Dear John,
Nigel Farage once railed against “Project Fear” – yet he’s running one of his own. In a recent press conference – and of course an op-ed in the Mail – he insisted that rising crime has Britain in a state of crisis. Farage is trying to paint a conspiratorial picture, in which nefarious elites import illegal migrants in order to create anarchy. For some reason.
Of course, the data doesn’t agree. Most crime has been falling for decades, with the exceptions of fraud (*cough*) and shoplifting. But the accuracy was never the point.
It’s a political tactic, the classic Donald Trump pairing of “law and order” and racism. It creates a feedback loop, encouraging distrust and racial hate, then feeding further off that distrust. Innocent people always get hurt along the way.
Last summer, Farage’s hyperbole and lies about a knife attack in Southport fuelled real-world violence against innocent people. Now, Farage is trying to pressure the police into publicising the immigration status of criminals (risking officers being in contempt of court), to fuel the kind of violent riots he purports to oppose.
