Farage, flags and Connolly: How the Right turned on the State

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast. The mood in the country around this issue is a mix between total despair and rising anger. And I would say this, that without action, without somehow the contract between the government and the people being renewed without some trust coming back, then I fear deeply that that anger will grow. In fact, I think there is now, as a result of this, a genuine threat to public order. And that is the very last thing that we want. That is Nigel Farage launching Operation restoring justice, reforms, big campaign against illegal immigration that he hopes will propel him from a party with four members of parliament to becoming a majority and Nigel Farage as prime minister.

1:09Farage wants to ape his great hero Donald Trump in enacting a mass deportation programme across the UK. But is any of it realistic? And with Farage warning about civil disorder, is it not his language, his rhetoric, his focus on this issue, which promises to create the very disorder he's warning against? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:38The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And this is a speech that reform have been promising for much of the summer. It was trailed in the papers at the weekend. Farage and Reform once again, showing they are very adroit, very adept at being able to control the media conversation, particularly when the government itself, for reasons much to our amusement, I think, John, have decided to basically be quiet for about pretty much everything this summer. But yeah, Farage made this big speech flanked by his chairman, Zia Yusuf, in Oxford this morning. And it was meaty, I think it's fair to say. Here are some of the things that he's promised as part of his deportation plan.

2:15He wants to deport over half a million people, 600 ,000 people. In order to do that, he's saying he will quit all foreign treaties used to prevent deportations by lawyers. That would include our membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. It would be the disapplication, at the very least, of the UN Convention on Torture and Treaty on Torture. Likewise, the disapplication, if not the outright removal of the Human Rights Act within UK law. He said that anyone who arrives illegally will be entirely ineligible to claim asylum. He said that those who do arrive will be detained in camps, including women and children who enter the country illegally.

2:51He said the RAF Voyager is on standby. Entirely clear for what, but it's going to be on standby. Sweeping detention power to the Home Secretary, pledges, has promised a returns agreement with Albania, although we already have one, and will launch threats to countries who refuse return treaties with the UK, including cuts in foreign aid and maybe economic sanctions So countries like Eritrea, Afghanistan and so on. And he's rejected concerns about what happens to asylum seekers after deportation, like if they're going to get tortured or killed or whatever, because he says we've got bigger problems in our own country.

3:25And we have to see off the threat of civil unrest, which he's been predicting all summer. Yes, that threat of civil unrest is the really interesting bit for me. In fact, I think there is now as a result of this, a genuine threat to public order. and that is the very last thing we want and you think is it actually the last thing you want or is it a fantastic recruiting sergeant for reform if there is some unrest i mean you look at the last summer riots and reform rose fantastically off the back of that you know summer riots over again it was over immigration and asylum seekers and all the rest and you know the spark may have been the southport murders but it morphed into something very different and you can see how Nigel Farage is very cleverly and as you say adroitly playing this.

4:13I watched the speech this morning. The backdrop, it felt prime ministerial. It felt like he had the full panoply. You know, there were autocue. There was a big audience in a big kind of old aircraft hangar. It could have been a Tory launch. It could have been a Labour launch. This was reform doing big style politics. and even if you start unpicking and looking into the detail of well yeah but if we do that what happens to the good friday agreement and if we do that well how are you going to get afghan asylum seekers back to afghanistan or wherever it happens to be the general impression given is that i've got a plan conventional politics has failed come to me because i'm the only one who will get this done.

5:02We should maybe separate it because we can talk about the politics. As I agree with you, the politics is clearly on his side. Let's just talk about, though, some of the things he said and some of his ideas, because I think it is important because he's coming along and saying that this is novel and this is comprehensive. And in fact, he guaranteed he's the latest in a long line of politicians now who've said, if we do my plan, this problem will go away. So let's just take a little bit of it in turn. First of all, as you say, John, he says, I think there's a growing threat to our public order and that's the last thing we want.

5:31Well, is it? Because maybe not Farage directly, although he has a bit, but the wider online right all summer has basically been predicting that this country is about to take to the streets, is about to go out and is about to end up in profound civil disorder because of this issue. I'm not saying that there isn't profound feeling in this country about this issue. I know that there is. but I will just note that even this weekend again when there were predictions of mass disorder actually in most cases it's a bit of a damp squib in most cases people just went about and were enjoying their bank holiday weekend and there was not civil disorder and I have to say that I think politicians have to be very very careful about predicting and using the threat of civil disorder or the prospect of civil disorder in order to say we must do this policy I'm sorry we live in a parliamentary democracy here.

6:25We don't live under the force of vigilante justice. We don't live under the threat of the mob. That's not how we do politics in this country. Again, I'm not seeking to undermine the strength of feeling that's out there. There is a very strong strength of feeling out there for reasons that I understand. But I also think that most British people, most reasonable British people are not going to be taken to the streets and trying to venting their anger in that way. They may do so at the ballot box and reform is clearly riding a bit of a wave at the moment. But I am very, very uncomfortable about senior political figures saying, if we don't do this, we're going to have violence on the streets.

7:01Imagine if a left wing force did that. It would rightly be decried and slammed as basically the fomentation of a kind of street justice and street politics and the violence of the streets. We can't be going in that direction. No, I think that's so true. I remember when I first started out in journalism and you were given a test and, you know, police are predicting disorder or whatever. You know, politicians say there will be disorder this weekend when protesters come together. And you think, no, if there is disorder, we'll report it. But let's not predict and let's not make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that there is going to be violence on the streets.

7:35And actually this summer, you know, you go back to this time last year when you had Elon Musk kind of weighing in and he's kind of weighed in slightly today, you know, weighing in and saying civil war is coming to Britain. It's a certainty. Well, it hasn't. And it probably isn't. And for, you know, for the hundred or so people who are outside whichever hotel, housing, asylum seekers. Yeah, there is probably another 500 or a thousand who feel very strongly about it, who aren't there. But there are millions of people who are going about their daily lives who are not part of this protest movement.

8:11There is absolutely rightly a concern that, you know, if you are a nation, you have to control who comes into your country. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. It's what is the right thing to do. And the right thing to do is bloody complicated. If there were an easy answer to this, don't you think the Tories would have found it? Don't you think Keir Starmer would have found it? And just to hold up. Right. We've got this idea. We're just going to expel them all. I mean, for Donald Trump, it is slightly easier because everyone is coming across the southern border from Mexico. And you can just say, right, well, you're going back to Mexico or you're going back to a supermax prison in El Salvador.

8:49Slightly easier than for us. What are we going to do practically? Yeah, indeed. And something that Farage was talking about is, you know, maximising our economic and diplomatic muscle. and again citing the Trump example and we should say I mean Trump has had a lot of success in dealing with the situation on the southern border. He's closed most of the asylum programs. He's doing it at an extraordinary social cost you could argue you know being in the United States recently we've both been you know you see huge protests against ICE, massive social division the threat of ICE going into communities and deporting in some cases American citizens or spouses of American citizens or fathers or mothers of American citizens.

9:27So you know it's been extremely heavy handed and in many cases He's unconstitutional, but there is no doubt that he's had some success. Very hard, much harder to replicate that in our case for all sorts of different reasons we can discuss, not least because something Trump can do because he's the president of the United States is exert substantial political and economic pressure on Mexico. We do not enjoy that same political and economic leverage with France. France and Britain are roughly similar sized economies with similar sized similar sized powers within Europe. We can't threaten sanctions on France.

9:57None of this would work. Right. It's not replicable. And the geography, of course, is completely different. And then there's the legal framework. I mean, Farage is right that our legal framework has made it more difficult for the Home Office than, say, ICE or the United States government to do what it wants. But then there are sometimes good reasons for that, right? For a start, this question, which I have not heard anyone provide a satisfactory answer to, and you've already alluded to it, John, is like, what are we going to do about the Good Friday Agreement? The fact is, the ECHR is written in to the Good Friday Agreement.

10:28It would require a revision, which Farage says he's going to do. He says that reform government will be able to achieve a revision, opening up the Good Friday Agreement with the Republic, right? Well, good luck with that. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. And not only good luck with that, but is that what we want? Do we want, after a period of dicey period in relations, Anglo-Irish relations, and indeed in terms of the peace process, do we want to be reopening the Good Friday Agreement? Likewise, you and I have discussed, I think that it is time, and I think there is general recognition, and I think that the window has moved on this.

10:59I think there is more and more recognition across Europe that we might need to look at the post-Second World War refugee architecture, the legal architecture. Yeah, we might need to look at the ECHR, but there's a difference between that and just saying, right, we're going to disapply it. We're going to remove it from UK law. We're going to leave it unilaterally. These are difficult things. Are we really, for example, going to be in a situation where we are going to send people to countries where we know they might be killed? Are we going to send children back? And Faraj himself said, actually, we're not too sure what we're going to do about kids.

11:30What are we going to do? He says that we're going to exert diplomatic or economic leverage on Afghanistan. What economic or diplomatic leverage on Afghanistan? Are we going to pay money to the Taliban government? Yes. For them to take... OK, we're going to give money to the Taliban, which we think is a terrorist organisation. Is that seriously what we're going to do? OK, it's a decision, but let's have that discussion because it is very, very, the actual trade offs on it are substantial. Yeah. And what can we threaten the Taliban with? I mean, sanctions on on what? We're doing a lot of trade, obviously, with the Afghans at the moment.

12:04Exactly. But that's not what Nigel Farage is after. Nigel Farage is about doing really, really well at the next election. And whether his policies will work or not is almost incidental to his central aim of to keep riding this political wave. and I have to say he is riding this wave brilliantly. There is genuine concern out there. I think that people are right to be concerned about illegal immigration and a lot of what he says in terms of the frustrations felt by the British people, even if he overcooks it slightly and say, you know, there could be civil disorder. I think he's right. I think there are an awful lot of people who think this is just monstrous that all these small boats are arriving and people, you know, probably a lot of them, you know, not genuine asylum seekers, probably kind of economic migrants who are looking for work And I'm hoping, you know, there are so many other things as well that could be done in terms of identity cards and all sorts of things that could be done.

12:56But at the moment, you know, let's turn this back on the Labour government. I don't see the radical thinking coming. You know, I saw in the Times. They've said nothing all summer. The Times today. They've allowed them to occupy this. They may have identified a hundred asylum seekers who arrived on small boats to go back to France. You think, OK, it's a start, but it's not very much, is it, when you're talking about thousands of people arriving. And so I just think that at the moment, the government doesn't seem to be either as paralysed and can't find a good policy solution that's workable and practical, or it's just not thinking about it.

13:35And if it's not thinking about it, it really bloody ought to be. I think they're thinking about it, but I think that what is practical and what is easy to achieve in the short term is there is a massive gulf between that and where Farage is and where that gulf is where all the politics is. And I think clearly, again, I think probably, again, actually in policy terms, in policy terms, genuinely, there is not going to be, there wouldn't be, if you put reform and Farage in there tomorrow, I predict that in policy terms, natural deportations and changing the flow, certainly in the short term, there wouldn't be a great deal of difference.

14:11but there would be a great deal of difference on the politics. What would Farage be doing now if he were prime minister? He'd be opening up some camp somewhere and inviting all the television cameras in and there'd be bunk beds and everything and it'd look sparse and it'd be austere and he'd be like, well, I'm sorry, this is what you get. If you come, this is what you get. And all this and he'd throw his hands up in that pantomime day and way that he does. You know, and he'd do that and he'd probably be briefing the papers. He's going to open a camp on say, you know, Ascension Island or whatever it's going to be and he'd go to Ascension Island and it's, you know, and how much of this kind of translated would kind of be actually relatively immaterial, but it would dominate the politics, whereas the government is doing nothing of that.

14:47It's earnestly trying to solve the problem. But unfortunately, and I don't like this, you and I might not like it, but it is true, earnestness doesn't get you very much in today's media environment. It was nonetheless interesting that, I mean, in terms of the sort of how the government are responding to it rhetorically, at Downing Street today, the lobby briefing, which has started again, they are actually basically refusing to demur or dissent from anything much that Farage has said. So Starmer, Prime Minister's spokesperson, saying that Starmer is open to striking returns deals with Afghanistan and Eritrea.

15:18We're not taking anything off the table. Starmer won't criticise Farage's rhetoric and claims that Britain is facing an invasion by migrants. They just say we recognise the strength of feeling. They do rule out leaving the ECHR because, as we've discussed, it underpins the Good Friday agreement. So, generally speaking, what Starmer is doing is saying Farage is right. The question then is, well, if you're saying Farage is right, why don't you just do what Farage is saying and suggesting? And that's very difficult politics. It's really difficult politics. I get the impression that the real split in the Labour Party right now is between those who think that the main threat to them staying in power is Farage and the right, and you've got to be moving your politics in a direction of populist, anti-immigrant direction, and those who think that actually what the Labour Party is really its existence is threatened by the Liberal Democrats, by the Green Party, by Corbyn's party that still to properly emerge and that from the left is where your greatest challenge is and to start going in the direction of Farageista politics is lunacy and I get the sense that there's a slight paralysis in which way the government ought to go so it borrows a bit from Farage but then doesn't adopt the policies and doesn't actually then either condemn the Farage politics either or just kind of slightly frozen in the headlights by what is coming.

16:44Yeah, the problem is that Farage will always be able to outflank you. Yes. Farage knows that Starmer is never going to say we're going to should pull out the ECHR, partly because if Keir Starmer believes in anything, it is in the structures of international law, international treaties, international obligations. That is at the centre of his type of kind of cosmopolitan politics so he's never going to do it but also because actually just in government terms it's just deeply impractical well in a moment we'll be back on a related subject and that is the flying of the flag and a listener's question about what the labour government's response should be

17:34Right, we're not doing a Q &A again. We did that on Friday. But we have had a question which I think really sort of gets to the heart of one of the other big questions which we're thinking about at the moment. Hi, news agents. Given the enactment of Operation Raise the Colours in mine and Lewis's birthplace, Red Null, Birmingham, and it's slow spread across the nation, how would the news agents suggest Labour tackle the issue, take them down and most likely take some heavy political flack, Leave them up. Not giving in to the bait offered by the groups putting them up. Well, Jay should just, of course, consider himself lucky that you haven't told him to f*** off, which is the last thing that you did to the last question that we were asked.

18:10There were very particular circumstances. Yeah. It's an interesting strategy, isn't it? Telling your own listeners to f*** off. But hey, look, it seems to be working for us. I did go home on the tube that day and think... Quite faragiste, actually. Was that a smart thing to have done? Anyway, to the question. Funnily enough, I was in Norfolk this weekend and was driving up the... You and Rupert Lowe, making sure that the dinghies didn't come over that way. Exactly, I was there. And there were an awful lot of bridges where the flag of St George was hanging, which you wouldn't normally see. Did I find it offensive?

18:43No, I didn't find it. Fine. If people want to fly the flag, marvellous. If you travel in America, you'll see the stars and stripes absolutely bloody everywhere. Yeah, I think in terms of the political strategy to how to handle it, I think that Downing Street basically got it right today, where they said Starmer supports people putting up flags but won't comment directly on people hanging them from the lampposts. The PM supports people pulling up flags to show pride and have value and heritage. Look, we know, we know why the groups who are behind at least some of this stuff, we know why they're doing it, right?

19:14They're doing it to try and get a reaction. In some cases, they're doing it to try and intimidate. Now, obviously, objectively speaking, there should be nothing intimidating about St. George's flag, the England flag. It should be the flag of our country. We do know, obviously, historically, that it has connotations on the far right and the EDL have used it and all of these sorts of things. So I do know that. And I'm a great believer in reclaiming both the British flag and the England flag. Other countries don't have this problem whatsoever or have this connotation and we should seize it back. But I do understand why in certain places, because of that historical connotation and because of that motivation, some of these people are not doing it because they're motivated by patriotism.

19:50They want to intimidate. They want to send a message. They want to send a message of kind of cultural kind of aggression and all that sort of stuff. I can understand why some people might find it difficult or intimidating or a bit worrying or a sign of something. That said, we shouldn't allow them to do it. They want to put the flag up. Fine. And we say that is a flag of England. That is a flag of Britain. That's a flag of Shakespeare. That's the flag of democratic values. That's a flag of liberalism. It's a flag of tolerance. And we welcome it. And I think that's the only way to deal with it, because if you don't deal with it that way, then what you do is you allow these malign forces to own that flag a flag that most people because they don't think about you know they're not sitting there and thinking about some of those connotations they just see and think that's the flag of my country and if they hear left-wing forces or progressive forces the government being a bit sniffy about it yeah then they think oh right why don't they like our flag and by the way if the government do that and we all just go yeah put it up they'll stop putting it up or at least those people will stop putting it up because it will have lost all element of being subversive i think there has been a degree to which the flag has been reclaimed you think of when it's the world cup and england are playing in the world club and the flag of saint george is bloody everywhere and you know and outside my house too and fantastic and if people want to hang a flag from gantries and lampposts i mean i kind of saw that councils are being are ordering taking them down because of the danger of the flags and i'm thinking oh be careful how you're doing this because honestly you know if it looks like there are councils who are against the flag being flown.

21:15I can see the point of, you know, you don't want people clambering up lampposts, falling off them and ending up in hospital. So there is a safety issue about it. But, you know, broadly speaking, if people want to fly the flag, fantastic. This is our country. We're proud to have our flag. We're proud to have the Union flag. We're proud to have the flag of St George. I think if anyone on the left starts getting their knickers in a twist about it, they're making a huge mistake and doing the far right's work. And those who do want it to be seen as a sort of almost an intimidatory thing saying we're British, we're English, we're white, this is our country, which is the undertone of why some people are doing this.

21:53I mean Orwell wrote about this. I mean this is back in the 40s right. He's saying England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it's always felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution from horse racing to suet puddings. It's a strange fact, but it's unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poor box. And, like, obviously Orwell is exaggerating a little bit for effect, but it's amazing how true that can still ring and how unique that is.

22:27You wouldn't get that in France among French intellectuals or certainly the United States or other countries like that. It's something unique to England. You'd never get the French talking about suet puddings. No, that is true. God love them. Right, we'll be back in a second. We're going to be talking about something else that has preoccupied much of the press over the course of the weekend, and that is the strange fate of Lucy Connolly and whether or not she really is a political prisoner. Stay with us.

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23:35Have you been Keir Starmer's political prisoner? Absolutely. And me and several other people, like I said, it's important to remember that it wasn't just me. He needs to practice what he preaches. I think, you know, he's a human rights lawyer. So maybe he needs to quite, you know, look back at what people's human rights are, what freedom of speech means and what the laws are in this country. So that was Lucy Connolly speaking to Alison Pearson from the Daily Telegraph, who is a very like mind on this issue, that Lucy Connolly was a political prisoner and she is now being almost sort of deified as this tortured soul.

24:15Joan of Arc of that time. Yeah, exactly. That there is something that was terribly wrong and that she was a victim of the lack of free speech in this country for what she posted when the riots took place last summer. And it's just worth reminding herself what she did say, which was about burning down the hotels where asylum seekers were being held. And that was seen as the wrong side of the line by the courts. And she was imprisoned for it. Yeah, she, during those riots, she tweeted, and she's a wife of an ex-conservative councillor. She tweeted, mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards.

24:55If that makes me racist, so be it. That was viewed over 300 ,000 times before being deleted. Then she was sentenced to 31 months in prison at Birmingham Crown Court for incitement to violence. She served about 40 % of that, 10 months. She was released on the 21st of August, so five days or so ago. And this became a kind of core celebre on the online right. You know, this idea that she was a political prisoner, that she was being unfairly treated, that there was two tier justice and all that sort of stuff. I mean, I interviewed Tory frontbencher Matt Vickers on Sunday on RBC about this. And he he agreed with this idea that she was a political prisoner, that she'd been treated unfairly, that there had been an unfair process.

25:35Do you think that Lucy Connolly was a political prisoner? I think what we saw when all those, well, Keir Starmer went out there and branded people like me and many other people across the country far right if you were concerned about illegal immigration. No, but she was a bit different, wasn't she? She's been made an example of. So this is a mother, a childminder, who tweeted something in haste that she shouldn't have tweeted, and then she deleted it. I don't know how many Twitter followers she had at the time, but I don't imagine it was huge. Meanwhile, we've got an elected Labour councillor, an elected Labour councillor, a community leader, who isn't being sent to prison for saying that people's throats should be...

26:10So do you think she was a political prisoner? I think she was, yeah. I think she was made an example of in a way that shouldn't have happened. She pleaded, the process is wrong, we need to fix the process. So are these outcomes to occur? The idea that she was a political prisoner was on, not just on some sort of fringe groups online, you know, it was on the front page of the Daily Telegraph this weekend, it was on the front page of the Sun. and I think this shows again the sort of deep radicalisation of much of what was once mainstream centre-right thought in this country look you can have an argument you can have a debate about whether or not Connolly's sentence was too harsh that she shouldn't have got 31 months in the end she obviously served 10 months but this idea that she was A.