How Farage builds the BXP:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/21/brexit-party-nigel-farage-italy-digital-populists-five-star-movement
QUOTE:
“If I was starting Ukip today,” Farage told the political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo around that time, “would I spend 20 years speaking to people in village halls or would I base it on the Grillo model? I know exactly what I would do.” Farage and his colleagues in the
Brexitmovement had been converted.
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Like Farage, Bilney believed there was an opening for a British party to do the same. “Issue: there is not currently any party in the UK with any true internet presence,” her report begins. To emulate Five Star, she placed online engagement at the heart of Leave.EU’s campaign. Instead of a target audience passively absorbing a message from party leaders, followers were made to feel they were part of a conversation and a movement – a strategy often used by brands, too. As Bilney put it,
the goal was to “upgrade” a follower to a paying “supporter” through staying in touch regularly, hitting them with varied, dynamic content and keeping them engaged.
“We’ve taken learnings from business, because if you look at insurance, you want people to renew their policies,” Bilney said. “And I would apply that same principle with an organisation or a party … you wouldn’t want the members to drop off. But if you don’t talk to your members, and you don’t engage your members, they drop off.”
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As Banks watched Leave.EU grow, he believed it could be more than a one-off campaign. He wanted to turn it into a long-term movement, like Five Star. A few months before the referendum, he emailed Farage to suggest Farage “subtly delink” from Ukip “and we will start building Leave.EU”. He even offered to put up £10m “to develop a popular political movement along the lines of Beppe Grillo’s incredibly successful
Five Star Movement in Italy”, he writes in his book The Bad Boys of Brexit. Banks also had a new website built for Leave.EU that would replicate some of the features of Five Star’s Rousseau.
But Farage decided to bide his time. Given that the new prime minister, Theresa May, had promised to deliver Brexit, it seemed sensible to wait. Any new movement could be born out of the ashes of a failed deal, Alexandra Phillips, the Brexit party candidate, said – and Farage could portray himself as coming to the rescue to save Brexit.
“Nigel would say that the market has to be right for us,” Banks told me. “It’s the equivalent of trying to start a fire in a wet forest. But now the forest is tinder dry.”