the accumulation of toxins that is the English (or English as British) version of the Triple P virus (Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth) that has entered the bloodstream of British politics, and which is posing a stark threat to UK liberal democracy.
Farage’s pledges of a Trump style mass deportation programme to finally end “illegal” immigration once and for all which would entail the immediate return of all arrivals on “small boats” to the countries from whence they came; negotiation of return fees with regimes such as the Taleban and Iran’s homicidal theocracy and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (Farage’s latest iteration of a tyrannical European institution which negates the rights of the freeborn Englishman) lays bare the sheer ugliness of the Alt-Right agenda and the two sides of its minted coinage: narrow, nativist nationalism on one side and pathological international isolationism on the other in its callous disregard of human rights abuses in far off countries of which we know plenty.
It is ethical ground that Farage and his ideological ilk share with the latter day anti- “war,” anti- “imperialist” left in their recycling of Putin’s “NATO expansionism to blame” narrative on Ukraine and apologism for the crimes against humanity of the former Assad regime in Syria. In line with Farage’s bottom feeding (or perhaps bottom fingering) have been daily protests outside hotels holding asylum seeking applicants and with far-right groups barely hidden in plain sight and an efflorescence of territory marking “flegs” shagging. The crucible to much of this week’s fervour around migration has been the litigation over one such holding centre, the Bell Inn in Epping, Essex in which the Court of Appeal overturned a High Court injunction compelling the government to close the Bell Inn and move its residents on by `12th September. Speaking from personal knowledge, this confluence of events has created a palpable sense of fear and anxiety for migrant and asylum seeker advocacy organisations and their clients and a wider concern that with Reform UK 15 points ahead of Labour in opinion polls the UK could indeed be set for a Farage premiership.
“Operation Restoring Justice” the Reform UK moniker for Farage’s mass deportation plan is not border control but Trumpism in a union jack. It is a louder, more extreme version of former PM Rishi Sunak’s failed 2023 strategy to detain everyone, deport everyone and process no one. It was a policy destined to fail, whether by design or default. It created a backlog of unheard asylum claims, spiralling hotel costs and public anger – with no drop in small boat crossings. But Farage wants to go further. He pledges to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repeal the Human Rights Act to remove legal avenues of repeal; disapply the UN refugee convention for five years; and exit anti-torture and anti-trafficking treaties.[1]
If one is to believe in Farage’s hubristic prospective, Britain could deport 288,000 people annually. That’s nearly 800 a day – 30 times the current rate of asylum-related returns. Of course, the arithmetic and geopolitics do not stack up. The UK has just 2,200 detention places, Farage wants 24,000. Deportation relies on returns deals, but none exist with most of the countries from which refugees are fleeing, including Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan (discounting Farage’s lack of moral scruple about dealing with odious regimes or civil conflict-ridden failed states). Nor is France likely to cooperate if the ECHR is nullified.[2] There is a cost estimate of £10bn over five years, including £2.5bn for the construction of detention centres in undetermined locations.[3]
But here’s the bub. Farage is playing at performative politics in the most cynically strategic manner possible and it is through his carefully crafted playbook that his pathway to 10 Downing Street lies, as hopefully but cautionary improbable this prospect is. Exuding power without any authority or responsibility, Farage is setting the agenda on immigration from the bully pulpit of weekly press conferences held in the ‘silly season’ when Parliament is in recess and the major party leaders are ‘on the beach’ (literally as then Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb was during the debacle of the fall of Kabul to the Taleban and the evacuation of Westerners and their Afghan helpers). The viewing public has quite had probable more exposure to a perma tanned Farage strutting forth at the helm of his press conferences while the official Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch flails around in her unfocused, shouty manner and Prime Minister Keir Starmer while performing statesmanlike on the foreign stage struggles to keep a lid on the widespread dissatisfaction on the domestic performance of his year old government.
Ever attuned to the shifting sands of the news agenda and the attention spans of public opinion, Farage has conducted seven press conferences held most on Mondays, with announcements on migration and crime trailed into the weekend press and his live appearances on news channels sometimes lasting longer than an hour.[4]
Those conferences have generated fevered debates and backlash that run for days. There follows a raft of defections, from a police and crime commissioner, former MPs and, on Wednesday 26th August 2025, Reform UK’s first Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP). Never starving of the oxygen of publicity, Farage has featured on at least 22 front pages.[5]
Unlike tightly controlled government press conferences, Farage always veers off-script, always takes questions but dismisses any he cannot answer. Like a Donald Trump with oracy and articulacy, he exploits to the maximum the time he has available with long rambling answers that comprise a smorgasbord of half-truths and pet theories that could be converted into news stories.[6]
A key element of the Faragiste operating manual is a flexible and economical, nay shameless, approach to the truth and his own spoken record. For just 24 hours after making his headline making pledge to deport women and child small boat migrants, he rowed back on it (is it too much of an attribution to humanitarian considerations that he didn’t want to be associated with the iconic cruelty of the separation of children from their parents on the US-Mexico border during Trump 1.0?) saying that exemption of them “at this stage is not part of our plan for the next five years” and that, besides, “there are so many illegal males in Britain”[7]
After the opprobrium of Northern Ireland’s political parties and those involved in the negotiation of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement predictably fell on his shoulders like the proverbial ton of bricks, Farage also swiftly backtracked on his proposal to renegotiate the Agreement acknowledging with candid honesty that “The Northern Ireland situation is deeply complex” and “that will not be at the forefront of what we do”.[8] But should Northern Ireland ever become a concern for a Reform UK government (heaven forbid!) then both sides of the constitutional divide should be careful for what they wish for. Being essentially an English nationalist party, Reform could well look for the easiest way to expedite any responsibility for NI by, maybe, calling snap border poll with no preparations for the aftermath (as was the case after the Brexit referendum) and then wash their hands of the consequences in true ‘not me guv’ isolationist style.
Farage’s MO of treading delicately but strategically on the penumbra of what is legal to say in public is one which ought to be very familiar to students of demagogues like the late Ian Paisley and Donald Trump. He says that public order is in danger from uncontrolled immigration. The he executes a rhetorical pivot from the undesirable character of those arriving by boat – “suspected of being involved in some form of terrorism” – to the prospect of unrest in communities where there is “rising anger” and “despair” at the influx of these marauding interlopers. His warnings are threats. His foreboding fans the flames.[9] Figuratively speaking, Farage can always be relied on to drop a lighted cigarette butt on a dry gorse field or strike a match near a propane gas cylinder.
And Farage’s rhetorical flourishes have sociopathic consequences. Stoked up by rage at the “invasion” of “unvetted young single males of fighting age” from “backward medieval cultures” (Islamic in the populist imagination,) angry mobs of balaclava clad youths; tattooed and tanked up older men of “Engerland” supporter repute complemented by the pink femininity of the Women’s Safety Initiative (WSI), a grassroots movement whose stated mission is “to expose the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, put women and girls first, advocate for victims and demand real solutions.” (WSI was founded to address "the exponential growth of women and girls being followed, harassed and assaulted by male foreign nationals.”[10]) lay siege to asylum hotels up and down the country though not with the destructiveness of last year’s summer riots (provoked at least partly by Farage’s conspiracist undermining of the police investigation into the Stockport killings of three young girls at the Taylor Swift theme party.). But the toxicity around migration reaches deeper into the soil and bedrock of communities.
“Operation Restoring Justice” the Reform UK moniker for Farage’s mass deportation plan is not border control but Trumpism in a union jack. It is a louder, more extreme version of former PM Rishi Sunak’s failed 2023 strategy to detain everyone, deport everyone and process no one. It was a policy destined to fail, whether by design or default. It created a backlog of unheard asylum claims, spiralling hotel costs and public anger – with no drop in small boat crossings. But Farage wants to go further. He pledges to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repeal the Human Rights Act to remove legal avenues of repeal; disapply the UN refugee convention for five years; and exit anti-torture and anti-trafficking treaties.[1]
If one is to believe in Farage’s hubristic prospective, Britain could deport 288,000 people annually. That’s nearly 800 a day – 30 times the current rate of asylum-related returns. Of course, the arithmetic and geopolitics do not stack up. The UK has just 2,200 detention places, Farage wants 24,000. Deportation relies on returns deals, but none exist with most of the countries from which refugees are fleeing, including Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan (discounting Farage’s lack of moral scruple about dealing with odious regimes or civil conflict-ridden failed states). Nor is France likely to cooperate if the ECHR is nullified.[2] There is a cost estimate of £10bn over five years, including £2.5bn for the construction of detention centres in undetermined locations.[3]
But here’s the bub. Farage is playing at performative politics in the most cynically strategic manner possible and it is through his carefully crafted playbook that his pathway to 10 Downing Street lies, as hopefully but cautionary improbable this prospect is. Exuding power without any authority or responsibility, Farage is setting the agenda on immigration from the bully pulpit of weekly press conferences held in the ‘silly season’ when Parliament is in recess and the major party leaders are ‘on the beach’ (literally as then Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb was during the debacle of the fall of Kabul to the Taleban and the evacuation of Westerners and their Afghan helpers). The viewing public has quite had probable more exposure to a perma tanned Farage strutting forth at the helm of his press conferences while the official Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch flails around in her unfocused, shouty manner and Prime Minister Keir Starmer while performing statesmanlike on the foreign stage struggles to keep a lid on the widespread dissatisfaction on the domestic performance of his year old government.
Ever attuned to the shifting sands of the news agenda and the attention spans of public opinion, Farage has conducted seven press conferences held most on Mondays, with announcements on migration and crime trailed into the weekend press and his live appearances on news channels sometimes lasting longer than an hour.[4]
Those conferences have generated fevered debates and backlash that run for days. There follows a raft of defections, from a police and crime commissioner, former MPs and, on Wednesday 26th August 2025, Reform UK’s first Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP). Never starving of the oxygen of publicity, Farage has featured on at least 22 front pages.[5]
Unlike tightly controlled government press conferences, Farage always veers off-script, always takes questions but dismisses any he cannot answer. Like a Donald Trump with oracy and articulacy, he exploits to the maximum the time he has available with long rambling answers that comprise a smorgasbord of half-truths and pet theories that could be converted into news stories.[6]
A key element of the Faragiste operating manual is a flexible and economical, nay shameless, approach to the truth and his own spoken record. For just 24 hours after making his headline making pledge to deport women and child small boat migrants, he rowed back on it (is it too much of an attribution to humanitarian considerations that he didn’t want to be associated with the iconic cruelty of the separation of children from their parents on the US-Mexico border during Trump 1.0?) saying that exemption of them “at this stage is not part of our plan for the next five years” and that, besides, “there are so many illegal males in Britain”[7]
After the opprobrium of Northern Ireland’s political parties and those involved in the negotiation of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement predictably fell on his shoulders like the proverbial ton of bricks, Farage also swiftly backtracked on his proposal to renegotiate the Agreement acknowledging with candid honesty that “The Northern Ireland situation is deeply complex” and “that will not be at the forefront of what we do”.[8] But should Northern Ireland ever become a concern for a Reform UK government (heaven forbid!) then both sides of the constitutional divide should be careful for what they wish for. Being essentially an English nationalist party, Reform could well look for the easiest way to expedite any responsibility for NI by, maybe, calling snap border poll with no preparations for the aftermath (as was the case after the Brexit referendum) and then wash their hands of the consequences in true ‘not me guv’ isolationist style.
Farage’s MO of treading delicately but strategically on the penumbra of what is legal to say in public is one which ought to be very familiar to students of demagogues like the late Ian Paisley and Donald Trump. He says that public order is in danger from uncontrolled immigration. The he executes a rhetorical pivot from the undesirable character of those arriving by boat – “suspected of being involved in some form of terrorism” – to the prospect of unrest in communities where there is “rising anger” and “despair” at the influx of these marauding interlopers. His warnings are threats. His foreboding fans the flames.[9] Figuratively speaking, Farage can always be relied on to drop a lighted cigarette butt on a dry gorse field or strike a match near a propane gas cylinder.
And Farage’s rhetorical flourishes have sociopathic consequences. Stoked up by rage at the “invasion” of “unvetted young single males of fighting age” from “backward medieval cultures” (Islamic in the populist imagination,) angry mobs of balaclava clad youths; tattooed and tanked up older men of “Engerland” supporter repute complemented by the pink femininity of the Women’s Safety Initiative (WSI), a grassroots movement whose stated mission is “to expose the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, put women and girls first, advocate for victims and demand real solutions.” (WSI was founded to address "the exponential growth of women and girls being followed, harassed and assaulted by male foreign nationals.”[10]) lay siege to asylum hotels up and down the country though not with the destructiveness of last year’s summer riots (provoked at least partly by Farage’s conspiracist undermining of the police investigation into the Stockport killings of three young girls at the Taylor Swift theme party.). But the toxicity around migration reaches deeper into the soil and bedrock of communities.
And the hostile discursive environment around migration is having real life effects upon those who work in the migrant advocacy sphere. Research by the Guardian newspapers has found that organisations that support migrants, refugees and asylum seekers have been forced to take radical security measures to protect themselves and their clients, in recent months, including temporarily closing offices and moving to online only services, and removing content from their websites including location information. During the course of the research, multiple organisations reported online threats, trolling, hostile emails, and intimidating Facebook posts. Some anti-migrant protestors made video recordings of refugee organisations’ premises and shared them on far-right online groups.[11]
The Guardian also reported that the Charity Commission took the highly unusual step of removing the names of trustees from several charities listed on its website after the Home Office gave a far-right influencer the names of some organisations with which it had meetings about asylum accommodation, following a freedom of information inquest. The City of Sanctuary UK, a small organisation which works with schools, was falsely accused by far-right activists of grooming schoolchildren and was the subject of a complaint to the Charity Commission by the former Tory education secretary for its “politicised” activity.[12]
Although the latest piece of grotesque misinformation to go viral last week did not bear Nigel Farage’s personal imprimatur, it is a parable for our Faragised times. An image of a 12-year-old girl from Dundee in Scotland wielding an axe and knife to supposedly ward off an attack by a male was reposted by Elon Musk several times to his hundreds of millions of X/Twitter followers and by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson. In fact, she has been charged with wielding the weapons in question towards a Bulgarian couple. This is the perfect vignette for our digitally monetised conspiracy ecosphere in which fear and prejudice, and primitive emotion are of greater currency than truth. Farage is an exemplar of this culture. Funnily enough, Elon Musk’s concerns about the supposed erosion of free speech in Britain do not appear to have extended to the decision by Nottinghamshire County Council four-month-old Reform administration to cease dealing with the local newspaper the Nottingham Post after the County Council leader objected to a story about plans for a restructuring of local government. A portent of life in Planet Farage.
How to Respond to Farage: The Old Slogans Will Not Work
It is tempting to look back at previous episodes of far-right activism and electoral successes and reprise the old strategies of anti-racist resistance and mobilisation. The pushback against the National Front in the mid-1970s in set piece street confrontations such as the Lewisham Rally in August 1977, the activism of the Anti-Nazi League and its organisation of the Rock Against Racism movement has passed into the iconography of the British Left as much as the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. The electoral rise of the British National Party in the 2000s culminating in the election of two of its candidates to the European Parliament in 2009 galvanised the Love Music/Hate Racism movement and grassroots anti-BNP campaigning which culminated in the vanquishing of BNP leader and MEP Nick Griffin in the Barking & Dagenham constituency in the 2010 General Election and the all of the BNP councillors on the council in that year’s local government elections.
However, the far right that is mobilising in the 2020s and, disturbingly, setting the agenda on immigration is a different beast from what earlier waves of left-wing activism confronted. Writing about his experience in organising a protest to defend refugees kettled in Thistle City Barbican hotel in London, the barrister and authority on the far right David Renton remarks that shouting:
The Guardian also reported that the Charity Commission took the highly unusual step of removing the names of trustees from several charities listed on its website after the Home Office gave a far-right influencer the names of some organisations with which it had meetings about asylum accommodation, following a freedom of information inquest. The City of Sanctuary UK, a small organisation which works with schools, was falsely accused by far-right activists of grooming schoolchildren and was the subject of a complaint to the Charity Commission by the former Tory education secretary for its “politicised” activity.[12]
Although the latest piece of grotesque misinformation to go viral last week did not bear Nigel Farage’s personal imprimatur, it is a parable for our Faragised times. An image of a 12-year-old girl from Dundee in Scotland wielding an axe and knife to supposedly ward off an attack by a male was reposted by Elon Musk several times to his hundreds of millions of X/Twitter followers and by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson. In fact, she has been charged with wielding the weapons in question towards a Bulgarian couple. This is the perfect vignette for our digitally monetised conspiracy ecosphere in which fear and prejudice, and primitive emotion are of greater currency than truth. Farage is an exemplar of this culture. Funnily enough, Elon Musk’s concerns about the supposed erosion of free speech in Britain do not appear to have extended to the decision by Nottinghamshire County Council four-month-old Reform administration to cease dealing with the local newspaper the Nottingham Post after the County Council leader objected to a story about plans for a restructuring of local government. A portent of life in Planet Farage.
How to Respond to Farage: The Old Slogans Will Not Work
It is tempting to look back at previous episodes of far-right activism and electoral successes and reprise the old strategies of anti-racist resistance and mobilisation. The pushback against the National Front in the mid-1970s in set piece street confrontations such as the Lewisham Rally in August 1977, the activism of the Anti-Nazi League and its organisation of the Rock Against Racism movement has passed into the iconography of the British Left as much as the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. The electoral rise of the British National Party in the 2000s culminating in the election of two of its candidates to the European Parliament in 2009 galvanised the Love Music/Hate Racism movement and grassroots anti-BNP campaigning which culminated in the vanquishing of BNP leader and MEP Nick Griffin in the Barking & Dagenham constituency in the 2010 General Election and the all of the BNP councillors on the council in that year’s local government elections.
However, the far right that is mobilising in the 2020s and, disturbingly, setting the agenda on immigration is a different beast from what earlier waves of left-wing activism confronted. Writing about his experience in organising a protest to defend refugees kettled in Thistle City Barbican hotel in London, the barrister and authority on the far right David Renton remarks that shouting:
“Nazi scum off our streets" by anti-racists towards the anti-migrant contingent who were chanting “invaders” and “parasites” ‘didn’t strike me as effective when I heard it, and the more I have thought about it since, the more convinced I am that is the wrong strategy.[13]
For the cheerleaders of the modern far right like Tommy Robinson do not lace his speeches with reworked passages from Mein Kampf; recycle Holocaust denial and Elders of Zion tropes or openly trade in white supremacism. The National Front and BNP who did peddle these ideas could not poll any more than 6% of votes because their explicit racism and fascism put a ceiling on their progress. Supporter of the National Front in the 1970s broke with its campaigning because of their affinity with fascism and Nazism; not least of their considerations was memories of the Blitz on London just over three decades earlier.
For the contemporary far right has a singular focus on refugees with one singular narrative – that the residents in the hotels are single men, are foreigners and that ergo, they are likely sexual predators.[14] As mentioned earlier, the far right is pushing forward a group of female leaders both very amenable to that logic and who have the emotional acumen to push that message to multiple recipients.
This argument with its faux feminist concerns wins supporters and insulates them from accusations that they are extremist (“Not far right but not far wrong” is their mantra). The only way to confront this form of othering is to tackle it head on by rejecting any idea that foreign men – or Muslims – are more susceptible to sexual offending than British males. Rather than confronting this form of racism through “Bash the Fash” or shouting “Nazi scum off our streets” is to rebut that argument with simple, one line statements such as the statistic that 40% of those who attended the far-right protests after the Stockport atrocity have been reported to the police for domestic violence.
Rather than the formulaic wording of most anti-racist, left wing campaign material, that sort of unvarnished figure should appear on their leaflets and posters. In this way opponents of the modern far right can take back control of the narrative.
References
[1] The Guardian Editorial Asylum. Farage’s deportation plan is not border control but Trumpism in a union jack 27th August 2025 p.2
[2] Ibid
[3] Rafael Behr Same man and same playbook – but now with lives at stake Guardian Journal 27th August 2025 pp.1-2
[4] Jessica Elgot Summer offensive. How Reform was allowed to dominate news agenda. The Guardian. 27th August 2025 pp.4-5
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Libby Brooks Farage drops vow to deport women and child small boat migrant. Guardian 28th August 2025 p.6
[8] Ibid
[9] Behr, op cit
[10] Michaela Makusha Women’s safety group accused of setting back sexual violence debate The Observer 24th August 2025 p.9
[11] Far-right threats force refugee groups to take safety measures. Guardian 24th August 2025 p.14
[12] Ibid
[13] David Renton Shouting ‘Nazi’ at anti-refugee protestors will solve nothing. Guardian Journal 29th August 2025 pp.1-2
[14] Ibid, p.2
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
But why is it gaining traction? Why are the locals raising concerns? Are they all just simply racist? Why are rentals never mind property becoming unaffordable? Why are jobs becoming scarce? Why are GP and hospital appointments the same? Why do police forces not investigate horrendous crimes for fear of being labelled racist? Why are people passing through multiple countries to claim asylum in the UK? And now Ireland? Why do young Irish emigrate due to the demographic shift and lack of jobs? If the jobs are drying up, why the immigration?
ReplyDeleteImmigration does not cause unemployment but a response to skill shortages and spare capacity in the economy. Epping started because a hotel resident was charged with sex offence against 14 year old girl. Housing shortages, GP appt shortages and lack of jobs thr failure of neo liberalism not immigration.
ReplyDeleteAlso the government is unfortunately reluctant to challenge directly and even colludes in anti migrant rhetoric
ReplyDeleteand is picking on student visas and family reunions
Yes there was an utter failure to tackle the grooming gangs two, three decades ago which was beyond appalling but what more recent crimes are police not investigating for fear of being seen as racist?
ReplyDelete