Farage Hits Back at Attempts to Stifle Immigration Debate: Consequences of Govt Decisions ‘Are Huge’

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - SEPTEMBER 26: Nigel Farage addresses media inside the media centre at
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Oliver JJ Lane

Nigel Farage was particularly cited as an impediment to Britain preparing for a “new era of high immigration” in a think tank report, prompting the Brexiteer to tell Breitbart that if Britons want to discuss migration policy, they must be allowed to do so.

Monday’s publication of the influential Social Market Foundation think-tank’s paper Routes to Resolution, Finding the Centre Ground in Britain’s Immigration Debates paper floated several radical policies for the United Kingdom to adopt including pre-training future migrants in their home nations before importing them to the UK to take jobs. While a wide group of migration-critical voices were cited in the report itself, only one individual weighed heavily enough on the minds of the report authors to feature both in the paper and the covering press release: Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage.

Expressing concern over the possibility of “political disruption” on the road to achieving the aims of the paper, engineering public approval of mass migration and seeing that the country is ready to welcome high numbers of arrivals for years to come, paper lead Jonathan Thomas of the SMF wrote: “The political consensus favouring economic arguments for liberal migration policy is extremely fragile. That consensus also creates an opportunity for political disruptors, an opportunity seized by Nigel Farage and UKIP in the early 2010s. To avoid that risk, there must be compromise on all sides to reach a sustainable centre-ground position on migration.”

Speaking to Breitbart News, Mr Farage rankled at the suggestion he was a mere disruptor, insisting the British people had a right to be heard on matters important to them without being swept aside by think tankers. He said: “This is yet another attempt to use my name to demonise any debate on legal and illegal immigration. The consequences of our population change on the lives of ordinary people are huge — yet we are not supposed to discuss it. Well, we will!”.

The SMF paper comes after a record year of immigration for the United Kingdom, with 1.1 million arrivals leaving net immigration levels of over half a million. While illegal immigration to the United Kingdom is a long-term issue for the UK border, the advent of clandestine boat migration has brought the problem to the public eye in a way it never has been before. While the boats are there for all to see beating down on England’s southern coast, the older methods like stowaways onboard trucks crossing into the UK were only ever on show when — tragically, and murderously — it went wrong.

Migration is also firmly in the public eye because electors may reasonably feel like they had voted for border control at several successive elections, only to find the border-control promising parties in power taking no effective action for many years. Parties and causes speaking the language of border control came first in national elections in 2009, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and twice in 2019, yet immigration is now higher than ever.

Whether this is a mixture of dishonesty and incompetence, or simply dishonesty, will no doubt become clear in time. But that outright dishonesty has been in play to some extent is beyond doubt: the Conservatives stood for elections for many years promising real, measurable reduction in overall migration numbers but one of the most powerful men in the Cameron era later admitted they had no intention whatsoever to keep those promises in the first place.

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