There is no situation where an intervention by Nigel Farage won’t make things worse. He has, after all, made a career out of detecting, exploiting and exacerbating people’s grievances and fears, a grim cycle that has delivered electoral success. The man is gifted in his insidious trade, if nothing else.
Nowhere is this strategy more dangerously deployed than in issues of migration, race and crime, so often shamelessly conflated by the Reform UK leader with a studied and long-experienced hand. It is done almost instinctively. Once, he even blamed being late for a “meet-the-Ukip leader” event in Wales on traffic jams on the M4 caused by immigration, rather than, say, the infamous bottleneck at Newport.
Rather more grievously, his actions in the aftermath of the horrific Southport murders a year ago did nothing to calm tempers and stop the wild social media speculation that the person responsible was a Muslim asylum seeker who’d more or less just arrived in Britain, via a small boat.
He plainly has no regrets and is approaching the disclosure of details concerning the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton in the same reckless manner. He and his Reform UK colleagues on Warwickshire County Council are demanding, as Mr Farage did last year, that the immigration status of those involved be released by the police. The justification, once again, is that there is a “cover-up” – a serious allegation made without foundation – and people are being denied the truth, presumably through some sense of misguided political correctness.
Mr Farage implies, as he did last year, that this “cover-up” – which he presumably sees as a deliberate attempt to deceive the public – only serves to create confusion and inflame feelings. In fact, of course, it is he who is creating additional tension, adding to a sense of injustice and the fear that the police are more interested in defending perpetrators than defending victims, despite the obvious truth that those accused have been caught and taken into custody by those same police, doing their duty.
It is difficult to see why the migration status of everyone arrested on a serious offence should be automatically released, as Mr Farage suggests, even when it is immediately known for sure. If the person involved is a refugee, for example, accepted for indefinite leave to remain, then that does not make them “more guilty” or their offence “more serious” simply by the fact that they may have escaped from torture or some war zone. There is a strong probability that migration status will be equated to race, which is even less relevant. The only possible valid use of immigration status in the criminal justice system is if the person is convicted. At that point, the question of deportation does arise.
The fact is that someone’s immigration status can affect the feelings of many perfectly law-abiding and worried people demonstrating outside “migrant hotels” (real or imagined) up and down the country on legitimate grounds. They are not all fascists or racists, still less pathologically violent. They are angry and fearful at what they learn from the news and the speculation on social media, and they deserve to be told the facts.
But there is just the suspicion that immigration status can, in some grotesque, emotionally-charged way, lead to violence and mob rule. It is, quite simply, wrong and criminally so, to attempt arson on a hotel with human beings inside, whatever the circumstances. It doesn’t help anyone or solve anything.
If a rapist comes from a family that can trace its English origins to Anglo-Saxon times, that should make people no more or less angry than if the criminal has only lived here for a matter of weeks and is from some country in Africa or the Middle East. Race should play no part in justice, even mob justice.
It would be refreshing, statesmanlike and a genuinely great public service if Mr Farage and those like him used their public platform to call for calm and peaceful protest, and not display so much apparent tacit support for angry, violent reactions in tense demonstrations. His warnings sound too much like self-fulfilling prophecies, as when he declared a few weeks ago: “I don't think anybody in London understands just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country.”
Given what happened last July and early August, the opposite is surely true: ministers and police chiefs are all too well aware of such a possibility. The difference is that, unlike Mr Farage, they don’t seem to be talking it up.
It would make a useful change if Mr Farage didn’t make everything into a “cover-up” and accept that, in many cases, details are withheld for sound legal reasons concerning a fair trial and the provisions of the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
The police should not have to break the law and risk upsetting a trial and letting the guilty go free simply because of the threat of a riot if they don’t, or accusations of “two-tier policing”.
What’s more, Mr Farage shouldn’t call for the resignation of chief constables, or any other officers, who are trying to keep the oaths they took to uphold the laws set down by parliament and the King’s peace. Standing up for the police, defending the independent judiciary, condemning violence and respecting human rights are, in fact, the patriotic British things to do at times such as these.
If he cares about the cohesion of communities and the rule of law as deeply as he claims, Mr Farage should do his bit to keep the peace as well.
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