If Lee Anderson’s latest “opinion piece” in the Express reads like it was written by a glitching chatbot stuck on “Furious Nigel Farage” mode, that’s because it serves the same purpose: noise over substance, narrative over truth, cruelty over complexity. Every line is designed to whip up rage, to manufacture a siege, to simulate sovereignty where none exists. The real border, after all, is not the shoreline, it’s the class line. And Anderson is firmly on the side that builds walls upwards.
The article plays its part in a now-familiar pageant: Britain under siege, 1,200 people in boats framed not as desperate survivors of war, climate catastrophe, and economic collapse, but as an “invasion force”. Note the vocabulary: invasion, emergency, red carpet, no checks, taxpayer burden. It is the language of war, not policy. And what it hides is that this border panic isn’t about numbers. It’s about narrative control in a country with no functioning social contract.
“More boats means more Reform votes.” That’s not an admission of failure. It’s a campaign strategy.
Anderson doesn’t bother with solutions, because solutions don’t serve the story. You can’t build a functioning asylum system if your party’s entire identity depends on insisting one doesn’t exist. You can’t uphold international law and scream for withdrawal from the ECHR in the same breath. You can’t moralise about “the taxpayer” while backing a party whose economic policy is a pipeline from public to private hands. But that’s not the point, is it?
The spectacle only works if the targets remain faceless, voiceless, reduced to dots on a map or statistics on a graph. No mention of the children among those 1,200. No accounting for Britain’s role in the global crises these people are fleeing. No room for the awkward fact that Britain is not “full” but its politics are hollow.
And then there’s the cynical invocation of “lefty lawyers” and “foreign courts”, the classic scapegoats of this pantomime nationalism. It’s a refrain with a long history: blame Strasbourg, blame the bar, blame everyone except the billionaires who own the land, the homes, the press. Never admit that the real crisis is a housing system rigged for landlords, a labour market that thrives on precarity, and a welfare state so gutted it cannot cope with anyone, let alone newcomers.
When Anderson says “we’re full”, what he means is: we’re full of hate, full of fear, full of the poison that keeps the working class divided.
Reform UK exists to channel economic despair into xenophobic resentment. It’s a bait and switch. Offer no material solution to the real crises (housing, wages, crumbling infrastructure), but promise someone to blame. Migrants in boats. Judges in robes. Lawyers in court. All while the real architects of misery. The asset-strippers, the hedge funds, the deregulators. Sail on unbothered.
Starmer is no saviour in this. His triangulation. Soft xenophobia dressed as seriousness. Only legitimises the ground Farage and Anderson thrive on. But Anderson’s fury is not a response to Starmer’s weakness; it’s the stagecraft of a party that knows it cannot govern, only polarise.
Anderson doesn’t want a functioning border policy. He wants a permanent culture war, fought with flags and barbed wire, against phantoms.
This is not a policy debate. It’s a moral collapse. The Faragist right doesn’t want “control” of the border. It wants a theatre in which to perform the fantasy that Britain is under siege, and only it can save it. Never mind that this fantasy kills. In the Channel. In detention centres. In the slow erosion of any notion of asylum as a human right.
Anderson’s article ends with a call to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights. That’s the real plan. Not just to close the borders, but to end rights themselves. Because they get in the way of power. Britain is not “too soft”. It is being hardened, deliberately, into a place where cruelty is the point, and empathy is a threat.
The migrants will keep coming—because the world is burning. The question is not how many, but how we respond. With solidarity? Or with another column like this one, clicking its way to hell.
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