Farage: We Are Fast Becoming a Police State

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND - JANUARY 11: Police confront Members of The Scotland Against Lockdown
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has criticised Health Secretary Matt Hancock for being “drunk on his own power” after introducing a law making it a criminal offence to lie about having travelled from a coronavirus ‘red list’ nation, which could result in ten years in prison.

The health secretary announced the new measures on Tuesday, putting the potential sentence on a par with prison terms handed out for serious crimes such as poisoning or making threats to kill.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage reacted to the remarkable development in Britain’s coronavirus strategy, saying: “The Coronavirus Act allows ministers to take the most draconian decisions without due process or a vote in parliament. It is a threat to civil liberties.”

Mr Farage reminded Britons during a YouTube broadcast on Wednesday that he had warned the government was “taking far too much power” and eroding Britons’ liberties for several months, but that “all of this went a step too far” following Hancock’s “diktat”, saying the health minister had become “completely drunk on his own power”.

“We are fast becoming a police state,” Mr Farage later remarked.

Former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption had also warned that government ministers’ ability to force through new measures and police expanded powers to enforce it made Britain increasingly look like a “police state”.

Farage further criticised the government’s hypocritical approach to border control, where that while last year “they couldn’t care less about our borders” and allowed 18 million people to arrived unchecked in the three months up to the first lockdown, Britons are now ordered to quarantine in hotels for ten days if they have come from any of the dozens of “red list” nations at a cost of £1,750 per person for accommodation, travel, and testing.

He also remarked on the complete lack of parity in treatment between legal arrivals — threatened with costly hotel confinement or arrest — and illegal aliens who continue to arrive across the English Channel to be put up at taxpayers’ expense.

“There is one exception to all of this: if you come into the UK illegally by dinghy across the English Channel on the next calm day, the fact that you’ve got no documentation, the fact you’ve not had a PCR coronavirus test in the previous three days, none of that will matter. You will still get put into a hotel. The difference is: nobody will charge you £1,700 for the privilege.

“If ever there was a moment to start dealing with illegal immigration, surely it’s now. If we’re going to get tough with our borders, is this not the moment to say, ‘We will not accept people coming criminally into the United Kingdom and posing a massive coronavirus risk’?” he said.

The Reform UK leader also said that while he could understand the government providing documentary proof of vaccination so that Britons could use it to enter foreign countries demanding it, “what I don’t want, is for us to finish up with people in the street being stopped asked to produce their papers to prove they’ve been vaccinated. With this government as out of control as it is as we’ve seen in the last 24 hours, I think any of these things are possible.”

“This is about our liberties. This is about our freedoms. The more power central government takes, the more difficult it is to get those freedoms back,” he warned.

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