By our political correspondent.
The smell of shit is never contained by borders; it drifts, settles, and eventually coats the lungs of those of our common weal. For years, we have watched Nigel Farage and his fellow travellers in the Reform Party pose as the champions of the “left behind,” but the mask is slipping to reveal a far grimmer reality. This is not a grassroots movement of the British people. It is a franchise of the Hungarian autocracy, fuelled by the same dark-money networks that have turned Budapest into an outpost for Putin’s interests.
Let’s (reluctantly) look at Matthew Goodwin, the academic-turned- GB News prophet for the populist right. For months, the Reform Party has played a shell game with the truth regarding Goodwin’s ties to Viktor Orbán’s regime. When pushed by the Good Law Project, Reform claimed Goodwin’s role at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) was a mere “brief period” in the past. Yet, as recent investigations by Sam Bright have exposed, the paper trail and the podiums tell a different story.
Just days ago, Goodwin was headlined in Budapest, introduced not as a former associate but as a current “visiting fellow” of the MCC. This is no dusty academic post. The MCC is a state-funded ideological engine room, gifted over a billion dollars in Hungarian state assets, including a massive stake in the national oil company, MOL. This is a firm that keeps the lights on in Budapest by processing Russian fossil fuels. When Goodwin cashes his reported ten thousand euro a month fellowship, he isn’t just taking a salary; he is standing at the end of a pipeline that runs directly from the Kremlin.
It is the rankest hypocrisy imaginable. Farage and Goodwin stand on platforms from Clacton to Glasgow, barking about “sovereignty” and the “betrayal” of the working class by “globalist elites.” Yet, here they are, skipping across Europe to take counsel and coin from a regime that has dismantled the free press, shackled the judiciary, and turned the Hungarian state into a private fiefdom for Orbán’s cronies.
They claim to be “taking our country back,” but it seems they are quite happy to sell it off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder in the East. They speak of “national self-loathing” in Britain while they prostrate themselves before a foreign autocrat who treats democracy like a nuisance to be managed rather than a right to be defended.
The strategy is clear. They want to import the “Orbán model” to these shores: a world where the media is a megaphone for the party, where the vulnerable are scapegoated to hide the theft of public wealth, and where dissent is treated as treason. Goodwin defends these relationships as “standard academic exchange,” but there is nothing standard about a political operative being bankrolled by a foreign government to influence domestic policy.
In Scotland, we have a long memory for those who wrap themselves in the flag while their other hand is in the pocket of the powerful. The Reform Party is not a solution to the crises facing our communities. It is a predatory operation, a vanguard for an illiberal elite that views the rights of workers and the institutions of democracy as obstacles to their own greed.
Farage and Goodwin are salesmen for a poisoned chalice. They offer the wine of nationalism to a their public, but it is spiked with the poison of autocracy. We must see through the theatrical bluster and the fake “man of the people” routine. The struggle for a genuine, socialist democracy, where power belongs to the many, not the few, will never be won by following those who take their orders, and their checks, from the strongmen of Europe. It is time to reject the salesmen of Budapest and demand a politics that actually serves the people.
