The Reform leader’s summer campaign is a cynical exercise that will exacerbate social tensions and fuel insecurity
D
uring last year’s general election campaign, Reform UK settled on “Britain is broken” as a slogan. This summer, intending to dominate the news agenda during the long Westminster recess, Nigel Farage has decided to ramp up the dystopian rhetoric. “Broken” has morphed into “lawless”, as Mr Farage tours the country deploying language reminiscent of the “American carnage” speech delivered by Donald Trump at his first inauguration in 2017.
Unfounded claims of a huge rise in crime have been breezily tossed out to bolster the assertion that Britain is “facing nothing short of societal collapse”. The crisis of lawlessness on the streets, wrote Mr Farage in a recent article for the Daily Mail, was being compounded by the government-sponsored arrival of “droves of unvetted men into our towns and cities”. Commenting on recent protests outside an Epping hotel accommodating asylum seekers, after a resident was charged with sexually assaulting a local teenage girl, he remarked that the country was close to “civil disobedience on a vast scale”.
According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales – which Mr Farage chooses to ignore but which is the most robust source of relevant evidence – incidents of theft, criminal damage and violence have been in long‑term decline since the 1990s. But Reform’s leader is more interested in sinister mood music than data, as he seeks to foment a feelbad factor.
