Deportations will not rebuild what capital has destroyed.
It has become commonplace, almost a reflex, to declare that Britain is broken. In his latest column for the Daily Mail, Nigel Farage seizes on that familiar refrain and sharpens it into a vision of national restoration by force: mass deportations, the abandonment of human rights law, a closing of doors both literal and symbolic. His programme is, at heart, not a solution to Britain’s decline but a performance of strength staged against the weak. If Britain is broken, it was not migrants who broke it, but the same structures of wealth and power that Farage has spent his career defending.
The Sleight of Hand
Farage frames immigration as the central cause of national collapse: the crumbling NHS, the housing shortage, failing infrastructure. Yet the disrepair of Britain’s public sphere predates the latest migrations. It is the consequence of long decades of privatisation, deregulation, and deliberate neglect. Capital abandoned communities. Successive governments stripped the state to the bone. Services that migrants helped sustain were already hollowed out by policies designed to favour profit over people.
The displacement of blame is almost too crude to require comment. Those who built the banking crisis, sold off council housing, shattered collective bargaining, and plunged local authorities into debt do not appear in Farage’s story. In their place stand migrants, held responsible for a collapse they did not cause.
“It was not migrants who closed the libraries, sold off the homes, or turned public goods into private fortunes.”
It is a trick as old as the British state itself: when the profits are taken, blame the stranger.
Deporter-in-Chief
Farage turns to Barack Obama’s record to legitimise his ambitions, citing the millions deported during Obama’s tenure. Yet the comparison reveals the bankruptcy of Farage’s vision more than its plausibility. Mass deportations in the United States did not reverse economic decline or heal social divisions; they amplified them. They provided the appearance of action, a grim arithmetic of bodies removed, but left the underlying crises untouched.
Britain’s institutions, already fragile, would not withstand the pressures of such a project. The scale of surveillance, detention, enforcement, and administrative brutality required to carry out mass deportations would transform the state into something darker than even Farage’s opponents presently imagine. Yet it is not the outcome that matters to Farage. It is the spectacle.
“Industrial-scale deportation is not a remedy for decline. It is a stage-managed confession that no remedy remains.”
Like all fascist movements, Reform UK offers not solutions but ceremonies of power, designed to assure a hollowed-out nation that someone is still in charge.
Leaving the ECHR
Farage’s call to leave the European Convention on Human Rights completes the portrait. The ECHR was not an imposition by Brussels; it was a British-led initiative, born from the wreckage of war and European fascism, intended to protect individuals against arbitrary power. Farage’s casual promise to tear it up is not a minor legal reform. It is an assault on the principle that there are limits to what a government can do to the people under its rule.
In the architecture of rights, timing matters. A system where deportations are executed first and challenged later is not a system of justice. It is the machinery of a state unmoored from law, relying instead on discretion, expediency, and spectacle.
“To restore ‘the rule of law,’ Farage proposes its destruction.”
The implications are not confined to migrants. They would erode protections for everyone: citizens and non-citizens alike. In dismantling the ECHR, Britain would not become sovereign. It would become vulnerabl. Not to migrants or strangers, but to the unrestrained violence of its own government.
The Economic Illusion
The economic argument for deportation is barely sketched in Farage’s column: a vague promise that billions would be saved once the “burden” was lifted. Yet history offers no example of a nation prospering by shrinking its labour force, destabilising key industries, and expanding its carceral apparatus.
The true costs of Farage’s project. Endless litigation, a vast expansion of detention infrastructure, disrupted supply chains, inflation driven by acute labour shortages — are invisible in his account. Nor does he acknowledge the basic reality that migration is not an aberration but a structural feature of global capitalism: a world where wealth moves freely and labour moves out of necessity.
Farage proposes to solve Britain’s crisis by amputating the limbs it still relies on.
“Deportations would not rebuild what was stolen. They would hasten the collapse.”
The Politics of Revenge
There is no programme of renewal in Farage’s politics. Only a programme of retribution. The enemy shifts as needed: migrants today, environmentalists tomorrow, trade unionists soon enough. What Reform UK offers is not the rebuilding of a nation, but the policing of its ruins.
This is the old imperial reflex turned inward. Once, Britain projected violence outward; now, in its diminished state, it prepares to inflict it on itself. Farage’s Britain would not be reborn. It would become a cautionary monument: a state at war with its own exhausted people, desperate to locate an enemy within because it cannot confront its own decline.
“Reform UK promises not the reversal of decline, but its ritual performance.”
The real causes of collapse. Extraction, inequality, deregulation. Remain untouched. They flourish amid the noise.
Broken by Capital, Not by Migrants
Britain’s brokenness is undeniable. But it was not caused by those seeking shelter. It was caused by those who stripped shelter away. It was billionaires, landlords, financial capital. Not migrants. Who took what was collective and turned it into private wealth, leaving behind a country of shuttered high streets, empty libraries, and threadbare hospitals.
The task ahead is not to punish those who arrived seeking a future. It is to dismantle the structures that turned the future itself into property, speculation, profit.
Farage offers a war against the vulnerable. Britain needs a war against decay, against the consolidation of power, against the quiet theft of the common good.
We are not broken because we opened our doors. We are broken because we opened our coffers to billionaires, landlords, and the architects of financial ruin.
No nation has ever escaped its decline by scapegoating the poor.
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