Common Nonsense - the Rebranding of Idiocy

There was a time when “common sense” meant something useful – a sort of unpretentious wisdom born of experience and practicality. You didn’t need a PhD in economics to know not to spend more than you earned, nor a background in sociology to realise that shouting at immigrants wasn’t going to solve a labour shortage. But in recent years, Nigel Farage and the political far right have seized on the phrase “common sense” and drained it of all sense entirely – common or otherwise.

In Farageworld, “common sense” means pulling up the drawbridge, slashing regulations, binning the Human Rights Act, scrapping Net Zero, and flogging what’s left of the public realm to whoever’s got the readies. If it’s nuanced, evidence-based, or vaguely modern, it’s elitist. But if it’s reactionary, regressive, and wrapped in a Union Jack tea towel, it’s “common sense”.

Take immigration. The Faragists talk endlessly about “common sense border control” – by which they mean cutting legal migration, turning away asylum seekers, and throwing money at Rwanda. It sounds simple. That’s the point. But it completely ignores the fact that we have record NHS vacancies, farms unable to harvest crops, and care homes crying out for staff. What’s common sense about gutting your own labour supply while ranting about people not working?

Or Net Zero. “Common sense energy policy,” they bark, involves drilling for North Sea oil and scrapping heat pump subsidies – all while global temperatures soar, and the rest of the world sprints ahead with green tech. It’s like standing in a burning building, refusing the fire escape because “we invented coal” and “heat pumps sound a bit European”.

Then there’s the constant fetish for “law and order.” The Farage crowd love a “common sense approach” to crime. Translation: longer sentences, more stop and search, and turning prisons into warehouses for the angry and unwell. No talk of rehabilitation. No curiosity about why people offend. Just knee-jerk posturing for the tabloids. All this, while our prison estate is bursting at the seams – not enough space, not enough staff, and not a prayer of reform. But still, they want to bang up more people for longer. It’s like trying to fix a leaky roof by shouting at the rain.

What unites all these “common sense” solutions is not wisdom – it’s wilful ignorance. They reduce complex problems to soundbites, declare war on nuance, and sneer at expertise. Why? Because nuance gets in the way of rage. And rage is the fuel that keeps this whole pantomime running.

Farage and his followers have tapped into a deep well of frustration. That much is true. But instead of channelling it into something constructive – like reforming our broken institutions or making globalisation work for the many – they’ve opted for easy villains and empty slogans. “Take back control.” “Stop the boats.” “Make Britain Great Again.” Each one masquerades as common sense while actively robbing the country of its actual senses.

Let’s be clear: common sense is not cutting foreign aid while pretending we’re a global leader. It’s not scrapping environmental protections during an ecological crisis. And it’s certainly not cosying up to Trump, a man who thinks bleach is a medicine, wind turbines cause cancer and is ruining economies around the globe.

The tragedy is that by twisting the term into a populist cudgel, they’ve made real common sense – proper, grounded, well-informed judgement – seem elitist. We’re through the looking glass. A librarian warning about book bans is now “out of touch”, but a bloke in a pub calling climate change a hoax is speaking “common sense”.

It’s time we took the phrase back. Because Farage’s version of common sense isn’t sense at all – it’s simplistic, self-serving tripe dressed up as wisdom. And if we don’t challenge it, we’ll be governed by slogans, not solutions.

Let’s stop calling it “common sense” and call it what it is: common nonsense.