,300 new jobs. Speaking to the PA news agency on a visit to Port Talbot, she said: 'These are going to be the biggest offshore floating wind farms in the world, and they're going to be off the coast of Wales. 'It is going to create thousands of jobs, power four million homes and bring down energy bills. 'This is really, really good news for Wales, and especially for young people and people wanting apprenticeships, because there are guarantees within the process that there will be specific apprenticeships and jobs for young people.' The minister's visit also follows the announcement of funding for the redevelopment of the port in Port Talbot as part of the spending review last week. The Crown Estate – which manages the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland – is making a £400 million investment in the UK's offshore wind supply chain. While profits from the Crown Estate go to the Treasury, it is owned by the monarch and run independently. The Crown Estate owns the seabed out to 12 nautical miles and around 65% of the Welsh foreshore and riverbed. Management of Crown Estate assets has been a controversial issue in Wales, with Welsh Labour calling for management to be devolved as it has in Scotland. Labour in Westminster has refused to allow the Welsh Government to take control. Ms Stevens said Thursday's announcement 'vindicated' the UK Government's position. She said: 'Today's announcement is a real vote of confidence in floating offshore wind as a new technology and industry. 'This will be the biggest floating off in the world. 'In order to deliver that and deliver those thousands of jobs and the billions of pounds of investment, you have to have certainty, and investors need to know that the situation is certain.' Asked if Scotland would not be able to get a similar scheme, she said it would 'put it at risk.' 'There is a significant risk, if you bring uncertainty into the process, that developers and investors will go elsewhere.' She insisted it was not a question of whether the Welsh Government could be trusted with the Crown Estate. Llinos Medi, Plaid Cymru's energy spokesperson in Westminster, pushed back against Ms Stevens, arguing Scotland is developing 19 offshore wind projects under the devolved Scottish Crown Estate. 'Until we devolve the Crown Estate, the process of extracting wealth from Wales's natural resources will continue,' Ms Medi said. 'The Labour First Minister of Wales made a big pitch that she would not let Westminster 'take our wind'. 'It's clear that those efforts have not been effective, as the fees and profits from this announcement will be given to the Treasury in Whitehall rather than being retained for the Welsh public purse for the benefit of our communities.' Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said floating offshore wind will be 'transformative' for economic growth in Wales and the south west of England. He said: 'The Celtic Sea has huge untapped potential to support our mission to become a clean energy superpower, so we can get energy bills down for good.' Speaking to PA, Eluned Morgan, the First Minister of Wales, said it was a 'really significant announcement', branding it the birth of a new global industry. 'This is a brand new approach to energy, it's cutting-edge technology,' she said. 'People are going to have to work out how effective this is, how do you do it properly. 'I have been speaking to a lot of these energy companies and a lot of supply chains to say 'base yourself in Wales'.'
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Offshore floating wind farms to power millions of homes, minister says
New floating windfarms, set to be among the biggest in the world, will create thousands of jobs and power millions of homes, a minister has said. Turbines up to 300m tall will sit on platforms floating off the coast of Wales, powering some four million homes under plans revealed on Thursday. The project, which is jointly run by the Crown Estate, Equinor and Gwynt Glas, is expected to be completed by the mid-2030s, with several wind farms to be constructed. The turbines are expected to be assembled in Bristol and Port Talbot, from where they will be towed out to the final project sites. Jo Stevens, the Secretary of State for Wales, said the announcement was 'great news' for the country, and could create some 5,300 new jobs. Speaking to the PA news agency on a visit to Port Talbot, she said: 'These are going to be the biggest offshore floating wind farms in the world, and they're going to be off the coast of Wales. 'It is going to create thousands of jobs, power four million homes and bring down energy bills. 'This is really, really good news for Wales, and especially for young people and people wanting apprenticeships, because there are guarantees within the process that there will be specific apprenticeships and jobs for young people.' The minister's visit also follows the announcement of funding for the redevelopment of the port in Port Talbot as part of the spending review last week. The Crown Estate – which manages the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland – is making a £400 million investment in the UK's offshore wind supply chain. While profits from the Crown Estate go to the Treasury, it is owned by the monarch and run independently. The Crown Estate owns the seabed out to 12 nautical miles and around 65% of the Welsh foreshore and riverbed. Management of Crown Estate assets has been a controversial issue in Wales, with Welsh Labour calling for management to be devolved as it has in Scotland. Labour in Westminster has refused to allow the Welsh Government to take control. Ms Stevens said Thursday's announcement 'vindicated' the UK Government's position. She said: 'Today's announcement is a real vote of confidence in floating offshore wind as a new technology and industry. 'This will be the biggest floating off in the world. 'In order to deliver that and deliver those thousands of jobs and the billions of pounds of investment, you have to have certainty, and investors need to know that the situation is certain.' Asked if Scotland would not be able to get a similar scheme, she said it would 'put it at risk.' 'There is a significant risk, if you bring uncertainty into the process, that developers and investors will go elsewhere.' She insisted it was not a question of whether the Welsh Government could be trusted with the Crown Estate. Llinos Medi, Plaid Cymru's energy spokesperson in Westminster, pushed back against Ms Stevens, arguing Scotland is developing 19 offshore wind projects under the devolved Scottish Crown Estate. 'Until we devolve the Crown Estate, the process of extracting wealth from Wales's natural resources will continue,' Ms Medi said. 'The Labour First Minister of Wales made a big pitch that she would not let Westminster 'take our wind'. 'It's clear that those efforts have not been effective, as the fees and profits from this announcement will be given to the Treasury in Whitehall rather than being retained for the Welsh public purse for the benefit of our communities.' Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said floating offshore wind will be 'transformative' for economic growth in Wales and the south west of England. He said: 'The Celtic Sea has huge untapped potential to support our mission to become a clean energy superpower, so we can get energy bills down for good.' Speaking to PA, Eluned Morgan, the First Minister of Wales, said it was a 'really significant announcement', branding it the birth of a new global industry. 'This is a brand new approach to energy, it's cutting-edge technology,' she said. 'People are going to have to work out how effective this is, how do you do it properly. 'I have been speaking to a lot of these energy companies and a lot of supply chains to say 'base yourself in Wales'.'
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
The Reform surge in Wales that spells doom for Keir Starmer
While Reform's credibility in Westminster has been tarnished by public rows among its upper echelons in recent weeks, in south Wales, where support for the party is soaring, people don't seem to care. Clare Davies, 48, from Llanelli, a former steel town in Carmarthenshire, south Wales, has never voted – she has never seen the point. In next year's Senedd election, however, Davies is considering voting for Reform – despite the turbulence it has endured in the wake of former chairman, Zia Yusuf's resignation earlier this month. 'It's a change, for a start,' she says. A change is exactly what a vote for Reform represents in this part of the country. Labour has been the biggest party in Wales in every election since 1922, giving it the longest winning streak of any political party in the world. For more than a century, the red way has been the only way. If Llanelli is any indication, however, by next May (when the Senedd vote is due to take place) that will no longer be the case. 'The things [Labour] do aren't working for the working classes,' Davies says. 'I remember growing up, seeing election campaigns, and everyone talking about Labour. I thought I'd vote Labour. But times have changed. Labour means something different now than it did.' Last week, Nigel Farage chose Port Talbot, some 20 miles south-east of Llanelli, for his opening salvo ahead of next year's Senedd elections. Farage once described himself as the only politician 'keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive'. Now, gunning for the Welsh vote, he is singing a very different tune. The Reform UK leader unveiled grand plans to reindustrialise parts of Wales, re-opening the Port Talbot steelworks, which closed last year, and the coal mines. Labour First Minister Eluned Morgan dismissed these policies as 'absolute nonsense' and said she wasn't sure if 'if people in Wales want to see their grandchildren going back down the pits.' (The party has banned new coal mines from opening as part of its net zero drive.) Davies's grandfather did not work down the pits, but he did have a long career in the local steelworks. He and Davies's grandmother both recently died and she has been reflecting on their lives. They worked hard – her grandmother as a homemaker and latterly a cook – and retired early, in their 50s, to travel the world. It is the kind of life, Davies suggests, that is out of reach for people like her, now that hard work does not necessarily equal success, and nothing is certain. Davies works full time in the DVLA office; she does not know when she will be able to retire, or even drop a day to help take care of her five grandchildren. She worries that they will grow up with a poorer education and poorer prospects than their peers. Educational attainment in Wales, measured by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, had dropped to its lowest ever level last year. It was significantly below the average recorded across the UK as a whole and in other OECD countries. Parts of Llanelli registered among the most disadvantaged areas of the country. 'The feeling is that things have got worse if you're working class,' Davies says. 'Even if your family has always voted Labour… people are listening to stories of times gone by and thinking, 'we want things to be like that again'.' Farage and his party, then, appear to understand the Welsh electorate better than Morgan gives them credit for. There are certainly clear signs Reform is gaining ground, particularly in the Welsh Valleys. YouGov polling published earlier this year, the first of its kind since the 2024 general election, put Reform in second place among Welsh voters, with a 25 per cent share of the vote, fast gaining on Plaid Cymru. Adding to the sense the ground is shifting is the fact that the upcoming Senedd election, which must be held by May 7 next year, will be the first to use a 'closed proportional list system'. This means the number of seats a party wins will more closely reflect their percentage share of the vote – a system which is expected to benefit smaller or insurgent parties, such as Reform. Meanwhile, support for Labour has collapsed, according to the same YouGov poll, and the party has dropped to third place at 18 per cent. This is apparent in Llanelli town centre, where I find nothing but disdain for Labour (both in Wales and in Westminster). Marie Howard, 80, was a lifelong Labour supporter, until she became a first-time Reform voter last year. 'Labour promised everything and we got nothing,' she says, citing the removal of her winter fuel allowance (now restored for most pensioners). 'They didn't keep their promises. Mind you, Nigel Farage is promising everything, and I don't know where he's going to get the money from.' One passing shopper, who declined to give his name, says he 'hasn't voted for the past three elections, because nothing changes.' This emerges as a theme, as people young and old tell me they haven't cast a ballot in years as they feel there's no point. Joseph May, a 24-year-old pub bartender, says: 'Most of my friends didn't vote, for similar reasons to me – they didn't feel like any [party] appealed.' Another passer-by adds: 'I've said to myself I'm never voting again.' This, though, could work in Farage's favour: if the findings of the British Election Study bear out, traditional non-voters are likely to favour Farage, relative to Sir Keir Starmer, and if activated, may therefore be likely to offer Reform their backing. Dr Jac Larner, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, has studied the reasons behind Reform's rising popularity in Wales. He has conducted research that shows emerging support for the party is, in the main, not coming from former Labour voters. His analysis suggests that just four per cent of people across Wales that now support Reform voted for Sir Keir Starmer's party in last July's general election. Instead, these new potential voters are mainly coming from two sources: firstly, from mopping up the Conservative vote. 'Reform has essentially cannibalised the Conservative-Brexit coalition,' Larner explains. 'These are people who voted Conservative in 2019, many of them for the first time. They didn't particularly like the Conservative Party, but they voted for them for Brexit. Now, they've switched to Reform.' The second and potentially more significant demographic is the disillusioned section of the electorate who had given up on voting entirely. Traditionally, turnout at UK Parliamentary elections has been higher in Wales than in the rest of the UK, Larner explains. 'Now, it was lower in the last election, so we could read something into that,' he says. However, 'turnout at Senedd elections [held every five years for members of Welsh Parliament] is low. It was knocking up against 50 per cent at the last election; a lot of people just don't bother to vote at all.' The reason this matters now, he explains, is because evidence in England suggests that Reform is winning support from first-time voters and others who haven't turned out for a long time. 'I don't see why it would be any different in Wales,' he says. 'If that's the case, it's important.' So important, in fact, that it could be the key to the party's success. Outside of those two groups, and in Wales especially, there is another set of voters among whom Reform appears to be gaining a foothold: those who are socially conservative but, given the Conservative Party's legacy in Wales, could never bring themselves to vote Tory. 'In South Wales, you have a lot of voters who, values-wise, line up with the Conservatives but won't vote for them,' says Larner, because of all the 'baggage' that comes with the party. 'There isn't that baggage with Reform,' he says. There has always been anti-Tory sentiment in this area; now there is anti-Labour feeling, too. The final significant factor in Reform's surge is that there is 'mass dissatisfaction' with the Welsh government, Larner explains. Frustration with Westminster's ruling class is 'nothing new,' but 'for the first time, a majority of people now think that the Welsh Government is doing a really bad job,' he says. 'It's driving people towards Reform.' Natalie Evans, who runs a café and sports supplement company with her husband in Llanelli, is one of them: she has long been fed up with Labour, but moved from voting Conservative, to voting for UKIP, to voting Reform. 'We've been burdened by politicians in the past saying, 'we'll do this,' and then doing the opposite,' she says. 'And that's exactly what the Labour government have done – they're taking more money off people, and they're not stopping illegal immigration. 'This town has [had] 100 years of Labour and you see the state of it. The shops have all shut down, small businesses have been hit hard, [and there is] antisocial behaviour,' she continues. Many people in the area voted Labour in 2024 on the basis of the party's vow to secure the future of the steel industry. But in September last year, Port Talbot's last blast furnace – the same furnace Farage said he will seek to reopen – was closed. The key issue for Evans, however, is immigration and its impact on public services. 'You've got people who aren't skilled coming in, putting pressure on the NHS,' she says. 'I'm not racist or anything like that, but I do believe that the illegal immigrants are putting enormous pressure on public services and haven't paid a penny into [them].' Reform's rise in support here has its roots in such sentiment. The party's growing popularity can be traced back to the summer of 2023, when the Stradey Park hotel, a popular Llanelli wedding venue, was sold. The new owners struck a deal with Clearsprings Ready Homes, one of the companies contracted by the Home Office to provide accommodation for asylum seekers. The hotel was due to house up to 241 people, a proposal that was opposed by the local council and led to months of violent protests and clashes between police and demonstrators. Six people who forced their way into the grounds of the hotel and started a fire were arrested. In October that year, the Home Office confirmed the plans had been dropped. Reform picked up on the strength of feeling, and began gaining support at pace. Davies didn't support the protests, but believes they put the party on the map in the area. 'Something as big as that happening [here] – making national news – people who didn't know about Reform now do and are swinging towards it,' she says. In the general election the following July, Llanelli was the Welsh seat that Reform came closest to winning. Gareth Beer, the party's candidate, stormed in and came second, narrowly losing out (with 11,247 votes) to the long-standing Labour MP Nia Griffiths (who won 12,751). Last month, Gareth's wife Michelle Beer, 47, was elected as Carmarthenshire's first Reform county councillor by a healthy margin. Michelle's perspective on the hotel protests is that they 'brought the community together' (others, arguing they sowed division, disagree). Michelle took part in the demonstrations, as did her husband. They invited Reform's now-Deputy Leader Richard Tice down, taught him how to pronounce Llanelli, and kick-started a Reform campaign (before joining the party, Gareth, 49, previously voted Labour; Michelle backed what was then the Brexit Party). While out canvassing voters in the run-up to last year's election, Michelle said he encountered a 'genuine, heartfelt' desire for change. 'That's what spurred people on. I think they saw the opportunity. We fell a bit short but hey, never mind.' Garteth says he decided to stand for Reform 'for the kids, really' (he and Michelle have four, aged between six and 22). 'You see things in terminal decline, and you want to make a stand,' he says. 'Wales is a microcosm of what's happening in the UK now. Wales is ahead of the curve in terms of educational decline, economic [decline]... we started when Reform was at 1 or 2 per cent, and just watched it grow.' Indeed, the Beers's success in Llanelli's local politics may provide something of a blueprint for Reform's path to power nationwide. The apparent internal discord in the party – such as Yusuf's recent resignation – matters far less to potential Reform voters than a 'common sense' approach on the ground, he says. (Farage, in his speech at Port Talbot, dismissed Yusuf's standing down as a 'speed bump'.) Beer says local supporters don't care about rows in the upper echelons of the party, as it's 'all about what happens locally'. 'It's a grassroots movement,' he says. 'It's the local stuff that matters – we just want our kids educated, our roads to work, and for the Government to run things, which now seems secondary to pushing ideas down our necks.' Reform is yet to have a Welsh leader, a Welsh MP, or even a Welsh HQ. That hasn't stopped them gaining ground. In May next year, we will see just how far the movement can go.
BBC News
4 days ago
- Sport
- BBC News
Mixed ability rugby helped man rebuild his life after accident
A keen rugby player who was left with brain damage and severe sight loss after he was knocked off his bike said he believed he could soon be a World Cup Powles, 35, plays for the Port Talbot Panthers team and will also be competing in the International Mixed Ability Rugby Tournament which gets under way in Spain next week."To be back playing rugby again is amazing after what I've been through."And the opportunity to go to a World Cup is out of this world." Jak spent five-and-a-half months in hospital after he was knocked off his bike by a car while cycling to school when he was family said he nearly died, and had to learn to walk and talk a teenager, Jak played rugby for his school, Brynteg Comprehensive in Bridgend. He also won an Under 15's cap for Wales' rugby league side, as well as trialling for the Great Britain team in St Helens."Jak was a really good rugby player and he loved playing the game and when that was taken away twenty years ago, we never thought he'd be able to play rugby again," said his dad, Carl."But seven years ago we had the opportunity to start this side, Port Talbot Panthers, and it's done Jak and me no end of good." Carl now plays alongside his son, and explained his role on the pitch as being "Jak's eyes"."I act as facilitator," he said."I can catch it and give the ball to Jak who runs in to contact, but because of Jak's brain injury he is only 'cwtch tackled', where he goes to ground and releases the ball."It works well."He said the type of rugby they play would not work unless teams were filled with a mix of abilities."You have mainstream players alongside someone with disabilities. Here we have players with cerebral palsy and amputees, but Jak is our only visually impaired player." The fourth International Mixed Ability Rugby Tournament, also known as the mixed ability World Cup, will begin on 23 June in Pamplona in tournament started 10 years ago in Bradford in 2015 and has grown will be 32 teams from 22 countries competing, including four from Swansea Gladiators and Llanelli Warriors, who both made it through to the semi-finals in the last international tournament in Cork in 2022, will join the Port Talbot Panthers in the men's tournament, while Merched Cymru are in the women's finals will take place on 27 June, with more than 70 matches lined up. Jak, who will be one of the 1,500 players taking part, is a hooker - but while it is the same format as a regular rugby union match, the scrums are his visual impairment, as a hooker he still undertakes the line-out explained how rugby had been a big part of Jak's reocvery."Not long after his accident we took him out with the under-18's from Brynteg touring school side to South Africa," he said."He had a really supportive teacher, Peter Cavalli, who visited him in hospital lots and suggested the tour."And we played one game where Jak had a line-out throw and that was the start of it."Jak fought a battle 20 years ago and he's still fighting now." Carl is also the chairman at Port Talbot Panthers. who train at Aberavon Green Stars ground in Sandfields."There's a good feeling around camp and the rugby we play does change people's lives."There's guys who started with us with zero confidence, people who thought they'd never play again, and you see their confidence come back."It's life-changing."He said the Port Talbot community had been "really supportive", adding: "They've gone through so much with the steel works recently but they've still helped us with fundraising and making it possible for us to go."Jak added he believed everyone should have the opportunity to play rugby and it had been brilliant for him, "socially as well as fitness"."But the main winner is I'm out there playing rugby again," he said."Win, lose or draw I want to play rugby. I'm ready, so let's go for it."
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
British politics is in a loop and it's Farage's vision that's stuck on repeat
As so often happens, what Nigel Farage said on a recent visit to south Wales deserved endless pejoratives. It was ludicrous, condescending, half-baked, opportunistic and plain stupid. Even he didn't seem to know exactly what he wanted. At a Reform UK press conference in Port Talbot, he seemed to make the case for reopening the town's steel-making blast furnaces, before admitting that 'it might be easier to build a new one', though he also acknowledged that it would 'cost in the low billions' to do so. But he had even more dizzying visions of reopened Welsh mines. 'If you offer people well-paying jobs … many will take them,' said Farage, 'even though you have to accept that mining is dangerous.' The climate crisis, predictably enough, was not worth considering. He also did not offer any opinions about coal-related issues such as slag heaps, land slips, rivers that run black, and unimaginable underground disasters. When he was asked where new pits might be located, he blithely offered the opinion that it 'comes down to geology'. That is true, up to a point, but he would surely also have to think about the housing developments and business parks that often sit atop all those disused coal seams. The whole thing was – of course – politics on the level of pub bullshit, but Farage and his people presumably knew that. What mattered was the resulting spectacle: Britain's foremost populist proposing to 'reindustrialise' Wales, in the face of entirely reasonable doubts, mockery and outright opposition from voices easily maligned as the usual distant elites. In that sense the visit was a win, repeating a formula that has been working for a very long time. Besides Farage's own enviable political skills, there are obvious reasons for that. The first is to do with the fact that the basic social and economic conditions that fed into the rise of the UK Independence party and the Brexit referendum remain unchanged. It seems, in fact, to be 2016 for ever: Britain is still a country of anaemic growth and productivity, ongoing local austerity, stagnant wages and fear of the future. Those conditions explain people's ever-deepening disdain for mainstream politicians, and their sense that as life constantly goes round in circles, Westminster does not seem able or willing to break the pattern. Every grim rotation, moreover, seems to be accompanied by ever-more extreme manifestations of the country's dysfunctionality. Our passage to a new political era used to be marked by the results of elections and referendums. But of late, it feels as if more vivid proof of where we are heading is provided by civil disturbances. Last year's summer riots were an obvious example. In the same week that saw massed violence in Salford, we have just seen horrific outbreaks of racist violence in the Northern Irish town of Ballymena, and Farage has offered opinions that follow his usual slippery script: 'I just wonder whether it is not a deeper, broader problem we saw something of after Southport last year. You know what? If they'd listened to me, none of this would have happened.' A question not asked enough in political journalism is what life in contemporary Britain feels like. The answer in part comes down to a profound sense of tension and a constant, latent fear that something awful is about to happen. Farage attracts supporters by offering himself as an answer to that feeling – but to those who recoil from him, he is the source of it. Like Donald Trump, that combination makes him a very zeitgeisty politician. So does his presence on social media – which, even if most politicians do not yet understand it, has changed what is required to be a successful public figure even more radically than TV once did. Farage has 1.3 million TikTok followers, as many as every other Westminster politician combined. Particularly since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, he is regularly cited and praised in the parallel news universe that millions of people now take their information from – full of scurrilous rumours and explanations for events rooted in QAnon-like conspiracies. That ecosystem blurs into the nightmarish version of reality X offers as a kind of mood music, represented by endless videos of violence and hostile altercations between members of the public. All this suits Farage – and Farage-ism – just fine. His key asset is a diagnosis of people's problems that gets simpler and sharper by the week: you are scared and struggling, he and his allies tell the public, because the government spends too much money on foreigners and is full of privileged and snobby people who know nothing of your pain. The Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham recently gave an interview to the centre-left journal Renewal, in which he mused on what effective political communication now entails. The governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he said, operated in 'a world of nuance', but social media 'just ended all of that'. What he said next sounded like a brisk answer to why Farage is winning: our modern means of communication, he said, 'changed politics, and politics hasn't changed enough to reflect that … people want instant opinions from elected representatives. They want authentic opinions'. Six weeks ago I watched Farage do a walkabout in a neighbourhood of Scunthorpe, surrounded by crowds of people jostling to take pictures of him on their phones. Not long after he had been presented with an Airfix tank, he commented that all the attention was 'the benefit of just being real, you know what I mean?' Clearly, just like Boris Johnson in his pomp, a great deal of his persona – the clothes, the pints, every calculated pronouncement – is actually affectation and pretence. But politics is now so low on charisma and the common touch that simply being comfortable in your own skin looks like a kind of spectacular normality. In that sense, Starmer and Labour's other high-ups might be Farage's ideal adversaries. With the possible exception of Angela Rayner, they are mostly bloodless and hesitant. They cling on to a presentational style that is 20 years out of date, built around pre-ordained news themes on the proverbial 'grid', set-piece interviews, and complicated and chronically abstract rhetoric: 'missions', 'renewal', the constant chase for growth. Of late, the prime minister has tried his own occasional approximations of Farage's approach, putting up such blunt and boastful online posts as: 'I've already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here. And I won't stop there.' But that style rings hollow, because he doesn't have Farage's swaggering confidence nor any understanding of how to bring such directness to the way he talks about Labour's fundamentals: the economy, jobs, public services. There is also something to be said about how the government intends to change the country. After a wasted year, last week's spending review contained a surprising amount of good news, not least on housing. But it was all about the kind of investment that will not start to become visible until 2028 or 2029. Everyday life, it seems, will continue moving in ever-decreasing circles for another three or four years. That is a long time for Farage to carry on making mischief, as he illustrates an aspect of modern Britain too little understood – that, to an extent that vividly illustrates other people's colossal failures, he looks like the only front-rank figure who understands how 21st-century politics actually works. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
