Today’s newspaper front pages are all the same: Nigel Farage, standing behind a podium emblazoned with Operation Restoring Justice. It’s meant to be statesmanlike, but the image reeks of the 1990s, of Nick Griffin in a village hall declaiming about “cultural survival” and “fighting-age males.” The message is the same; the difference is the media. Griffin was treated as toxic, his party marginal. Farage is given front-page oxygen, presented as if his deportation fantasies are part of the democratic conversation.
How many times must we say this? It is not about small boats. If we had serious politicians, we would be debating what the country actually needs: the ageing demographics, the sectors that cannot attract workers, the structural reliance on migrant labour. Instead we are back in Griffin’s world of hotel windows smashed and “protect our women” chants, only this time it’s framed as mainstream patriotism. The BNP shouted from the margins; Farage’s Reform is rewarded with legitimacy. The rhetoric is no less ugly.
“Operation Restoring Justice” is not an immigration plan. It is a Trumpian style plan for authoritarianism. Farage promises mass deportations, 600,000 in five years (nearly 800 a day) despite the fact that Britain manages only a few thousand asylum returns annually. He cannot name a single RAF base to be turned into a detention camp, nor explain how deals will be struck with regimes like Iran or the Taliban. What he offers is a performance: an “invasion” narrative, women and girls under threat, activists and lawyers portrayed as enemies of the nation. This was Nick Griffin’s repertoire in the 1990s.
The danger lies not in its practicality but in its spectacle. Griffin never needed to govern. His purpose was to poison debate. Farage has perfected the formula. Where the BNP lacked polish, he supplies it; where Griffin was denied coverage, Farage thrives on it. The big difference this time around is the establishment enables him. Downing Street refuses to condemn his talk of an “invasion,” Labour triangulates around “strength of feeling,” the tabloids splash the slogans as if they are policies rather than provocations. What was once consigned to the margins now sets the political centre.
Strip away the theatrics and the mechanics collapse. Britain has 2,200 detention places; Farage demands 24,000. Deportation agreements do not exist with most of the countries from which asylum seekers flee. The Centre for Migration Control calculates that a mass deportation scheme would cost nearly £50 billion, not the £10 billion conjured up by Reform. None of this matters, because (as with Griffin) the goal is not policy but permission: permission to abandon the ECHR, the Refugee Convention, the ban on torture itself. Permission to normalise what was once unthinkable.
That’s why this must be said plainly: Farage is mainstreaming BNP politics. The same racist tropes about “young undocumented males,” the same scaremongering about “assimilation,” the same promise of a country purified by deportation. Back then, such rhetoric was marked out as dangerous, extreme, unfit for public life. Now it is wrapped in a St. George and paraded as a patriotic alternative.
We face a Rubicon. Allow Farage’s fantasies to define the debate, and the ground shifts permanently. What was Griffin’s fever dream becomes the new common sense. And with it goes the very core of British democracy: the rule of law, the universality of human rights, the idea that people cannot be bargained back into the hands of torturers.
The lesson of the 1990s should be clear: Griffin was defeated not by appeasement but by exposure, not by indulging his rhetoric but by showing it for what it was. Farage’s “Operation Restoring Justice” deserves the same treatment. There must be relentless challenge, moral clarity, and the insistence that this is not about small boats, but about whether Britain still values justice at all.
