What UK voters can learn from the Irish gay-rights movement on how to avert a Farage nightmare

Farewell then, Sir dull-and-weak Keir, as the UK gets set for its seventh prime minister since Brexit, with a disconsolate, populist chimera howling at the gate.

The likely new ruling Labour Party leader, Andy Burnham, has been the mayor of Manchester for the past 10 years – an ethnically diverse and gay-friendly city of 3 million people, whose £100bn/yr (€115bn/yr) economy is larger than the GDP of several small EU countries.

Burnham’s foe in the next election, due by 2029, but expected to be brought forward, will be Nigel Farage, a far-right demagogue and an MP, with nil executive experience, whose Reform party leads in polls.

And if it seemed insane that a man of Farage’s low calibre could head the world’s fifth largest economy and a nuclear power, in the great line of WW2–era British prime minister Winston Churchill, it would actually be on trend for recent UK leaders, who already plumbed nadir (Liz Truss in 2022) after nadir (Boris Johnson in 2019-2022) of incompetence.

It would also be on trend globally, in the US presidential line from Nobel Prize laureate Barack Obama to Donald Trump’s MAGA, or the Russian one from Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika to Vladimir Putin’s war crimes.

The last Polish and Hungarian elections, in 2024 and April 2026, did show the brittleness of populist regimes inside the EU.

But politics aside, the UK matters to me personally, as I grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east of England, where my family emigrated to from Poland, when I was eight years old, in 1983.

Back then, we got a really warm welcome in our street, local Roman Catholic church, and pub, where people loved my dad’s stories about Solidarność protests in Warsaw.

But things palpably changed for the worse after Farage and Johnson’s Brexit in 2016, not just geopolitically and economically, but also culturally – it emboldened a sizeable minority of white English racists to come out of the closet and make immigrants like us feel unwelcome, despite the fact my dad had worked in England as a medical doctor and paid taxes there for 40 years. And we’re not even black.

A prime minister Farage would sink Britain further into decline.

So what should Burnham do against the firehose of far-right lies and the dirty tricks that will now be aimed against him, not just by Farage on X et al, but also by pro-Farage top US officials, and by the Kremlin, as the UK gears up for Europe’s next strategically important vote?

You can’t ban toxic waste from coming out in the social-media age, especially in a democracy.

Panti Bliss’ advice

Sadly, I don’t have all the answers, but I do recall wise advice from Panti Bliss, an Irish artist and gay-rights activist, who successfully campaigned in Ireland’s watershed same-sex marriage referendum in 2015.

What made the key difference, the Irish activist said, was grassroots action, not politicians or celebrities.

“What did it more ... was the private activism of people coming out,” said Panti Bliss, whose off-stage name is Rory O’Neill.

“In Ireland today … even your 75-year-old mother-in-law, or whoever, she knows the local gay. It’s pretty much impossible not to have a gay neighbour, or a lesbian granddaughter, or work colleague. That’s what won the [Irish] referendum,“ said O’Neill.

“When people went to vote, they voted for people they knew, not the dry arguments of the No side,” added O’Neill.

And so, if I hear from English friends that their parents or siblings plan to vote for Farage, as I have done, then, as an Anglophile immigrant, it makes me sad, but I will also become a personal thorn in their sides on Facebook, X, Instagram, or wherever they go for news, in the coming months, in the hope that my microcosmic engagement might move a few hearts or minds.