Most people are aware that ever since Theresa May threw away her parliamentary majority in her vanity election, she's been at the beck and call of the extreme-right Europhobic fringe of the Tory party because she has no room to manoeuvre without continually appeasing them.
What is less commonly known is the fact that this hard-right fringe of the Tory party have clubbed together to form a shady and highly secretive "party within a party" which uses taxpayers' cash to bankroll their push for an extreme and highly destructive hard-right version of Brexit.
This group of Brextremist Tory politicians call themselves the European Research Group, and between them members have claimed over £250,000 in parliamentary expenses for work they claim to have done on behalf of this fringe pressure group.
The Tory MPs who have claimed taxpayer cash for work done on behalf of their secretive Brextremism operation include Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom, Sajid Javid, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Chris Grayling, David Gauke, Penny Mordaunt, and Liam Fox.
Here is a list of known members of the group (politicians with positions within Theresa May's government in bold):
- Suella Fernandes (the current chairperson of the group & PPS at the Treasury))
- Steve Baker (previous chairperson of the group until promoted into the Brexit department)
- Liam Fox (Minister for International Trade)
- Craig Mackinlay (Former UKIP politician who defected to the Tories)
- Andrea Leadsom (former Tory leadership candidate, Leader of the Commons)
- Sajid Javid (Minister for communities and local government)
- Chris Heaton-Harris (The Tory whip who sent McCarthyite inquisition letters to UK universities)
- Jacob Rees-Mogg (regularly touted as a future Tory leader)
- Chris Grayling (Minister for Transport)
- Michael Tomlinson (low profile Tory MP and deputy chair of the group)
- Michael Gove (Minister for the Environment)
- Penny Mordaunt (Minister for International Development)
- David Guake (Minister for Work and Pensions)
Mackinlay claims that such a move would raise £150 million by charging everyone who visits the UK from the EU, but it's spectacularly easy to spot the flaws in this plan.
The first major flaw is that the £150 million "profit" does not take account of the lost tax revenues caused by driving away potential visitors with time consuming and costly visa applications. It would only need a small percentage drop in tourism from the continent to massively reduce tax revenues and eclipse the £150 million "profit" leaving country significantly worse off.
Aside from the obvious false economics of the scheme there's also the fact that such a move from Britain would obviously trigger a reciprocal response, with the EU requiring visas for British visitors to any of the EU member states. This would create the situation where EU citizens would have the choice of visa free travel anywhere within the EU, or the time and expense of applying for a visa to visit the UK. Meanwhile British citizens would have to apply for visas to visit all ten of our top ten travel destinations (which are in order: Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, USA Portugal, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Poland).
It's bad enough that this fanatical group of Tory MPs has appointed a rabid former-Ukipper to come up with an absurd plan to kick the UK tourism industry to pieces, significantly reduce UK tax revenues in order to raise a paltry £150 million by rinsing cash out of any EU citizens who still chose to visit Brexit Britain, and trigger a reciprocal tit-for-tat response from the EU that would significantly impact millions of British visitors to the continent.
But the fact is that they're actually claiming huge wodges of taxpayers' cash to promote this kind of hard-right Brextremism is the most extraordinary thing about it.
Then there's the fact that members of this secretive Brextremist group are embedded throughout Theresa May's government, with leading members of the ERG claiming that they have the power to "get anything they want" from Theresa May.
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Remember last year when Andrea Leadsom was vying with Theresa May for the Tory party leadership and the Theresa May camp whipped up a massive storm of synthetic outrage over Leadom's comments about how being a mother made her a good candidate to be Tory leader and Prime Minister?
Remember how Theresa May supporters within the Tory party and the right-wing press interpreted Leadsom's comments as an attack on Theresa May for being childless, and then hounded Leadsom into withdrawing from the Tory leadership contest?
I'm no Leadsom sympathiser whatever, but the way she was pressured into resigning from the Tory leadership race so that Theresa May could be appointed Prime Minister without even facing a ballot of Tory party members was about as cynical a display of contempt for democracy as is possible to imagine.
Fast forward to March 2017 and the outpourings of outrage from Tory party members and the right-wing press are nowhere to be seen over Theresa May's disgusting personal attack against Jeremy Corbyn's family life.
Theresa May resorted to an outrageously misleading below-the-belt personal attack after Corbyn totally cornered her on the fact that the massive education funding cuts her government are enacting are in breech of the Tory manifesto commitment to protect school funding.
Theresa May's evasive response to being cornered like this was to totally evade admitting that the 2015 Tory manifesto pledge was a lie by attacking Corbyn's family life.
May attacked Corbyn for the fact his son was sent to an exclusive grammar school, but this personal attack was an extraordinarily low blow given that it was Corbyn's principled insistence that his son should go to the local state school that led to the breakdown of his marriage, and that it was his ex-wife, not Corbyn, who insisted on the grammar school education for their son.
Isn't it funny how Tory MPs and the right-wing press can whip up a massive storm of synthetic outrage over Andrea Leadsom's comments that were read as an implicit criticism of Theresa May's family life ... but when Theresa May explicitly attacks Jeremy Corbyn's family life in a grotesquely misleading manner, the silence from Tory politicians and the right-wing media is absolutely deafening.
It's almost as if they're all a massive bunch of hypocrites isn't it?
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I've always had reservations about identity politics because it defines us by what we are rather than what we do, and because it factionaises society into specific interest groups which is clearly an impediment to building solidarity against the powerful minority who have such strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo.
Some of the appalling reactions in the left-liberal press to the fact that the Tory party leadership contest will be fought between two women have turned my reservations about identity politics into outright revulsion.
There were two particular articles in the left-liberal press that jumped out at me as being both identity politics driven and woefully misinformed.
"We're still waiting for a female Labour leader - and it's getting embarrassing" - New Statesman
This stomach-churningly bad article in the New Statesman used the fact that the two candidates left in the Tory leadership contest are both female to whine that (aside from the caretaker leader stints of Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman) the Labour Party has had no female leader. The conclusion of the article is that "time has run out" for Labour and that the next leader should be female.
What the article utterly fails to do is point out who this next female leader should actually be. It doesn't explain that two of the four candidates to become Labour leader in 2015 were female, but that they were both routed by a massive surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn (who then appointed the most female dominated cabinet in UK political history).
The article didn't explain that Liz Kendall was from the unpopular right-wing fringe of the Labour Party and that she only picked up 4.5% of the vote, and it didn't explain that Yvette Cooper is a Blairite loyalist who is married to Ed Balls (the guy who came up with Labour's disastrously uninspiring austerity-lite strategy that led to their defeat in the 2015 General Election and contributed to the absolute massacre in Scotland where Labour lost 40 of their 41 seats) and that she was routed too.
The article also failed to mention Angela Eagle, the low-profile, insincere, gaffe-prone political water carrier who lined herself up to replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader during the anti-democratic efforts to bully him out of his job, but then chickened out of launching a democratic leadership challenge when Corbyn steadfastly refused to be bullied into resignation.
The article didn't mention any names because it clearly doesn't matter to the author who this next female leader of the Labour Party is. It doesn't matter whether they are honest or insincere, from the left of the party or the right, an anti-democratic coup plotter or a supporter of Labour Party democracy, an austerity critic or an austerity supporter, or any other consideration, because the only important factor appears to be whether this future leader has a penis or not.
"Sturgeon, May, Leadsom: Women to the rescue amid political turmoil" - The Guardian
This article is even worse than the New Statesman one, so bad in fact that the Guardian decided to retroactively rewrite the title and a chunk of the article to replace the focus on the Tory leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel (as if all female politicians are just nondescript and interchangeable pawns in a male game of chess).
The thrust of the article was that women are going to come along and clean up the mess made by men. This central theme is completely undermined by the way it just lumps a load of completely different women together despite the huge differences in their political standpoints, circumstances and experience.
Nicola Sturgeon is an extremely popular political leader of a party on the left-liberal side of the political spectrum and Theresa May is a terrifying right-wing authoritarian with her fingerprints all over much of the most illiberal, vindictive, economically illiterate and downright unworkable legislation during David Cameron's tenure as PM. Lumping them together just because they're female is utterly demeaning because there are far more important political considerations than what sex they happen to be.
The decision to erase Andrea Leadsom from the article title and replace her with Angela Merkel is even more absurd. Leadsom is an inexperienced and transparently dishonest political chancer with a CV full of exaggerations and complete bullshit who opportunistically thrust herself into the political limelight during the Brexit debate. Merkel on the other hand has been Chancellor of Germany for ten years, which is four years longer than Leadsom has even been an MP! The idea that these women are interchangeable is absurd.
It's enough of an insult to a social democrat like Nicola Sturgeon to crudely bracket her alongside hard-right fanatics like Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom simply because they all happen to be female, but to consider an inexperienced political opportunist like Leadsom to be interchangeable with an undeniable political giant like Angela Merkel is ridiculous and demeaning.
Corrosive identity politics
The idea that women should automatically support the likes of Theresa May or Andrea Leadsom simply because they're female is such an absurd example of corrosive identity politics it's insulting.
A look at the politics of these two women reveals why it's never a good idea to judge a person simply by their identity, rather than by their actions.
In 2012 Theresa May oversaw the introduction of arbitrary income thresholds for British civilians wishing to live in the UK with their non-EU spouses. The figure was set at £18,600 per year, plus thousands of pounds more per child. It's obvious that such an arbitrary figure discriminates in favour of people who live in London and the Home Counties where incomes are higher, and against people from poorer areas like Cornwall, the north east and the Welsh valleys, but such an arbitrary figure also discriminates against women too, especially mothers.
Despite the decades long fight for wage equality, women still earn significantly less than men. The upshot of Theresa May's arbitrary income thresholds is that 72% of British males can afford to bring their non-EU partner to live in the UK, while only 43% of British females can afford the same. Theresa May's arbitrary threshold is a blatant example of Tory discrimination against women (and especially mothers, and women from poorer regions of the UK), yet some people want you to ignore her actions and believe that Theresa May would somehow be better qualified to look after the interests of women just because she happens to be one.
Andrea Leadsom is just as bad. Back in 2013 she fantasised about stripping all workers rights from people employed by small businesses, which obviously includes millions of female workers. This is a woman who wants to strip other women of their rights to maternity pay, sick pay, holiday pay and even the right to claim unfair dismissal.
In a case where a small business owner starts demanding sexual favours from his young female employees and then sacks them if they refuse his perverted demands, Andrea Leadsom is on the employers side because she thinks that victims of sexual harassment by their bosses shouldn't have the right to claim unfair dismissal.
The fact that Andrea Leadsom is a woman doesn't mean that she's always going to side with other women, but the fact that she's a right-wing Tory MP means that she's always going to side with capital.
Aside from their own specific misogynistic policies both of these women have voted in favour of one set of savage austerity measures after another for the last six years, despite the mountain of evidence pointing to the fact that ideologically driven austerity policies disproportionately impact women.
It's spectacularly naive to imagine that just because someone is a woman, that they must be on the same side as other women. Both Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May have far more in common with male members of the privileged establishment class to which they belong, than with women from ordinary backgrounds.
Both of these women have proven themselves willing to discriminate against other women they deem to be part of the "lower orders", by voting in favour of ideological austerity, or through their own favoured discriminatory policies. However some people would have you believe that the fact that they were born without penises is by far the most important consideration in the matter.
Don't worry your pretty little head about all that boring politics stuff" they'll say, "look, they're a woman and so are you, so you should identify with them and vote for them", and the really sad thing is that many women will fall for this pathetic identity politics bullshit, just as people of either sex have fallen for all manner of equally ridiculous propaganda narratives over the years.
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It's funny how history repeats itself. Back in 2001 (after William Hague became the first Conservative leader in history to resign without serving as Prime Minister) the Tories fell for the distortions of a bullshitter with a CV full of exaggerations and made up rubbish. His name was Iain Duncan Smith and he was so unpopular with the general public that the Tories soon stabbed him in the back before he even got to lead them into a single General Election*.
Now loads of Tories are falling for another bullshitter with a CV full of exaggerations and made up rubbish. Her name is Andrea Leadsom. Her claims about having had a high flying career in finance seem to be just as reliable as Iain Duncan Smith's claimed university qualifications (which didn't exist) and his high flying army career (which was massively over-exaggerated).
Iain Duncan Smith and Andrea Leadsom are not the only complete bullshitters the Tory faithful have fallen in love with by a long stretch. David Cameron was such an egregious bullshitter it still baffles me that a huge percentage of the British public actually considered him to be "statesmanlike".
Cameron lied so fluently and so often that it seemed that he'd rather tell a lie even when it would have been easier to tell the truth, yet he was apparently so good at it that he convinced the Tories to make him their leader, then the general public to make him their Prime Minister.
Then there's Michael Green Grant Shapps or whatever he's calling himself these days. How on earth did an Internet scam artist like that ever climb all the way up to being Chairman of the Tory party without the Tories adoring the slick polished lies of a professional bullshitter?
What is it in the Tory psyche that doesn't just prevent the natural human revulsion at professional bullshitters like Leadsom, IDS, Cameron and Green Shapps, but actually fills them with admiration instead?
It's hard to come to conclusions on such a question without generalising about Tory voters, because there don't seem to have been any scientific studies into why right-wing people seem to accept and admire professional bullshitters so easily and so regularly.
There do seem to be two main options. Either they're so gullible that they actually buy into all of the obvious bullshit and distortions, or, like the rest of us, they can actually see it for what it is, but they believe that the ability to lie, distort, manipulate and con in order to achieve an objective is a core skill for a member of the political class, and something to be admired rather than despised.
Whatever the case, one thing is sure: The high-flying careers within the Tory party for absolute bullshitters like Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron and Michael Green Grant Shapps, and the rising star of another transparently dishonest bullshitter like Andrea Leadsom demostrate that Tories really do love a bullshitter.
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* = The Tory self-preservation instinct resulted in them overthrowing Iain Duncan Smith as the leader of their party because of his ineptitude and transparent dishonesty. The fact that they subsequently allowed him to conduct a six year long reign of terror over the lives of millions of the most vulnerable people in the country during his tenure as butcher in chief at the DWP is highly illustrative of the callous Tory mentality. They recognised that IDS was far too inept to lead their own party, but they have such little regard for the most vulnerable people in society that they put a man they clearly knew to be inept in charge of the DWP for six torturous years.
The Tory MP Andrea Leadsom leapt into the political limelight during the EU referendum debate and even more so after putting her name forward to be the next Tory leader (which would make her the unelected Prime Minister of the UK).
Political track record
Most people would be forgiven for not having a clue who Leadsom was before the Brexit campaign kicked off, because she was hardly a well known politician. She has only been an MP since 2010. After a brief stint as a junior treasury minister for George Osborne, Leadsom was appointed as David Cameron's Minister of State for Energy (a junior ministerial position in the DECC) after the Tories financially doped their way to their wafer thin majority in 2015.
Leadsom's appointment as energy minister nailed the coffin shut on David Cameron's lie about the Tories being "the greenest government ever", because no government with a genuine commitment to environmental issues would appoint a person with a track record of opposing renewable energy schemes and environmental targets as their energy minister.*
Leadsom has only been an MP for six years, and has only held two junior ministerial positions in David Cameron's team. If you think that the UK would benefit from an experienced leader during the post-Brexit restructuring process, then Leadsom clearly isn't that person.
Tax controversies
Readers of Private Eye might be more familiar with Andrea Leadsom than most people are as a result of the magazine's investigations into her dodgy tax affairs.
Leadsom uses tax-dodging schemes in her kids' names in order to avoid paying tax on the buy-to-let property portfolio she has built up with her husband Ben. You'd have to be living in some kind of ludicrous Brexiter fantasy land to believe that such a person would do anything to clamp down on tax-dodgers, or to regulate the rash of parasitical buy-to-let slumlords that has infected the UK housing market.
Another tax controversy Leadsom was embroiled in was a £70,000 series of political donations to her election campaign from her brother-in-law's company which is owned by a British Cayman Islands based holding company. This tax-haven operated company has also handed £816,000 to the Tory party too.
The fact that the ban on political donations from foreign companies can be so easily bypassed through the use of of a British based subsidiary company is appalling. However what is even more concerning is the fact that while in the wake of Brexit the EU has immediately moved to begin the clampdowns on tax loopholes that the Tory led UK government have been blocking and obstructing for years, one of the top contenders to be British Prime Minister has the same kind of shockingly lax attitude to tax-dodging as David Cameron.
UKIP
Andrea Leadsom's campaign to become Tory leader is being supported by Arron Banks (the Tory donor - turned UKIP donor - turned Brexit campaign donor - turned Tory leadership candidate backer) who has openly stated that if it was up to him he would privatise the NHS.
There are two important considerations about the fact that Arron Banks has decided to back Andrea Leadsom for leader of the Tory party.
The first is that if he manages to get his pet politician established as the unelected Prime Minister of the UK, his dream of abolishing the NHS would clearly be a lot closer to coming true.
The other consideration is the fact that under the leadership of a candidate who has been hand-picked by one of UKIP's biggest donors, the likelihood of UKIP being folded back into the Tory party would be increased.
It's still unlikely to happen because UKIP serves as a brilliant Tory Trojan Horse party which hoovers up the votes of dissatisfied working class voters and then uses that support to promote even more of the toxic Thatcherite economic dogma that has savagely undermined working class wages and ruined working class communities for the last four decades.
Whether UKIP is folded back into the Tory party, or kept as a Thatcherite Trojan Horse party isn't the main issue. The main issue is that one of UKIPs biggest donors is now interfering in the Tory leadership election to promote his own favoured candidate. If the same man can have such influence over both parties, isn't it completely obvious that they're essentially the same thing with differently coloured ties?
Workers' rights
Andrea Leadsom's views on workers' rights are particularly appalling, even for a Tory. This is what she said about the rights of people who work for small businesses during a parliamentary speech in 2012.
"I envisage there being absolutely no regulation whatsoever – no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights." [source]
Make no mistake about it, Leadsom is an even more rabidly right-wing Tory than Cameon and Osborne. They attacked workers' rights throughout their six years at the top, but they did it piece by piece. Attacking unfairly sacked workers with one piece of legislation, public sector workers with another, the trade unions with another and so on ...
Leadsom has openly fantasised (on the public record) about stripping all workers' rights from anyone who works for a small company. She actually seems to believe that such a policy would be good for small businesses, rather than turning them into unscrupulous employer free zones, which any potential employee with any brains would avoid like the plague.
Who on earth would want to work for a small business if they knew that they would have no right to the basics provided by other employers such as sick pay, parental pay or pension contributions?
Who in their right mind would work for an employer who could sack them for whatever reason (refusing to suck their cock for example) with absolutely no right of appeal or compensation?
Leadsom is clearly an absolute crackpot who is so in love with hard-right economic dogma that she's utterly incapable of seeing that her plan to revoke workers' rights from small business employees wouldn't be a marvellous gift to the small business sector as she imagines it, but a curse that drives away any potential small business employees with brains enough to avoid putting themselves in a position where they can be ruthlessly exploited.
Dishonesty
In the aftermath of Brexit the veteran Tory politician Ken Clarke was recorded making a number of unguarded observations about the Tory leadership "fiasco". One of the most interesting was his claim that he didn't think that either Boris Johnson or Andrea Leadom were actually in favour leaving the European Union at all.
It's hardly beyond the bounds of possibility that a self-serving Tory politician would support a policy that they don't actuallybelieve in because they see it as being in their own self-interest to do so.
A look back to what Andrea Leadsom was saying in 2013 only adds to Ken Clarke's suspicion that she only jumped on the Brexit bandwagon because she felt it was in her own political self interest to do so. This is what she said in a speech to the Hansard Society:
"I don't think the UK should leave the EU. I think it would be a disaster for our economy and it would lead to a decade of economic and political uncertainty at a time when the tectonic plates of global success are moving".
Here's what Andrea Leadsom said on her own website on June 20th 2016, just three days before the EU referendum:
"I am convinced that a Vote to Leave on Thursday will not hurt the UK's economy."
Either one of these statements is true or the other. It's impossible for Leadsom or her supporters to argue that they're both true when they're so obviously contradictory. In one she predicted an economic disaster and in the other she predicted no harm whatever. She couldn't be more contradictory if she tried.
Some of her justifications in support of the second statement are outrageously dishonest too. This is an absolute corker:
"My best expectation, with my 30 years of financial experience, is that there will not be an economic impact"
Judged in its own right this is clearly an appeal to authority fallacy, but in light of her predictions of an economic disaster just three years previously, it's also brazenly dishonest. If three years ago she was declaring that Brexit would be an economic disaster, then 27 of her cited 30 years of experience clearly led her to the opposite expectation of what she was claiming.
If Leadsom was even remotely honest she would have admitted her complete U-turn on the economic impact of Brexit at some point in the last three years, and then explained her reasoning for such a total reversal of opinion. But she didn't do that, she chose to exaggerate in a brazenly dishonest manner instead.
Economic illiteracy
Andrea Leadsom worked in the Treasury under George Osborne and actually praises him for doing such a good job as Chancellor, despite the way he has created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined, overseen an appalling relative decline in UK productivity, and his ideological austerity agenda has completely failed to eliminate the deficit by 2015 as he promised in 2010. Additionally Osborne has had to admit that his 2015 promise to get rid of the deficit by 2020 was a load of rubbish too.
Leadsom voted in favour of one economically toxic batch of Tory austerity measures after another with no regard for the appalling social and economic consequences of such ideologically driven madness, and she shows absolutely no signs of having an economic epiphany that a fiscal policy of "let's cut our way to growth" is unworkable macroeconomic illiteracy.
Perhaps even more concerning is her insistence that Brexit was going to have no economic effect on the UK. Of course nobody expects politicians to have a magic crystal ball to predict the economic future with, but anyone who claims 30 years of financial experience should have been able to see how the market and the value of the pound slumped on every poll favouring Brexit, and how the markets boomed and the pound soared in value on every poll favouring Remain.
Aside from her pathetic inability to read the pre-Brexit market conditions, her claims that Brexit would have no impact on the economy are quite simply bizarre. The idea that such a seismic change in direction for the UK would have no impact on the economy is not only absurd from an economic perspective, it's utterly ridiculous from the most basic rational perspective too. The concept that actions have consequences is such a strongly established scientific principle it's been accepted as common knowledge. The idea that the action of quitting the EU would have no economic consequences is either the opinion of an economic illiterate, or a massively dishonest opinion of someone who knows that it's lamentably pathetic gibberish, but is intent on preying on the economic illiteracy of their audience.
Conclusion
Andrea Leadsom is an inexperience politician who has what can only be described as a very serious sincerity problem. Her economic views are ridiculous. If she actually believes what she is saying she's economically illiterate, if she doesn't, then she's cynically preying on the economic ignorance of her audience.
If this woman ends up being appointed as the UK's unelected Prime Minister, we can expect yet another Tory lurch to the right. An administration headed by an inexperienced political novice like Andrea Leadson would end up being a Thatcherism on steroids government with the appalling Arron Banks in the background pulling the strings.
If UKIP don't fold back into the Tories under Leadsom's leadership, it's hard to see how much space would actually be left for them on the extreme-right of the political spectrum without straying into full bore Britain First style fanaticism.
If you like stuff like workers' rights and the NHS, and dislike brazen insincerity, tax-dodging and hard-right economic madness like ideological austerity, then you should be very afraid that Andrea Leadsom's political star is rising.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
So Nigel Farage has resigned as UKIP leader again, and this time it's unlikely he'll be breaking his word by returning one week later.
Washing his hands of the mess he made
In his resignation statement he said "I have decided to stand aside as leader of Ukip. The victory for the leave side in the referendum means that my political ambition has been achieved" before going on to have a sly dig at the politicians who will have to stick around and clear up his mess by calling them "career politicians". Justifying his unwillingness to stick around and see through the monumental change he campaigned so tirelessly for by having a populist dig at those who will be actually be left dealing with the consequences is yet another measure of the despicable character of the man.
Anyone who thinks that Farage's parting rant at the EU wasn't an shameful national embarrassment clearly knows nothing about Britain's proud record of international diplomacy, nor gives a damn about the fact that the people Farage was insulting are the very people who Britain will have to negotiate with over the next few years to work out what the post-Brexit settlement between the UK and the EU is actually going to be.
Slinging a load of insults at the people you are going to have to negotiate with looks like a spectacularly counter-productive strategy, unless of course you're planning to wash your hands of the whole affair and leave others with the awkward task of negotiating with the people you just pissed off .
This is the beginning, not the end of it
The idea that the referendum vote for Brexit is the "be all and end all" of the whole thing rather then the beginning of a very complicated process is an utterly bizarre, yet widespread delusion.
Just witness the way so many Brexit voters leave furious "sore loser" and "get over it already" type comments when people are trying to discuss the likely future consequences of Britain's haphazard departure from the EU, as if the vote for Brexit was the end of the affair rather than the beginning of it!
Before the referendum people like me argued that Brexit would be a viable proposition for consideration if the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson had actually bothered to come up with any kind of coherent plan for how the post-Brexit UK economy should be restructured, but without such a plan, a vote for Brexit would be a vote for unpredictable chaos.
"Fearmongerer" shrieked the Brexiters every time we tried to point out that the Leave campaign was based on anti-immigration hysteria, uncosted and hopelessly unrealistic spending pledges, naive wishful thinking and outright lies, and that above all, that they had no real plan for what comes next.
Now it's becoming increasingly clear to everyone that there was no great plan after all.
The post-Brexit chaos
In the aftermath of Brexit the reality is beginning to sink in. David Cameron resigned because he didn't want to be the one to press the economic self-destruct button by submitting the Article 50 notification. He damned well should have done because he was the one who decided to gamble the entire future of the UK in return for a bit of short-term party political advantage at the 2015 General Election, but he didn't.
The majority of Labour MPs then decided to wash their hands of responsibility for clearing up the Brexit mess by focusing their attention on a ridiculously ill-timed coup attempt against their own leader instead of concentrating on the infinitely more important task of explaining what the Labour Party policy would be for reducing the social and economic insecurities caused by Brexit might be.
Boris Johnson was the next to wash his hands of the whole Brexit thing by refusing to stand in the Tory leadership election, leaving a field of five staggeringly unappealing candidates (is Jeremy Corbyn really that much more inherently "unelectable" than that disgusting bunch?).
Now Nigel Farage has washed his hands of the whole affair too.
A hard-right Tory future
Given the way the majority of Labour MPs decided to commit collective suicide rather than attempt to outline any sensible policies for dealing with Brexit (something that Corbyn and McDonnell have admirably tried to do despite the pre-planned anti-democratic internal rebellion going on behind their backs), it's pretty much clear that whoever wins the Tory leadership election is going to be the one to determine what form Brexit actually takes.
Whether it's the terrifyingly right-wing authoritarian Theresa May (who wants to scrap your human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances), the uber-Thatcherite anti-intellectual Michael Gove (the man who handed £billions worth of publicly owned schools over, for free, to unaccountable private sector interests) or an outsider like the dark horse Andrea Leadsom (who seems the most likely winner to me because she's far less smeared in shit than the other four candidates), Farage's legacy is going to be the Toryfication of Britain.
Nigel Farage's legacy
Enabling the Tory party to set about restructuring the UK far more comprehensively than Margaret Thatcher could ever have dreamed of is quite some achievement for a Thatcher-worshipping ex-Tory activist like Nigel Farage. I always maintained that UKIP was a Tory Trojan Horse political party designed to hoover up the votes of the dissatisfied and under-informed in order to deliver even more of the Thatcherite economic madness that is the actual cause of most of the social and economic problems faced by deprived communities across the UK.
Aside from giving a disgusting bunch of right-wingers who were too corrupt, incompetent or downright bigoted even for the Tory party (Neil Hamilton, Janice Atkinson, Bill Etheridge, David Silvester ...) a way back into mainstream politics, Farage's other main political legacy looks set to be the restructuring of the UK economy, constitution, legal system, foreign relations and society in general in line with the hard-right ideology of whichever of the five universally unappealing candidates ends up winning the Tory party leadership.
As for the party Farage fronted for so many years, whoever succeeds him as the leader of UKIP will have a hard task on their hands holding the party together when the actual reason for their existence has disappeared. However, whatever remains of UKIP looks certain to be an utterly toxic force in British politics which will continue to soak up the dissent of the communities most badly hit by hard-right Tory economics in order to drag the Tory party ever further rightwards.
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