https://arab.news/cdz7n
What to make of a British political leader who pledges to deport 600,000 immigrants in his first term? That is 120,000 people a year. This would even include doing a deal with the Taliban, a movement the UK was fighting against for so many years, to facilitate deportations to Afghanistan.
This is the jaw-dropping, headline-grabbing proposition that far-right leader of the Reform UK party, Nigel Farage, made in a speech last week. He claims this would only cost £10 billion ($13.5 billion). Other estimates veer closer to the £50 billion mark. Farage typically could not explain how this would be funded.
Not long ago, such a statement from such a person would have been heralded as loony fringe political idiocy. Not so in 2025. Farage’s party now heads the polls by as much as 10 percent and it has momentum. Farage’s populist antics are cutting through and he is successfully whipping up every anti-immigrant emotion possible. His other tactic is to warn of the very violence that he has been stirring up. “We are not far away from major civil disorder. It is an invasion, as these young men illegally break into our country,” he said last week.
The racist part is the fixation on attacking every nonwhite person coming to the UK as a vile criminal and threat to the British way of life. In the past, this would not have worked.
