Who's Afraid of Nigel Farage?

With a fag in one hand and a pint in the other, his straight talking still connects with widespread unease.

On 20 May 2023, Nigel Farage participated in a YouTube discussion with Fraser Nelson on the consequences of the Conservative Party’s betrayal of Brexit and its overseeing of consecutive massive rises in net legal and illegal immigration numbers. The interview received 108,649 views and is worth watching (click above).

Farage explained he was considering returning to political life. He outlined how he believes he successfully forced a Referendum on European Union membership onto the UK’s political agenda by linking mass immigration caused by the European Union’s free movement of people policy to the day-to-day problems facing ordinary Brits—getting a school place, signing on at a doctors surgery or with a dentist, finding affordable housing, or even securing a decent pay increase.

Before Brexit, everyone knew that over 100,000 additional people coming into the country yearly would negate most of the net house building. Such numbers were not rational. The Tories had been elected on successive manifestos that claimed they would keep net immigration below this figure, but instead, they let it rise to around 180,000-200,000 a year, the size of a decent-sized town. This was not because of the free movement laws, as Poland and Hungary have shown.

Rather, this was an absence of political will. For the Conservative Government, mass immigration is a panacea for all kinds of policy problems that make it border on an addiction—anything from staffing the health service to the seasonal farm sector. Cheap labour topped up by tax credits keeps business costs down—skilled migrant labour papers over the miseducation of our native pupils, students and workforce’s failings.

The Labour Party, often representing urban multi-ethnic constituencies, pretend everyone is welcome, and the Tories are waychists. They refuse to address the numbers of net migrants and demands on public services, assuming most of the incomer’s votes will go their way.

Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator and spokesperson for the urban progressive Tory, appears entirely out of touch on immigration, having married a Swedish wife and a committed Europhile, no doubt living in a leafy London suburb. He equates opposition to immigration with intolerant racism and fascism, and in the absence of these things, cannot see any problem.

But the opposition to mass net immigration is not personal; it’s not particularly racial; it might occasionally be built on anxieties about actual Islamic extremists or overblown ideological multiculturalism. But mass immigration has no mandate. Farage gets around the country and knows the mood outside of London. Such levels of legal immigration are unsustainable. Illegal immigration without verifiable histories and criminal records is unsafe.

Most migrants I meet came here legally, many from Commonwealth countries or Eastern Europe. More recently, the Government manufactured a surge of Indian students and their dependents to take up University places. One of them is now my personal assistant, dutiful, super smart, juggling work with a data analytics Master’s degree, married to her Indian husband, who works in UK Robotics. She cannot understand the wokeness but is too polite to criticise a country she is pleased to have made her temporary home.

Excluding the BLM loons from wealthy African-American families that have privileged places at Oxford or Cambridge, most legal law-abiding migrants are bemused by the self-loathing in Britain; they often admire the country for precisely the features the media claim are absent or a thin veil for racist and historical injustices: Freedom of speech, an uncorrupted police force, bribery-free politicians, British history and literature, classic architecture, the arts, and what they see as its comparative tolerance, democracy and of course job opportunities.

Concern over illegal channel boats and brutal black-on-white violence on social media, or the rioting and mayhem in France, has not changed the view that sensible immigration can be a good thing for the country. It is not individual migrants that are generally resented. It is the numbers and hypocrisy. We cannot take an asylum seeker seriously reaching the United Kingdom claims they have had to flee the totalitarian regime of France. We cannot go on with such high levels of immigration, and if conventional politics fails to address this, Farage is warning us of the emergence of a truly far-right.

We are drifting towards a Labour majority that no one wants due to the implosion of the Conservative Party into internal factionalism and incompetence. Many feel betrayed, both natural conservative voters and those who loaned them their vote due to Brexit. The failure to secure the basics of economic stability - low inflation and interest rates - managed immigration, and a rational energy policy has consequences. People are starting to see that Net Zero Carbon will mean dismantling the good life. Germany is radically deindustrialising with similar energy policies - it’s the equivalence of economic self-castration without anaesthetic but with stitches.

Farage’s views on the betrayal of Brexit and the need to curtail immigration resonate with significant sections of the population. A group of conservative MPs have just formed a New-Conservative faction and argued for a fall in net immigration from 600,000 to 200,000 annually. But memory is insurgent: this cut might look dramatic, except the Tories ran in 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019 on pledges to reduce net immigration often to less than 100,000; it topped 600,000 last year and was close to that the year before.

Last week, at the Television and Radio Industries Club (TRIC) Awards – Farage’s show on GB News or rather his presentation of it, beat Talk TV’s odious Piers Morgan and Eamonn Holmes, also of GB News, in a public vote for “news presenter of the year”. Noticeably all three presenters are on new news channels, as a significant section of the viewing public has become tired of ITV, BBC, Channel 4 and Sky’s hectoring partiality.

The problem for the micro-parties of Reform, Reclaim, or the Heritage Party, is breaking through in a first past the post-election system. They need to keep it simple and avoid the right-wing equivalence of ultra-leftism that is far too prevalent on the dissident, delusional and radicalised right.

---

The strength of Farage is his clarity.

Many in the UK look at President Trump and miss the point. They inevitably rely on the American mainstream media that hates Trump and the Republicans-in-name-only RINO talking heads that also loath him. But, just like Tony Blair’s early New Labour, Trump and Farage use simple messages and language that reach out to many who ordinarily see no point in voting.

Make America Great Again; a strong military; no more foreign wars; build the wall (managed migration); bring back our jobs from China (scrap poor globalist trade agreements); support the hard-pressed traditional family; faith and patriotism.

Applied to Britain, it might look something like this:

Be Proud to be British; Jaw, Jaw Not War, War; Net zero immigration by 2028, A Fair deal for Farmers, Defund the looney left (Men in women’s sports, Rewilding, Zero carbon, Soy, BLM); Frack away; Back British Beef; Free Speech; farms, faith, family and patriotism, and Never Again (No more Lockdowns). S.T.U.L. (Stiffen That Upper Lip)

---

As I started to write this blog, Nigel Farage announced that his bank account had been cancelled, and no other bank would offer him terms. Labour MP Chris Bryant had used parliamentary privilege to accuse Farage of receiving half a million from the Russian Government. This is not the first time that leading Brexiteers have been smeared. Neither are the links of the smearers to intelligence agencies hidden. Banks have been making these decisions due to European sanctions against the Russian Federation, which the UK embraced.

Farage’s bank, the elitist Coutts, has now been identified as providing briefings to the press against Farage’s claims, saying he was offered an alternative NatWest account and had insufficient funds to justify retention. I do not believe them. But it appears others have lost their bank accounts, singled out without explanation when merely talking common sense or expressing a political view.

Nigel Farage is wily. He had a bad Covid, banging his pots and pans for the NHS, but few politicians see the world as he does. An old, unreconstructed Thatcherite, in a post-Thatcher world, sure enough, but notions of patriotism, immigration control and a rolling back the woke state are innately popular. With a fag in one hand and a pint in the other, he connects. This is why the establishment seeks to marginalise him. The attempt at de-banking was a warning.

His defeat of Nick Clegg in their first European debate and their stalemate in the second (others saw it the other way around) led many to consider voting to leave the EU. Clegg’s debating style involved fallacious patronising straw man arguments, whilst Farage’s approach was direct, straightforward, and often convincing. The 17,410,742 people who voted for Brexit and broadly shared Farage’s views on immigration, sovereignty, and a more patriotic, anti-globalist perspective will be wondering about their own bank accounts.

Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has said “un-banking” is unacceptable and action will be taken. But the Conservative party is “…in office but not in power”. We are adrift as a country. Even the possibility that a popular politician such as Nigel Farage could be turned down for banking is unthinkable. This is a crucial escalation and a critical moment. The Tories were given another chance on Thursday, 13 December 2019. It has to be their last. We now can see what a landslide Labour Government will systemise. We need to build an alternative.