Even before he actually delivered his divisive, draconian Trumpesque speech on Tuesday, Farage and his team had achieved their prime target. By dominating the news agenda via a series of carefully placed leaks and briefings that secured front page headlines, leader columns, broadcast bulletin previews, phone-in show debates and igniting a viral social media frenzy.
Reinforced by championing the escalating number of heated protests up and down the country outside migrant hotels. All this against the convenient backdrop of opinion polls showing Reform extending its opinion poll lead, the government’s sliding to a new low, Labour councils queuing up to try and emulate Epping’s migrant hotel closure court victory, restive noises from Labour MPs in vulnerable seats and even a party grandee in former home secretary Lord Blunkett advocating a radical partial retreat from the ECHR.
Farage’s “Big Speech” had also been tactically timed to drop a bombshell on the eve of parliament returning from the summer recess on Monday and the upcoming party conference season with both Labour and the Tories facing awkward gatherings while Reform could anticipate something closer to a display of cult-like harmony.
A politician who gets it?
But just how divisive Farage’s migration blueprint for any future Reform government would be was encapsulated in a sample of Wednesday’s splash headlines. ‘FINALLY, A POLITICIAN WHO GETS IT’ roared the Daily Mail in caps along with, “As Nigel Farage promises unprecedented measures to halt illegal migration in face of mounting public anger and despair....”
Inside, the Mail devoted FOUR enthusiastic pages to Farage’s plan — its very title ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ echoing Trump — and with it a copycat vision of special squads swooping to arrest and deport up to 600,000 illegal immigrants, along with permanently exiting the European Convention on Human Rights, quitting the UN Refugee Convention and repealing the Human Rights Act.
‘AT LAST!’ the headline on a full-page op-ed by polemicist Stephen Glover who lauded Farage as the “politician who sees the enormity of the problems caused by mass uncontrolled immigration and who now has a credible plan to stop it.” He also debunked Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s claim that Farage had stolen her party’s ideas — thus again begging the intriguing question how long it might be before the Mail decides to back Reform over the Conservatives in a general election.
A questionable double page analysis by the paper’s policy editor, Martin Beckford: ‘From asylum bans to 5 flights a day for mass deportations, how Farage’s plans stack up’. And the main leader page comment continued the upbeat mood with a few caveats. Headlined ‘Farage is in tune with Middle Britain’, it argued: “Donald Trump-style raids would root out illegal migrants, aid money and sanctions used to ensure co-operation from other countries, and some would be returned to hostile regimes or sent to a third country. But can his imaginative blueprint be delivered? Mr Farage often gives the impression that complicated situations can be resolved with the click of a finger. Certainly, unpicking international treaties would take time. The liberal establishment — from parliament and the civil service to the legal profession — would launch an institutional intifada to torpedo his plans. But this would misread the public mood. Other political parties can snipe all they like, but Mr Farage is in tune with Middle Britain.”
By sharp contrast, ‘Britain is better than this’ declared the Mirror in an op-ed splash by its political columnist Paul Routledge who accused Farage of cynically playing the ‘migrant card’ in an authoritarian quest for power and urging public figures to “look to their consciences before speaking — for the sake of decency and humanity”.
Trumpism in a Union Jack
‘Farage accused of ugly populism over plans for mass deportations’ was The Guardian’s front page headline. Its main leader headline went further with: ‘Farage’s deportation plan is not border control but Trumpism in a union jack’. The leader certainly pulled no punches: “Nigel Farage wants you to believe Britain could deport 288,000 people annually. That’s nearly 800 a day — 30 times the current rate of asylum-related returns. This is a fantasy concealing his real aim: to destroy public trust in democratic institutions, crush legal constraints and turn fear into power. Mr Farage isn’t trying to fix the asylum system. In fact, he wants to dismantle the political framework necessary to achieve that goal: the treaties, parliamentary conventions and centuries of legal protections. In their place, a Reform government would operate by executive fiat cloaked in nationalist rhetoric.
“Asked whether deporting people to possible torture or death bothered him, Mr Farage said yes, but what really bothers him is women’s safety in Britain. It’s a telling deflection. Reform UK’s leader didn’t raise such concerns until it served his agenda. This is a zero-sum moral framing: protect them or us. Faragism is the opportunistic politics of outrage masquerading as principle. Shamefully, populist media laps it up. Labour must understand the threat for what it is... an attack on democratic norms. The kind that paves the way for repressive rule by and for economic elites, under the guise of national restoration. That’s Donald Trump’s game. It’s Mr Farage’s too.”
Also in The Guardian, a satirical contribution from the inimitable Marina Hyde with a column headlined, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall, am I not the greatest patriot of all?’ In it, she mockingly imagines a contest between Farage and Tory leadership wannabe Robert Jenrick. That’s the same Robert Jenrick who has just tested Kemi Badenoch’s patience by again mooting the idea of an electoral pact with Reform.
At The Telegraph, ‘Taliban to give Farage deal on migrants’ led page one, while the i paper also picked up on that exceptionally explosive element of Farage’s speech with its splash headline, ‘Farage’s promise to deport 600,000 migrants involves deals with Taliban and Iran’s Ayatollah’. (Reality check: The Taliban quickly dismissed the idea and Iran is likely to follow suit.) Worryingly, however, a rattled No 10’s immediate reaction to Farage’s speech and press conference was not to rule out looking for migrant return deals with tyrannical regimes with appalling records on human rights, women’s rights and the use of torture!
The Daily Express, these days a blindly enthusiastic, unquestioning Farage cheerleader, simply settled for, ‘Farage: I WILL DEPORT 600,000 ILLEGAL MIGRANTS’.
The Times took a different angle that could add to Keir Starmer’s migration woes with a front page warning: ‘Labour bid to head off small boats hits trouble’ — based on an upcoming confidence vote that could collapse the French government and scupper the recent agreement with the UK on tougher measures by France to curb small boat departures.
Inside, The Times leader struck a more measured tone than the Mail under the headline, ‘Deport-nation’ with a sub-deck: “Nigel Farage’s latest plan to send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants home is as challenging as it is aggressive, but it may yet propel him into Downing Street.”
The leader depicted the Farage plan as a “homespun” version of Trump’s mass immigration raid policy and an “enterprise that would involve surveillance operations, raids and deportation flights on an unprecedented scale, like nothing ever witnessed in modern British history.” The more radical proposals, it argued, would “come off second best on contact with reality”, while condemning Reform’s pledge to send people back to Afghanistan as “clearly unrealistic, if not downright immoral”.
But chinks were showing in Farage’s trumpeted masterplan within 24 hours when he appeared to be wavering amid a backlash over his initial insistence that women and children would be included in his fast-track deportation proposals.
The luxury of opposition
But the leader’s concluding paragraph made the pertinent point that “given the toxic climate” surrounding the migration issue the major shortcomings hardly matter in the context of the Farage / Reform drive for power: “Mr Farage speaks from the luxurious position of opposition. He has never held high office and his party has never run a ministry. Unlike Labour and the Tories Reform has no track record to weight it down. It can promise the earth on immigration and be rewarded with votes from a disillusioned and angry electorate, even if its plans do not stack up. Its rivals had better come up with something radical of their own, or face the consequences.”
Readers of this column may recall that, although I am a left leaning commentator who sometimes appears as an opposing voice on Farage’s GB News show, I predicted Reform’s spectacular May local election surge months ahead and raised the ‘distinct possibility’ of a Farage premiership. That now looks more distinct ‘probability’ but hopefully not yet a certainty in these turbulent, anything can happen times.
Trump the Achilles heel?
Indeed Farage’s friendship with Donald Trump and his passion for aping his policies and rhetoric could yet prove the Achilles heel in his quest for the keys to No 10 through making ‘migration, migration, migration’ the dominant theme when the general election arrives. Such is the deep hostility level to the US president in UK opinion polls. It’s a risk factor I know troubles some of Reform’s own strategists as I’ve referenced in previous columns and a recent book I co-authored on the rise of Populism in the UK.
But the pertinence of the closing lines of that Times leader also hit me at a weekend barbecue party gathering of old friends, most of whom I’d always known as coming from Labour or One Nation Tory dispositions. It was sobering to discover that at least half of them had either already decided, or were at least seriously considering, lending Reform their votes at the next election. Why? The answers varied between the migration issue or because they were simply so disillusioned with politics and politicians generally and viewed Farage as a “smooth and charismatic performer with a difference who couldn’t be any worse as PM”.
Perish the thought, I argued, in the hope it didn’t fall on irreversibly deaf ears.
Stop press – 29 August.
Gamechanger or pyrrhic victory? That’s the question now facing the government after the Court of Appeal on Friday afternoon dramatically overturned the ‘seriously flawed’ decision by a High Court judge to grant Epping Council a temporary injunction against the Bell Hotel being used as an asylum seekers hostel.
Another possible relief for the government is that dozens of other councils , including Labour ones planning similar legal actions may be dissuaded from doing so for the time being.
It was certainly the right decision in law but highly likely to escalate protests, sometimes disorderly and violent, in Epping and around the country.
Almost inevitably, too, it guarantees the Starmer government’s poll ratings will take another dive downwards.
For the prime minister and home secretary Yvette Cooper, the consolation is that that it gives them some breathing space as they struggle to find alternative strategies over the migration hotel crisis threatening their government’s prospects of long-term survival.
A full trial of the Epping case – with its nationwide implications – is now scheduled for October. But in the meantime, protests will increase with both Reform UK and the Tory leaderships loudly capitalising on public anger, strongly supported by right wing newspapers. Rumours are already emerging that wealthy backers of Nigel Farage and his Reform party are lining up to help sponsor Epping Council taking the case right up to the Supreme Court if necessary.
Within hours of the appeal court ruling, the world's richest man intervened to turn up the temperatures with Elon Musk accusing the Starmer government via a post on his X platform of “committing treason against the British people”.
