Farage, Reform and Language on Holiday

When Words Go on Holiday

The rise of Reform UK, and Nigel Farage’s continuing presence in British politics, can be fruitfully examined through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “language on holiday”.

Wittgenstein coined this phrase to describe moments when words are wrenched from their lived context and treated as if they had fixed, abstract meanings, floating free of the human practices that ordinarily give them substance.

In politics, this slippage is not accidental but strategic: slogans and soundbites are often designed to move language away from the messy reality of shared life and toward something punchy, evocative and untethered.

In other words: slogans are linguistic tourists, stripped of context, wandering without baggage but carrying a strange persuasive power.

Slogans as Language on Holiday

Farage’s political rhetoric thrives on this dynamic. Consider slogans like:

• “Take back control”

• “Protect our borders”

• “Reclaim Britain”

• “Stop the boats”

These phrases operate as language on holiday. They are abstract claims with an emotive pull, but they evade the background practices that would give them concrete meaning.

Take “control” for instance. Control of what, exactly? The economy in a globalised world shaped by transnational corporations? Immigration in a system reliant on migrant labour for healthcare, farming and hospitality? Or perhaps law, where sovereignty is constantly entangled with international treaties? Each of these contexts is messy, interdependent and open to negotiation.

But as holiday words, slogans travel light. They promise satisfactions while sidestepping complexity.

The Grammar of National Identity

Reform UK’s rise must also be situated in the grammar of British identity after Brexit. Brexit itself was a dramatic shift in what Wittgenstein would call a “language-game”.

Words like “sovereignty” once confined to legal discourse, were suddenly thrust into everyday conversation. But their meanings blurred in the transition. Instead of being tied to law and treaties, “sovereignty” was recharged as a free-floating term of nationalist desire.

Farage excels at keeping such language permanently on holiday, slogans forever detached from the practical booking of their return ticket back to ordinary life.

This explains why debates with Reform UK often feel slippery. When confronted with data on trade, labour shortages or international obligations, the slogans cannot yield, because their purpose is not to describe reality but to rally supporters and draw lines between “us” and “them.”

Wittgenstein reminds us that a word gains its meaning from the practices it inhabits. To say “border control” without reference to how borders actually function, economically, legally, socially, is like trying to play chess while treating each piece as a decorative object rather than a participant in the game.

Farage and the Shadows of Certainty

Wittgenstein also pointed out our human hunger for certainty in language. We want words to be crystalline, definitive. But real life is rarely so neat.

Farage’s appeal lies partly in his promise of linguistic purity: the seductive idea that messy realities can be reduced to stark expressions, “British jobs for British workers”, “our country back”, “stop the boats”. The tidiness is attractive precisely because our social realities are complex, plural and interdependent.

But this longing for purity highlights another danger of language on holiday: words become incantations that deny ordinary life rather than illuminate it.

Instead of grappling with messy truths, the need for migrant workers in the NHS, the reality of climate-linked migration, the inevitability of global interdependence, holiday slogans paint a fantasy world.

Wittgenstein suggested that philosophy’s task is “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”.

In politics, this means insisting that words like “freedom”, “control”, or “nation” must be tied back to lived practices that can be tested against reality.

The Task Ahead: Bringing Words Back Home

If the far right thrives on language on holiday, then resisting it requires more than dry technocratic arguments. The challenge is to re-ground language in lived communal forms.

That means:

• Showing that “control” might be found not in fortress walls, but in resilient, adaptive policies on housing, climate and jobs. Local democracy initiatives provide a good way forward.

• Demonstrating that “freedom” is not just freedom from Brussels, but the freedom that comes with affordable transport, safe housing or secure work.

• Shaping a grammar of belonging that is inclusive, rooted in solidarity rather than exclusion.

Words are not magic spells; they are tools within life. The challenge, as Wittgenstein might say, is to make sure our words don’t drift off on holiday but instead walk with us in the street, in the workplace, in the community garden, thick with the ordinariness and difficulty of life together.