Farage’s Times interview – his dystopian cruelty and proven incompetence will surely make Britain a worse place for us all

Nigel Farage’s interview in last Saturday’s Times is somewhat revealing and very disturbing.

We seem to have reached the stage where he feels able to say the quiet part out loud, where he confirms the suspicions that many of the decent folk of the UK have had for some time: that there are few limits to the moral depravity he is prepared to sink to in order to rile up hatred in the UK to his advantage.

Firstly, if he became Prime Minister, he plans to pull the UK out of many international agreements.

These include:

Yes, it seems he does not want to align the UK with being against human trafficking or torture. The first you would think should be of paramount concern to this person so concerned with “small boats”. The second you would think should be of paramount concern to anyone who hasn’t truly lost all vestige of humanity.

More locally, he also intends to disband the UK’s Human Rights Act. And, to the extent that he intends to replace it with anything, it won’t be anything that guarantees your human rights – the idea of which he seems to think is somehow a negative because human rights in his view are “state-given”. Apparently he sees the role of the state as solely to limit your freedoms and punish you . Not to help protect you, your dignity, your freedoms and indeed your life.

For be in no doubt: whilst he will use examples of various types of immigrants in the rare cases where he bothers trying to justify his lunatic ideas, these laws are not in place to protect only immigrants. If you are whatever Farage would accept as a being a 100% native British citizen then the exact same laws are what protects your rights too.

If Farage disbands these laws, you will lose rights and freedoms.

  • Your right to not be tortured? It’s guaranteed by article 3 of the UK Human Rights Act
  • Rights to a fair trial, of not being punished unlawfully? Article 6 and 7 of the act.
  • Right to freedom? Of thoughts, belief, religion, expression, assembly, to marry – the UK HRA, article 9, 10, 11 & 12.
  • Right to privacy? The UK HRA article 8.

    and so on.

Farage is proposing to strip the very legislation that enables your freedoms, quality of life and privacy, and that of your loved ones.

In withdrawing us from the world stage he will continue in his perverse ambition to make Britain weaker, poorer, less powerful; all in the name of making it crueller.

This is nothing new. This unpatriotic chancer was one of the “masterminds” behind Brexit which the majority of the UK agrees made our country, and us, its people, weaker, poorer and less influential on the world stage. We have become rule takers, not rule makers. Immigration has sored. As has poverty. The NHS seems to be in a chronic decline. Essentially, the exact reverse of what Farage promised would come as “Brexit bonus” has come to the fore, and the vast majority of us are substantially worse off as a result.

Even if you support the ethos behind some of his policies, you would almost certainly not want this dangerous and incompetent fool to get his hands anywhere near the levers of power. He has shown he cannot deliver what he promises – probably because he has no real intention of doing so. He just wants to maintain his vast wealth, increasing power, fame and ability to appear on whichever TV show he likes.

Immigration is of course the area in which his avaricious cruelty is brought most to the fore.

His “plans” include:

…the arrest of asylum seekers on arrival, automatic detention and forced deportation, with no right of appeal, to countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea.

There are plans for deals with third countries such as Rwanda, a “fallback” option of sending people to British overseas territories such as Ascension Island…

He will require the wide sharing of our personal data in order to help them do this.

The NHS, HM Revenue & Customs and the DVLA will be required to share data automatically so illegal immigrants can be tracked down and arrested.

At best this will lead to a rise in anyone who could be perceived as an “illegal immigrant” to avoid seeking healthcare, paying their taxes or getting a driving license, with all the consequent problems off pushing people into the illegal economy and induce extra cost for the tax-payer.

But it also feels very likely to end up with the data of all of us, immigrants or otherwise, being used for purposes we dislike or subject to leaks and hacks. The British public does not in general appear to like their health data being shared, even when it’s for well-meaning reasons that do not involve trying to deport you.

In Farage’s words:

The aim of this legislation is mass deportations

People entering the UK in order to claim asylum “illegally” (and note: there is currently no real legal way for someone to claim asylum – so he is basically referring to all asylum seekers) would be immediately arrested, temporarily detained on some hastily constructed ex-RAF-base holding pen and then shipped off.

“They have no right to claim asylum,” he says. “They would be arrested and detained.”

A total abrogation of responsibility, with cruel and unusual consequences.

Why is this needed? Well, his excuse is that asylum seekers are in general the scum of the earth, rather than the reality of being often desperate people fleeing from a tortuous trauma of course.

You have these young men from different cultures, Afghans being perhaps the worst example, who are literally free at licence to go out, work in the criminal economy and commit crimes…

This is of course an absolute lie. No-one is free to work in the criminal economy and commit crimes. He and his corrupt buddies may not have noticed – but our country has laws. And if you are caught committing crimes then you are subject to them, no matter your status.

You do not get a “commit murder without penalty” card just because you weren’t born in Britain. In fact the only real difference is that a wider array of punishments are available to you if you are a foreign national such as an asylum seeker – mostly involving being removed from the country,.

In fact one of the responsibilities explicitly mandated by the Refugee Convention that Farage wants to remove us from is that refugees must “abide by the national laws of the contracting states”.

After all, a much-overlooked fact is that the only reason you know about the tiny number of cases where it has been alleged in recent times that an asylum seeker committed a crime is because they are being investigated and making their way through the British legal system under the full force of the existing British law.

We don’t need special magical laws against migrants committing crimes because we already have laws against anyone committing crimes.

After a stint in the pre-fab camps, Farage envisions the survivors being deported to third-party countries. Such as?

He wants to sign deals with countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea, despotic regimes with dire human rights records.

Yes, Afghanistan. As in, the place ruled by the Taliban. The group famed for their “public executions and torture“.

But what of the risk of people being killed or tortured if they are sent back to their country of origin? The Taliban are unlikely to look kindly on people who have fled.

asks the interviewer, quite reasonably.

And now perhaps we see one of the reasons why he wants to extract the UK away from the laws on torture.

“I’m really sorry, but we can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world”

Farage responds, far less reasonably.

No-one is particularly asking him to be responsible for what happens in the rest of the world, although people may well have views on the morality of that position. But, if he wants to become PM, we should be asking him to take responsibility for what wants to make his own country do; for what will be done in our name.

Britain sending asylum seekers to places where we know they may be tortured is Britain taking an action. Why on Earth does he want us to abandon the convention against torture if Britain isn’t implicated in his plans?

If there’s a few immigrants he can’t immediately send to these kind of places then, well, he wants to resurrect the totally failed, probably illegal and much ridiculed Rwanda deportation plan that the last Conservative administration had.

He is open to reviving the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan

As a reminder, the Rwanda scheme cost the tax-payer £700 million and managed in the end to have gotten 4 – yes, four – people to leave the country. This does not seem very DOGE-aligned, even if it was moral, legal and he actually had the ability to make it work; which based on his past history he clearly does not.

Or failing even that, he might accept sending asylum seekers to the British Overseas Territories, such as Ascension Island, as a last resort

But wouldn’t some of this require the other countries to agree to take Britain’s small share of the asylum seeking population? Well, yes, obviously, but apparently he thinks we’ll be able to bully them into it.

Here he is, back channelling his hero, Donald Trump.

“We have enormous muscle on these things,” he says. “We can be nice to people, we can be nice to other countries, or we can be very tough to other countries.

But all the diplomatic levers that we have, if we have to use them, on visas, on trade, sanctions … I mean, Trump has proved this point quite comprehensively.”

Apparently forgetting the fact that part of the US’s considerable ability to seemingly bend some countries to its will (at incredible expense to the weakening US itself) comes from the fact it is such a big player on the world stage.

Farage’s own Brexit has lessened the wealth, trade, power and influence of the UK. Many countries have rather less to fear from the UK implementing whatever self-harm policies he has in mind that being shut out of the US economy, services, and so on.

It’s part of the empty-headed Reform technique of stealing US policies verbatim, without realising that they do not themselves in fact live or campaign to govern in the US. It may have escaped the attention of someone who spends far more time gladhanding his rich US pals and contributing to the American economy than helping members of his own UK constituency, but the UK is a different country to the US, with different needs and different abilities.

This is why they ran some council election campaigns on a plan of sacking all council DEI officers when in fact there were none to sack. Why they ran on closing down low traffic neighbourhoods in areas where there were none to close.

Anyway, to conclude:

“…look, I can’t be responsible for despotic regimes all over the world”

he says.

But we can and must hold him responsible for the despotic regime him and his big-business cronies seem to want to create in my home country, the United Kingdom.

The similarity between Reform UK and football in Britain

In the context of Reform’s recent attempt to sell expensive football shirts to its poor exploited supporters, GQ highlights a notable similarity between their party and modern-day football over here.

The common trait is: hypocrisy. They both promote a business model that deliberate enriches billionaires at the expense of massively exploiting us ordinary people; the people that gave them the success they so far had.

What’s grimly ironic is that football and Reform share a similar kind of hypocrisy. For all the game’s working-class, regional resonance, its modern business model is hyper-international and hyper-capitalist.

Clubs are owned by dodgy billionaires and sheikhs, and their shirts are emblazoned with companies that are no better: last season, it was gambling brands for 11 out of 20 Premier League clubs.

Similarly, Farage (like Trump) is claiming to back the common man while hardly diverging from the right-wing, billionaire-boosting economics which, in Margaret Thatcher’s day, did far more to immiserate regional towns and cities than an immigrant influx ever could, whatever slogans he might spin to the contrary.

Hope Not Hate dives into the unsavoury views of another 3 recent Reform council candidates

Hope Not Hate is, once again, giving us a rundown of the unpleasant history of some of Reform’s candidates in recent or upcoming council elections – showing that Reform’s claim to have a vetting process that is simply too perfect for its own good is an absolute joke.

Isaiah-John Reasbeck

Isaiah-John Reasbeck, who will be standing for election tomorrow in the Bentley ward of Doncaster is yet another Islamophobe. In the past he’s tweeted that:

Bradford has one of the biggest Muslim populations in Europe it is also one of the biggest shitholes in Europe draw your own conclusions.

and that, in a separate post, that people should “should be fucking terrified” of Islam.

Lewis Holmes

Lewis Holmes, who recently stood in the council by-election for Thames View, and is also chairman of the party’s Barking and Dagenham branch, has “promoted a slew of far-right content and used offensive slurs” on X.

He’s shared posts by continuously disgraced, very racist, convicted felon Tommy Robinson calling him a national hero.

The media won’t say this but I will. @TRobinsonNewEra is a national hero.

As well as retweeting content from a wider array of racists and misogynists:

Holmes has also reposted content from Catherine Blaiklock, a politician with the far-right English nationalist party English Democrats; Laurence Fox, the leader of the far-right Reclaim party; and Andrew Tate, the infamous misogynist charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.

He also goes around publicly insulting anyone he doesn’t like with with some very unpleasant words. As one example, he tweeted at the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom that:

you’re one of the reasons it’s happened you incompetent mong. The only people that use the word disinformation are those who think the audience are retarded dribblers.

For being a Reform candidate, he also doesn’t seem to like Reform all that much.

He wrote ‘Amen’ under a post from Rupert Lowe that claimed that “we need a credible alternative to the utter shambles that is Reform UK”, as well as retweeting a comment that “Farage and his ego are together incapable of building a team” saying the Farage “must never be Prime Minister”.

I can’t disagree with the latter point.

David Jarvis

Lastly, David Jarvis, who was recently the Reform candidate for Barnstaple with Westacott.

He’s a anit-woman homophobe, claiming that avideo claiming that the idea that “homosexuality is normal” and that “feminism is good” are lies of a anti-Christian age is “Powerful testimony and truth”.

He claims:

that he knows “of many previously ‘Gay’ persons” who “have been able to understand where the twist came in, where the lie was implanted and have embraced their original identity.”

He’s another paranoid conspiracy theorist – expressing total credulity in all the usual paranoid delusions of his ilk.

Firstly he believes that homosexuality is a part of the “global agenda of family destruction and societal breakdown”.

But that’s not all. He would appear to believe that in the weird conspiracy that the earth is actually flat, repositing content from accounts try to prove the lie, and sharing posts into the “Philippine Flat Earth Truthers” Facebook group.

Naturally he also believes that the Covid pandemic was/is fake:

…the MSM is still complicit and driving this scaredemic”.

He’s also referred to it as a “scamdemic” and claimed that governments are trying to “kill people with the vaccine”.

Nor does he believe in climate change – claiming that he’s a “Global Warming Denier of the first degree” and that scientists are lying about it.

He thinks that climate change is simply an effort to “justify a federal government power-grab”.

As well as seemingly being another Islamophobe, sharing a speech for Geert Wilders that claimed that

If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

and that it’s “not compatible with freedom or democracy”.

Greed and hypocrisy combine to create the £99 Reform ‘football shirt’

Never strangers to raising money by any grift they deem feasible, Reform has started selling a football shirt emblazoned with the name of their party and their leader.

The supporters of a party who constantly pretend they’re on the side of the poor everyday working man currently going through a cost of living crisis will have to stump up £39.99 to get the basic version or an astonishing £99.99 if they want one signed by Nigel Farage.

Apparently:

…it reflects our commitment to independence, strength and unity.

“Unity” is an odd claim to make for a party whose whole reason for being appears to be to sow division.

But that’s not the only hypocrisy at play. Remember last year when Nigel Farage was appalled at the British Olympic team having a perfectly recognisable version of UK’s flag that didn’t reflect the original colour scheme on their merchandise?

Flag from TeamGB's merchandise

At that time, Farage, dramatic as ever, seemed to think that a few people wearing something based on somewhat recoloured flag was going to destroy society:

I have to say I think this is really all quite deliberate, an attempt that goes right through much of civil society, right through much of our education system.

They want us to basically be ashamed of who we are as people, not proud. I am dead against it.

But what’s this on the top left of their official merch?

Looks like a distinctly recoloured flag to me!

It has also been noted that he didn’t appear to make quite such a fuss when UKIP, a political party which he was a founder and one-time leader of, changed Britain’s flag to be entirely purple with a big £ sign in the middle.

The latter change would have at least been an honest reflection of Reform’s greedy intention here.

The football shirt emblazoned with the name of a political party also seems further hypocritical for someone who has previously called for keeping politics out of football.

By which he meant, once again, keeping only the politics he doesn’t like and can’t make him money out of football. Yet again, one rule for his friends (and anything that could make him money), another rule for anyone he doesn’t like

Nigel Farage thinks the House of Lords should be abolished – except if he can fill it with his own cronies

Fresh from expressing his desire to appoint his preferred unelected bureaucrats to the government after spending a lifetime railing against unelected bureaucrats being given positions in the government, Farage has suddenly changed his mind on the utility of Britain’s second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords.

Nigel Farage before he has any hope of getting himself or anyone from whichever party he was in at the time into the House of Lords:

On LBC:

All I can say is the House of Lords is stuffed full of former MPs, party donors, spivs, former European commissioners, they’re a London-based clique, most of them are mates of Blair’s and Cameron’s.

The whole place is a complete and utter disgrace and the sooner we close the whole shooting match down and replace it with an elected Senate the better!

Nigel Farage vows to kickstart ‘political revolution’ with pledge to abolish House of Lords
Nigel Farage calls for the House of Lords to be abolished:

Do we abolish the House of Lords?

Yes we do. It’s bloated, it’s ludicrous, it’s packed with 100s and 100s of David Cameron’s mates and Blair’s mates.

Nigel Farage after getting a sniff of the opportunity to load it with his own corrupt cronies, shady donors and billionaire friends:

His “modest request“:

Farage said “Reform UK wishes to appoint life peers to the upper house at the earliest possible opportunity”.

Nigel Farage demands Reform be allowed to nominate peers to the House of Lords

Reform’s deputy leader wants to set up anti-immigrant vigilante groups rather than report crime to the police

Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice – he of the supposed party of law and order – is promoting the idea that members of the public should set up vigilante groups to patrol the areas near hotels housing asylum seekers.

It’s the ‘gentlemanly thing to do’ apparently. Rather than give the police any resources they need to have to tackle crime – if in fact they are not already doing so, after all we already have plenty of laws in place to deal with the sort of crime he thinks is going o – he believes that they’re too busy ‘pursuing online tweets and other unnecessary things” such that all other crime is going investigated and unprosecuted.

Someone who is in more of a position to actually understand what is going on with the police – the Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson – does not like this idea. Firstly, she has seen no evidence of the migrants “leering and jeering” outside schools that Tice is alleging is one of the drivers for his recommendation, nor heard reports of it.

Tice thinks there is “plenty of evidence”, but in fact cites none. Johnson reports that opposite.

I haven’t personally seen evidence of people hanging around outside primary schools other than obviously parents and carers. And I often go and talk to people in my constituency outside school gates. I haven’t seen that myself.

She also makes the point that the UK does still have a police force – the people that are responsible for dealing with crime. So even though it’s the duty of all us citizens to call out unacceptable behaviour:

…what I would say is this country on the whole is a very law abiding country and we have a police force who have the tools and the officers to make sure that if there is criminal behaviour happening that that is addressed. So if Richard Tice thinks that there are problems in his own constituency, I assume that’s what he’s talking about, he should be raising that with the authorities and getting the police to look at what’s happening.

If he’s really seeing all this crime going on then he’s really abdicating his basic patriotic duty to report it to the proper authorities. But it seems unlikely he has the vast array of unnamed evidence he claims to have. Rather:

I think unfortunately Mr Tice might well be trying to whip up an issue there.

This is shortly after ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe started “urgently chasing” a dinghy he sighted off the coast, rabidly tweeting that “Britain needs mass deportations NOW”.
The boat of course was nothing to do with illegal immigrants. It was being sailed by a charity rowing crew raising money for motor neurone disease.

Elsewhere we have recently seen probably the exact type of British citizen Tice intends to recruit to his team of misinformed vigilantes run riot with violent protests outside hotels perfectly legally housing asylum seekers. They’re certainly not helping the police get on with their job preventing crime by damaging their equipment.

What could possibly go wrong?

As Arnold Carton notes, the “history of vigilante patrols has been anything but ‘gentlemanly’“. He worries, quite rightly, that winding up a bunch of unregulated, unsupervised men to go out onto the streets looking for trouble may not end well.

Normally, in our society, people who exercise authority over others (teachers, police etc) are subject to clear rules and to supervision. None of this applies to amateur vigilantes. Unless we are careful, we will end up with impulsive, angry men reacting on instinct on our streets at night, with no supervision.

Nigel Farage’s constituents have barely seen him since he became their MP

Open Britain visits Nigel Farage’s constituency, Clacton, in order to ask how residents feel about what he’s done for them since becoming the local MP.

Has all that promised change come to fruition?

Of course not. It seems he’s never to be seen doing anything whatsoever, except perhaps having a drink in the local pub.

Not all that surprising for a person who has nine lucrative ‘second’ jobs, and tendency to spend a bunch of his time (in between winding up our citizenry with his mass of ill-informed media appearances) in other countries, doing anything other than concretely representing the concerns of his constituents.

What Reform achieved during their first 100 days of running Kent Council – ‘clickbait and chaos’

The Byline Times gives a run-down of what Reform achieved in their first 100 days of running the Kent council.

In their words, it was “clickbait and chaos”.

  • For the first 2 months they cancelled important meetings, postponed training sessions and delayed decisions.
  • They promised voters that they’d save money – right before appointing a new cabinet member for their “Department of (Local) Government Efficiency” – another failed idea they unthinkingly copied and pasted from American politics – at an additional cost of at least £36,000.
  • They voted against a motion that would cancel the “generous allowance” paid to deputy cabinet members.
  • They cut net zero programmes – damaging for the environment, and likely to increase costs to the council in the long term.
  • They reversed the decision to sell off the “money pit” that was the County Hall building, again costly to the tax payers.
  • One of their councillors, Daniel Taylor, appeared in court, charged with several serious offences including one of threatening to murder his wife.
  • They refused to support a motion that would increase the focus on violence against women and girls. Their council leader, Linden Kemkaran, claimed these crimes were mostly committed by non-British nationals, although I’m not sure why this means they shouldn’t be focussed on. In any case, local domestic charities said that it wasn’t true.
  • Reform Councillor Bill Barrett was forcibly removed from his role as Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport.
  • They claimed to be investing £60 million into highways – without noting that actually it was the previous (non-Reform) administration that agreed this.
  • They announced a £16 million reduction in the council’s debt. This was also achieved prior to them being elected.

We were told that Reform UK would act in the interests of the residents of Kent but instead we have only seen chaotic management, bigotry and empty soundbites that help no-one.

One of Reform’s election candidates is currently a branch officer for a different party

Reform UK’s candidate vetting process is apparently so stringent that they think that they’re actually too diligent when checking the suitability of candidates.

So diligent that they appear to have missed the fact that they seem to have missed the fact that Nick Wood, one of their candidates for councillor, has actually been put forward as a candidate for another party – as well as currently supposedly serving as an officer for them.

He’s previously stood for election on behalf of the UKIP party. Apparently he himself some that thought he’d left it until he was told at a Reform UK members-only meeting that he had been chosen as the UKIP candidate to stand for them at the next election.

Nonetheless, Reform have put him forward as their candidate in the Surrey County Council election. This is despite the fact he’s listed as a UKIP branch officer on the Electoral Commission records.

Reform don’t seem to want to take advice on justice from their justice adviser

Reform has taken on former prison governor Vanessa Frake as their “justice adviser”.

But they don’t seem all that keen on taking her advice on justice, nor respecting her experience. Their desire to stoke the flames of a culture war apparently outweighs their respect for her experience.

One point of contention is the question of trans women being placed in prisons. Reform apparently want them all removed, no questions asked. Frake’s advice, based on her knowledge and experience, is that the risks to all concerned should be considered individually.

She suggested instead that the placement of trans women should be considered on a case-by-case basis and depend on risk assessments.

“People who want to just see a blanket ban clearly have never stepped foot in a prison and seen how prison runs and seen [how] risk assessments on individuals happen,” she said.

She also shows a surprising amount of humility for a Reform supporter. Probably because her actual expertise leads her to realise she doesn’t know everything about everything

What she said:

“I’m not an expert on trans people, all that I know is that everybody should be treated with humanity and decency.”

Humanity and decency! What a novel concept. Did she know what she was signing up for?

What the Reform asked when ask if they agree with her views:

No.

In a later interview, Nigel Farage, quite surprisingly, seemed to also be defying the hate-filled policy of his own party, adopting a view more similar to Frake’s.

I’ve personally never worked in a prison so I can’t answer it,” Farage said.

“Basically, it’s about risk assessment, isn’t it?” he added. “In terms of the problems in prisons, it’s a relatively small one.”

A Labour source is rightly sceptical, saying:

Much like Boris Johnson, he’ll say anything to get himself through a press conference. It’s never coherent or reasoned. As scrutiny increases, this stuff will further fall apart.

The current Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, goes on to point out that at least in Downview prison, transgender females are held within a transgender-only facility, a point which I’m sure is missed by many folk with opinions. As, for what it’s worth, is the fact that even back in 2023 90% of transgender women were already housed in men’s prisons.