Welcome to the MrBeastification of British politics: the latest trick up Nigel Farage’s sleeve | Kirsty Major

You can already imagine the video.

A man stands in the middle of a suburban English street, holding a wad of cash in his hand. Smiling at the camera, he says: “I’m about to pay the energy bills for this whole street.” » Cut to images filmed by a neighborhood drone. The man knocks on the front door and a perplexed-looking woman answers, dressed in a fleecy dressing gown. “Congratulations, Carol. You’ve saved over £1,000 this year!” The high-energy electronic music builds to a crescendo as she hugs him. Then a photo of the next neighbor receiving their prize, and another, and another, while a countdown in the bottom right of the screen shows the total cash amount increasing. Finally, the whole community is in the street and waving their hands with joy.

This is almost certainly the kind of content we’ll be treated to when Reform UK’s energy bill lottery is over. The party announced the ‘Nigel Cut My Bills’ competition last month: for the price of your personal details – voting history, name, phone number and email address – you can win the chance to have Farage come and pay you and your neighbors’ energy bills for a whole year.

Concerns have been raised about data collection, but that’s not what worries me. Personally, I have a hard time being intimidated by so-called data compliance violations. No, I worry about what such a stunt represents: the MrBeastification of British politics.

YouTube don MrBeast is famous for posting stunts of epic proportions to the joy of tweens everywhere. A subgenre of his videos involves him handing out huge sums of money to unsuspecting individuals, such as the time he handed $10,000 to a homeless man in North Carolina begging for money from passing cars. MrBeast, real name James Donaldson, is incredibly popular. His most viewed video has 915 million views; that’s more than the entire population of Europe.

The Reform Party understands that politics is increasingly played online and that, in this space, emotions matter. In order to get people’s attention and, therefore, their support, he must arouse voters’ anger (because of the small boats) and also their enthusiasm for what he has to offer. His stunt uses the same elements found in MrBeast’s videos: it’s unexpected, the amounts of money are huge, and the randomness of it all makes you want to think it could just be you.

The “Nigel Reduced My Bills” website also features information on how the Reform Party is expected to reduce everyone’s energy costs if they win the next election. This will remove VAT from your energy bill, saving you £85. Cut Labour’s green levy, saving £100. Scrap Labour’s carbon tax, saving £15. To give credit where credit is due, this stunt is a brilliant piece of political communication: the act grabs you by the lapels and screams: “Farage is a man who puts money in your pocket” – now and potentially in government.

But for all the fanfare and extreme attention to social media, it can be easy to miss the fact that the Reform Party is fundamentally misleading people about how energy pricing works. Bills are high, not because of VAT, eco-levies or carbon taxes. They are high because the price of our energy is indexed to the price of our reserve energy source: gas. Reliance on fossil fuels, not renewable energy, is to blame. Nigel Farage’s obsession with North Sea drilling will only keep us locked into volatile energy markets. All of this means that in the long run, Carol and everyone else will continue to lose out.

This reminds me of a reformist policy from its 2024 campaign. The party announced it would charge non-doms (UK residents whose permanent domicile for tax purposes is outside the UK) £250,000 for a renewable 10-year residence permit and favorable tax status in the UK. Money raised from this one-off tax would go directly to Britain’s lowest-paid workers. “Surprise, Carol, here’s your cash prize for voting for Reform UK!” » However, the real winner of this arrangement would be the very rich person who doesn’t live on your street (unless you also have a pied-à-terre in Mayfair), because that pitiful sum is nothing compared to the money they would have had to pay in taxes to the UK’s public services.

After MrBeast hands the money to the homeless man in this video, he asks him how he became homeless. The man tells a very sad story: he lost his family, then was fired from a factory job and had to live in hotels before running out of money. Donaldson’s eyes shift uncomfortably and he grimaces, unsure of how to respond.

Grand gestures and token policies don’t grapple with reality – they’re just for show.