Reform’s migration plans are a massive con, says Fleet Street Fox. Here’s the secret Nigel Farage isn’t telling you
Journalism isn’t all red carpet interviews, international travel, and riding around in tanks. Sometimes, it’s sitting listening to the utter drivel of charlatans and trying to work out what the scam is.
Let us pray, then, for the benighted scribblers who have spent yet another Monday morning listening to Nigel Farage saying stuff that raises lots of questions, and then responding to those questions by refusing to answer them. If you want to know how that feels in the room, then find some jelly and try to attach it to the wall with six inch nails and a 3-day old banana.
With a Reform press conference at the start of almost every week this summer, the number of times journalistic forehead has met nail, wall or pen is so high that those poor devils have become walking colanders, capable of retaining softened vegetable matter and little else. Even those one or two who retain their wits find any attempt to fact-check the gravelly grifter fails to land, caught in the crosswinds of constant crap.
Today’s attempt to seize control of the political agenda before Keir Starmer’s finished his Wordle was a huge announcement about ending Indefinite Leave to Remain. It’s an immigration status that seems pleasingly bonkers to Farage and his cronies – the right to live and work in a country, for someone with no legal right of abode. How insane! How damaging! What a licence for ne’er do wells! Except the only problem is what no journalist and certainly no-one called Nigel mentioned: it only exists because of Brexit.
The policy announced today predicts that, unless something is done, 800,000 migrants who arrived since 2021 will all qualify for welfare and benefits once they have been here 5 years. Farage and his seriously-gaslit sidekick Zia Yusuf reckon ending it would save £235bn over a lifetime, but they could have said it would save World Cup penalties and it would make about as much sense.
Having announced these astonishing figures, the pair complained there were no figures to back it up. “Ask the government, we’ve tried!” they whined, while zero hacks fought through their befuddlement to ask why they had a policy to tackle something that lacks objective proof of its existence.
Presumably, the answer lies on the back of a magic beer mat, because every question that did seek to delineate the border between sanity and Reform UK got the same response. “The main objective of today’s press conference is to wake everybody up to the Boriswave”, said Captain Binjuice, again and again. He wants the press, but not the conferring.
It’s true the blond buffoon created a wave of migration. Reform says the total since 2021 is 3.8m people, 2m of whom are “on the route” to ILR. Not only is that number not the same as 800,000, but the Office for National Statistics says the total is nearer 2.5m. At this point, even a reporter whose maths stretches only so far as necessary for filing expenses would know something was off, and a few pointed it out. “Let’s get back to the main objective of this press conference!” harrumped the snake oil salesman. “It’s the Boriswave!” It’s a bold move to blame Nadine Dorries’ imaginary boyfriend for the nation’s problems not 5 minutes after she signed up, but let’s hope she feels forgiving.
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There’s a reason every splatistic quoted is “from 2021”, because that was the year Britain finally did what Farage had campaigned to do for 30 years, and left the EU. Having done so, it lost the EU’s legal framework for a path to citizenship for foreign nationals who had lawfully entered a member state, and instead invented ILR which is pretty much the same.
Yusuf claimed that, pre-2021, adults granted long-term visas had an average of 0.7 dependents each, and now it’s 1.2. “They’re all bringing their kids over!” says the horrified man on the Clapham omnibus, without anyone mentioning that pre-Brexit our migrants were mostly from Europe, which meant they were generally youthful and childless. Those with families were a commutable distance away, as Farage’s own wives, children and mistresses could all testify. Post-Brexit, migrants must come from further afield, and a mum from Zimbabwe finds it much harder to pop home at weekends. Of course there’s more dependents, because if you can’t hire a Pole to do a job you can bet your bedpan there won’t be a Brit to replace them.
According to Dim and Even Dimmer, Reform would still have a limited number of work visas, but would compel British firms to recruit British people, at higher wages, to do the jobs migrants have had. And there’d be a levy on businesses to pay for the upskilling needed to show a Reform voter how to harvest turnips without a flag. Which is all roughly the same as promising to make food prices jump 1000% overnight, while bankrupting every care home so that serfs have to dig potatoes while looking after relatives with dementia and disability.
On the upside, the economy wouldn’t be stagnant any more. It’d be as exciting and full of life as a jumbo jet plummeting nose-first towards Dungeness nuclear power station, and if nothing else we could leave the unrelenting grind of the last decade behind and experience adrenaline, thrills, and radiant energy. For 30 seconds or so, anyway.
Refom’s doom-ridden double act admit their approach would face “legal challenges”, but they weren’t asked if they feared being sectioned. Their solution to being blocked by judges is to “cut out the Human Rights Act” and recourse to Strasbourg, where courts might decide this was a dangerously-large pile of horse manure.
But here’s the really deadly thing about Farage and his plans. He will shred a massive bill of YOUR rights, guaranteeing you everything from freedom of speech to a day off at the weekend, just so he can take away ONE right from someone else. He won’t tell you he’s doing it, and he won’t tell you that such rules are what all our trade deals rely upon, nor that the European Convention of Human Rights can be amended – and has been, several times – without any need to tear up every. right hard-won over centuries that makes your life bearable.
But then, he has form. He didn’t tell you Brexit would cause more immigration. He didn’t say it would lead to browner immigration, or more dependents, or less control. He didn’t tell you it would make you poorer, increase prices, or slow down growth. Strangely, very few journalists did, either. But look around you, and tell me that is not what happened. Blame Boris, the wrong type of Brexit, whatever lie you’ve just been told and which you don’t have the wit or help to check. But hear this: he sold you a rainbow last time, and all you got was a sack of sick. The only way out of this is a return to European freedom of movement – and being able to spot a con. Otherwise, it’ll be insanity, damage, and ne’er do wells all the way.