This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

“Chutzpah” is a useful Yiddish word meaning “brazen cheek” or “shameless effrontery”, the classic example of its use in this sense being the young man who murders his parents and at his trial asks the court to show mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.

Reform UK shows a similar chutzpah in presenting itself as a patriotic party representing the British common man and defending British culture against foreign incursion – all without possessing a single idea or policy not generated by the American right.

Within days of Nigel Farage being secretly filmed ordering oysters and Black Velvet (chilled champagne and Guinness) as he butters up a big-business American donor (in fact, an actor who is part of an undercover investigation by the Verbatim group for Channel 4), he is “humbled” by the gift of £72n from by two crypto billionaires until recently resident in Thailand and Hong Kong.

Yet this shallow bunch at the head of Reform intend nothing less than the demolition of British liberal democracy, and its replacement by an authoritarian regime bulldozing through centuries of ancient restraints on state power. Though the media understandably fixated on the donations, Farage frankly outlined in his conference speech how the first 100 days of a Reform government would see a national emergency declared, parliamentary opposition overwhelmed, non-compliant judges replaced, and civil servants who “try to obstruct us” sacked. After two years of Trump quasi-dictatorship, it takes real chutzpah on Farage’s part to say he wants much the same thing for Britain.

Also deeply un-British is the paranoid political culture of Reform, for all their Union Jack waving and national anthem singing. In Medway, Kent, a Tory councillor called Robbie Lammas who defected to Reform last October, then redefected eight months later, says how struck he was by the suspicion with which he was viewed in Reform for getting much of his news from the mainstream media, and not from dark corners of the web where conspiracy theories are rife and taken as proven fact. He noted that day-to-day talk in Reform circles consisted largely in blaming others for anything that went wrong, though without any idea how to put it right.

This addiction to seeking out scapegoats and hidden enemies by the British hard right was graphically illustrated by an incident in Doncaster one Saturday afternoon late in August when anti-immigrant speakers at a rally were interrupted by the ringing of church bells.

Some 15 of them stormed into the nearby church to accuse the vicar, the Rev Canon Dr Richard Firth, of deliberately ringing the bells to drown them out. “You’re supposed to be a Christian preacher,” said one. “Yet you clearly don’t support British values and you don’t support Britain, because you’re happy to see this country being invaded.” To this the Rev Firth mildly replied: “It’s Saturday. The bell ringers practice on Saturday.”

It may be too easy to highlight the phony patriotism of Reform, and an emboldened British far right, and expect that British voters en masse will inevitably feel collective revulsion at toxic ideological transplants from Trump’s America. Grim experience shows that the anti-foreigner and anti-minority core beliefs of populist nativists the world over are proof against scandal and open hypocrisy. “Nobody ever went bust........

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