The Brexit party’s Nigel Farage has become the latest person to be publicly milkshaked, following similar incidents involving Tommy ‘Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’ Robinson and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin.
Farage was targeted while campaigning in Newcastle earlier today and was quickly whisked off by his inept security team.
Throwing milkshakes at public figures you disagree with is a lot of things. It’s certainly funny – there’s inherent humour in seeing someone covered in crap and humiliated, without being harmed in any serious way. It says ‘your politics are a joke’, and there is a long history of this type of thing in Britain.
But, it’s also a form of physical violence that can legally be defined as Battery: “Any unlawful and or unwanted touching of the person of another by the aggressor, or by a substance put in motion by him.”
It’s also an open invitation for further violence. When former Labour MP John Prescott was egged 18 years ago, he immediately began throwing fists and no reasonable person would blame him. While milkshaking on its own is just an annoyance and doesn’t cause any bodily harm, the response just might, and the thrower would probably deserve it.
Where that takes us politically is not a place any of us should want to go. That’s why this type of behaviour should be condemned by all sides and policed equally.
There will, of course, be those who rationalise all this by claiming words and hate speech can be considered violence, and people like Tommy Robinson, Carl Benjamin, and Nigel Farage have said such words – therefore they are the ones that initiated the violence and it’s ok to ‘splash the fash’ in retaliation.
Indeed, 32-year old Paul Crowther who threw the Five Guys salted-caramel and banana milkshake at Farage said: “It’s a right of protest against people like him.”
It’s that kind of shaky SJW reasoning that continues to drive a wedge and keeps reasonable people like me stuck in some weird, disengaged, political middle ground where everyone else seems insane.
If you’re on the left and support this new trend and are laughing inside because sticky Nigel had to cut his campaigning short, you don’t have the moral high ground. Put it this way, the next time Anna Soubry gets called a Nazi, you’ll just have to accept that we’ve moved on to physical violence now and hold your outrage until the trend is to stab politicians we disagree with.
Ultimately, throwing milkshakes is just lazy and ineffective. All it does is give the target more ammo because you’re the one being violent and you’re the one shutting down debate. It allows your opponents to present themselves as civil people who just want a discussion.
After the incident, Nigel Farage said: “Sadly some remainers have become radicalised, to the extent that normal campaigning is becoming impossible.”
Why would you try to make Nigel Farage look like the good guy?
