Farage’s Authoritarian Dream
Nigel Farage has unveiled another round of “policy announcements” — less a manifesto, more a vision for a whiter, more conformist Britain.
Meanwhile, the Government appears asleep at the wheel, or perhaps snoozing on a deckchair. Angela Rayner provokes tabloid paroxysms by vaping in a dinghy or drinking rosé in a dry robe. We say we want politicians to be normal people, then howl with outrage when they act like normal people.
In truth, they aren’t missing much. Politics and economics have been relatively quiet: modest growth, borrowing down, interest rates falling.
Some say the Government is “letting Farage set the agenda.” In reality, the agenda is being set by the people who own GB News, Reform, the Telegraph, the Mail, and by the billionaires funnelling money into social media. Farage is their content creator, not their leader. He’s boosted further by the very far-right activists behind asylum hotel protests and the “raise the flag” campaign. He doesn’t need to collude with them — their goals already align.
Behind the noise, the outlines of a Reform government are emerging:
- Leaving the European Court of Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act, disapplying the 1951 Refugee Convention and UN Convention Against Torture.
- Mass deportations of 600,000 so-called “illegal immigrants” — paying hostile regimes (even the Taliban) billions to take them.
- A vast surveillance regime, “fusing” data from the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and police.
- A British version of ICE — at a cost of £10bn, with new detention centres.
It sounds bold. It’s actually unworkable, illegal, and ruinous.
Breaking the Law
Leaving the ECHR would isolate Britain as a pariah. Small boat crossings were virtually unknown before Brexit, and particularly before Boris Johnson’s failed deal. Hard Brexit dismantled international agreements that made deportations possible. Smuggling gangs noticed, and business boomed.
More deportations require more cooperation with neighbours, not less. Leaving the ECHR makes that impossible.
These kinds of legal stunts already created the asylum backlog: tens of thousands left in limbo, parked in hotels at huge expense. Farage’s even harder Brexit would create more chaos, more hotels, not less.
It would also put the Good Friday Agreement at risk, just as Britain tries to re-establish global trade ties. Imagine Washington’s reaction if Britain tore up the deal America co-signed. Farage’s Britain would look less like “Global Britain” and more like a European North Korea.
And then there’s the infrastructure. Deporting hundreds of thousands means building giant prison camps. Reform won’t say where these would be. Because their supporters would explode when they found one planned in their backyard.
The Truth About Illegal Immigration
Reform’s 600,000 figure is a trick. They’re conflating three groups:
- People with a legal right to asylum who resorted to small boats because there are no safe, legal routes.
- People trafficked in illegally — into cannabis farms, nail bars, sex work, modern slavery.
- People who entered legally but overstayed visas or broke visa conditions.
Group 3 is the biggest — and the least talked about. The classic “illegal immigrant” in Britain is not a gang member from Albania but an Australian working cash-in-hand, an American overstaying a tourist visa, or a Canadian living with a British partner. Historically, Australians are the worst offenders. Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Indians and Chinese follow.
These people overwhelmingly self-deport. They go home, or they marry, or they sort out paperwork. For every Aussie in Earl’s Court, there’s a Brit overstaying on Bondi Beach.
Rounding them up would cause diplomatic chaos. Imagine the US watching its citizens locked in British detention camps. Imagine the economic damage to tourism. And for what? To deport people who already have return tickets. And in exchange, we’d be sent back an equal number of Brits.
Ending Your Right to Privacy
Perhaps most sinister is Reform’s proposed data regime.
Right now, your NHS records are private. The police can’t trawl through them. HMRC can’t share your tax data with the Home Office. That’s deliberate: the right to a private life is a cornerstone of democracy.
Reform would erase that. Every government department would have access to your data. Medical records, tax, driving licence, bank details — all open to the state.
It’s not a right if it can be revoked; it’s a privilege. Farage wants to strip rights from the vulnerable. But rights, by definition, belong to everyone. Once one group loses them, so can you.
Know Your Rights
British liberties are not conditional. They go back to Magna Carta, and to cases like James Somerset, the escaped American slave who won his freedom in London. By Reform’s logic, Somerset would have been deported.
Britain once fought for its rights — and for the rights of others. Farage would have us trade them for prison camps, surveillance states, and deportation fantasies.
The real cause of the small boats crisis was Brexit. The harder the Brexit, the harder the problem. Reform’s answer is more of the same: failures that create new crises, which they answer with more power grabs, more authoritarianism, fewer rights.
Until Britain no longer looks like Britain at all.
More bullshit political theatre from the Rabble Rouser In Chief.
Its known that people with a lower IQ drift towards authoritarianism. They struggle with nuance, they prefer black and white ideologies. Farage knows this only too well, he doesn’t have to justify his figures or explain he detail how its all going to work, the majority of his followers are not interested. Farage and the press have created the monster, and they position Reform as the only way to slay it.
Are you sure it is IQ? I know some pretty smart people who have absolute faith in Farage. I think it is a learned gullibility, a willingness to believe all kinds of nonsense to support their ideology
IQ is part of the equation. I’m not being derogatory to people with a low IQ. IQ is just one thing that makes a person, often people with high emotional intelligence outperform smarter people in the work place, then you many other traits like drive, resilience, extraversion and so on.
There are other factors that could prevent people fact checking information, such how busy people are, lack of free time, kids, work, hobbies etc. I guess we could sit here all day and come up with ideas why people back Farage, maybe they come from a right wing family, maybe they’ve had negative experiences with immigrants, the list is potential endless.
That said there are numerous studies that link a lower IQ to authoritarianism. I’m not saying the club is exclusive, certainly you could have smarter people backing Reform and less smart people backing the Greens. The data from the studies are generalisations, not fates.
Isn’t the main reason why people don’t check facts is that they don’t really care if something is true or not, just how it makes them feel?
I don’t know. I think if you are going support something that makes up a part of your identity, then its important you have the information to make the best judgement call that you can.
I could show certain people I know this article – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cger45p0lv0o and they will either not read it, or agree with council leader Mick Barton. The hypocrisy of reform supposedly being the party of free speech is lost on them, or they just don’t care.
A lot of people complain that their freedom of speech is being taken away from them when really what is happening is that people aren’t really interested in what they say
I’d never though of it that way, its a good point. Of course in the age of the internet these things are also measurable, with page views, content engagement, likes and the such.
“Freedom of speech” for Reform supporters doesn’t so much mean “freedom to speak without fear of punishment by the state” as “freedom to be a bigot without fear of consequences of any kind”.
For a very long time being a posh white man meant that you were listened to above other people, even if what you had to say wasn’t that interesting or original. Now the attention economy means those people have to compete with other, younger, more diverse, and often more interesting voices. They are still privileged but not as much, and not as much as they think they deserve. Most of the people complaining they are losing their freedom of speech are just boring and no-one is listening any more.
One of the great contradictions of our era is that fewer people in the UK are racist than ever before. But those who are racist have been emboldened to be as racist as they can, and social media amplifies their voices. Politicians in Reform and the Conservatives are pushing ideas that only a decade ago were confined to white supremacist message boards
I’ll just leave this here.
https://bmjopenrespres.bmj.com/content/12/1/e003526 – What is the relationship between population health and voting patterns: an ecological study in England
Abstract
Background Health is a fundamental issue in politics and an area where governments hold significant levers of influence. Countries in Europe have seen increased support for populist political parties, with some evidence linking support for these parties to health metrics. We aimed to establish if there is an association between health metrics and patterns of voting in England, particularly in relation to a recently established political party, Reform UK, in the 2024 general election.
Methods We conducted a cross sectional ecological study with data from all constituencies in England (n=543). We conducted Pearson correlations and linear regression between the proportion of eligible votes for Reform UK and estimated prevalence of 20 common non-communicable diseases, including obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, type 2 diabetes and depression.
Results Constituencies electing Reform members of parliament (MPs) (n=5/543) had the highest average prevalence of asthma (7.44%) and COPD (2.85%). Across the country, adjusting for age, sex and deprivation, a 10% increase in the party’s vote share was associated with a +0.261% (95% CI 0.213% to 0.309%) prevalence of COPD, a +0.113% (95% CI 0.026% to 0.201%) prevalence of asthma and a +1.479% (95% CI 1.239% to 1.720%) increase in obesity prevalence.
Conclusions At a constituency level, poor health, in particular conditions associated with breathlessness, was associated with a greater proportion of votes for Reform UK.
“The results are consistent with work showing a relationship between poor healthcare measures and Republican voting in the US6 and data from Italy linking dissatisfaction with public services and voting for the far right”
Yes, if you compare constituencies with declining life expectancies, and constituencies who voted leave you get an almost perfect match. Liberalism is linked with the idea that things can, and do, get better. Reactionary politics is linked with the idea that things were better in the past/things are getting worse. That is why they find it so easy to believe on-line scare stories about rampaging immigrants, and rising crime even though they could check if they were true or not just by opening their front door
The Nostalgia Fallacy. Yes reform are good this. Appeal to time that wasn’t necessarily better, but a time when people were younger, more carefree and less vulnerable. This ties in nicely with the Availability Heuristic, where people estimate the likelihood of something happening based on how easily things come to mind. The news bombards them with news on immigrants, facebook local groups echo this, but also every little crime is reported on them – it leads them to believe crime in their areas is rife, despite figures proving otherwise.