Farage isn’t offering a plan, this is performance. His “law and order” blitz isn’t costed, credible, or connected to reality. It’s the politics of punishment as spectacle: build more prisons, shout louder, deport faster, sentence longer. No thought to the broken justice system, no answers on prevention or rehabilitation. Just another culture war front for a party with no economic programme and no interest in governing.
It’s hard to take Nigel Farage seriously. Not because he isn’t dangerous (he very much is) but because, like every demagogue in decline, his project has become pure theatre. His latest “tough on crime” announcement is less a policy platform than a pantomime, complete with a familiar cast of bogeymen: knife-wielding youths, foreign criminals, the dreaded DEI officer. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a Greatest Hits of reactionary grievance, stitched together by a man who’s never let economics get in the way of a headline.
“Commit the crime, pay the price,” he says. But not if you’re the billionaire who funded him. Not if your crimes are counted in tax dodges, offshore accounts, or corrupt procurement deals. There are criminals, and then there are his kind of criminals, the kind who write the cheques.
Let’s start with the obvious: none of it is costed. Not the 30,000 police officers, not the 30,000 new prison places, not the military-to-police pipeline, not the fantasy network of international prisoner transfers. It’s policy as hallucination. Farage speaks as if he’s playing SimCity on cheat mode, where prisons spring up at the click of a mouse, budgets are bottomless, and human rights don’t apply. There’s no economic plan because there is no economic vision, just spectacle and carceral cruelty.
This is the point. The Reform project isn’t about governing. It’s about emoting. Farage doesn’t believe in practical solutions, he believes in vibes (like his mentor Trump). His political style is rooted in catharsis, not competence: the catharsis of blaming others. Of “taking back control” from foreign prisoners, lefty judges, shoplifters, anyone who can be crammed into a tabloid headline. When Farage says Reform UK will “end two-tier justice,” he doesn’t mean structural inequality. He means punishing the poor faster and harder.
Austerity + Authoritarianism = Reform
Britain already has one of the highest incarceration rates in Western Europe. Our prisons are at 99% capacity. Over 40% of officers leave within three years. The probation service is shattered. Courts are so backlogged that rape trials can take over three years to reach verdict. But Farage’s answer is simple: more punishment. More prisons. More sentences. Less mercy. Less justice.
We have seen this before, across the Atlantic. In the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans alike embraced “tough on crime” politics. Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill pumped billions into prison construction, militarised local police, and expanded mandatory minimums. The result wasn’t safety, it was a generational catastrophe. Mass incarceration devastated working-class Black communities, and the prison population exploded. Yet study after study has shown the fall in crime wasn’t driven by longer sentences or overflowing jails. It was driven by factors like demographics, reduced lead exposure1, and even car immobilisers. Meanwhile, the US now has the highest incarceration rate on Earth (over two million behind bars) yet still struggles with gun violence, community breakdown, and a political culture addicted to punishment. It didn’t work then. It won’t work now.
Farage wants to import the worst of American failure, without even the excuse of ignorance.
This isn’t a solution, it’s a stage show. While the NHS is buckling, wages are stagnating, and families are choosing between rent and dinner, Farage offers carceral catharsis: prisons not homes, cells not safety nets. He can’t fix the economy, so he plays sheriff in a broken town.
The carceral state doesn’t threaten his interests, it protects them. Because punishment politics isn’t about public safety, this is about control. It offers the illusion of justice while shielding the powerful. Prisons don’t cage the bankers who crash economies or the landlords who profit from poverty. They cage the poor, the dispossessed, and the surplus populations that capitalism no longer needs. Meanwhile, repression becomes a market: private prison companies, security contractors, biometric firms, and border surveillance start-ups all thrive on punishment. The more fear, the more funding. The more inequality, the more guards and gates. This is the business model. A militarised police force doesn’t storm hedge funds, it clears encampments, evicts tenants, and kettles protestors. It’s not protection from crime, it’s protection from the consequences of elite rule. The rich don’t fear the boot, they own it.
There’s no curiosity about what drives people to offend. No attention to poverty, trauma, addiction, or abandonment. No interest in rehabilitation. No serious attempt to make communities safer through support, trust, or care. Just the same dead dogma: longer sentences, harsher conditions, louder threats. Lock them up. Shut them out. Throw away the key.
Unserious Man, Dangerous Times
Farage has always been a provocateur. He’s spent his career as a pundit in politician’s clothing. His true constituency is not the Commons but the GB News studio. His pitch is simple: outrage without responsibility, posturing without accountability. Now, with Reform surging in the polls, he wants to cosplay as Prime Minister, without doing any of the work leadership demands.
But Britain doesn’t need another strongman act. It needs honesty. And if Farage were honest, he would admit this: his prison plan is a mirage. His costings are fiction. His “law and order” crusade is a smokescreen for authoritarian drift.
His politics don’t spring from any genuine concern for public safety. They come from a deeper impulse, to divide, to punish, to rule through fear. His is not a politics of justice, but vengeance theatre for a nation on the edge.
The public deserve more than slogans. They deserve answers. Farage has none. Just enemies to scapegoat, prisons to build, and a camera waiting at the end of it all.
- A growing body of research suggests that the decline in violent crime from the 1990s onward is partly attributable to the reduction in childhood lead exposure, following the phase-out of leaded petrol and lead-based paints. Lead is a neurotoxin, and exposure in early childhood has been shown to damage the prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional regulation, and judgement. Children exposed to high levels of lead are more likely to develop cognitive deficits, attention disorders, and behavioural problems, including aggression. As lead exposure declined across the US and other countries from the 1970s onward, cohorts of children grew up with healthier brain development, contributing, researchers argue, to the sharp drop in crime two decades later. ↩︎
