I am currently in a very strange place in my life. I am 34 years old and find myself unemployed on the auspices of my wife, with the strict instructions to keep our two children alive. This has exposed me to a lifestyle which makes the French foreign legion look like a holiday camp. Like anyone in my position knows, long term sleep deprivation is a brutal animal. Prior to children, it felt impossible that the sped up internal monologue of nonsense you endure on a work-stress-can’t sleep night, could be played during the day. However, here I am. Living a fight club style existence without the drugs, fighting or noir glamour. Although it seems it, my reason for writing this is not an attempt to relate to tired dads. I don’t think anyone wants to relate to the half-dead, especially not the half-dead. No, my real point is that, in these midnight rounds I’ve been having with my children, I have started to listen to more podcasts and read more news articles than ever before. I genuinely reckon that I would win Mastermind with a specialist subject being, ‘All Online Content Released in 2025’. However, aside from my opinion of the Diary of a CEO bloke worsening with each episode I listen to, there is one thing which is concerning me, and that’s the rise of the far-right. I know this topic is chronically overplayed and the far-right’s ideas are feared by many, however, this isn’t actually why I find this group so disagreeable. In a world of lip filler, men over 30 wearing caps and instagram gender reveals, I have learned to accept that some corners of our society are not for me. For me, my fears really centre on the reasons why people are relating to their message and their seeming inability to justify why they support them with, well, factual evidence. I had to check the previous sentence as it feels so counter-intuitive to say that a growing movement is, at least in part, based on feeling rather than reality, however, I stand by it.
Prior to my trad-wife days, I worked as a history teacher in a boarding school. Although my career choice is not without its moral questions, I really enjoyed teaching the skills of my subject as history, in its distilled essence, teaches pupils how to form an opinion which can be substantiated with evidence. It’s a subject that creates human beings who can navigate the issues life throws at them. As you may remember from school, an element of any history curriculum involves a mandatory analysis of historian’s interpretations of events. For the A-level course I taught, pupils would analyse two historians’ views on the reasons why Hitler expanded into Europe. In the exam, one historian may argue that it was because of Hitler’s racist ideology, whilst the other may focus on the appeasement of the allies, and it would be up to the pupils to weigh up the merits of their arguments and, ultimately, support one view over the other. However, in order to teach the course effectively, we would avoid any discussion of the historians interpretations until we had actually taught the pupils the course content i.e. the history of German expansion, what Hitler said and did etc. Why did we do this before showing the historian’s interpretations and not after you won’t be thinking?… Because it allowed the pupils to understand the reasons why the two historians felt differently on the issue, it allowed them to understand the arguments of the historians when they referred events as evidence and, ultimately, allowed the pupils to have their own viewpoint which they could, logically, justify.
And this is why I am struggling with the fair right movement where people are leaving their homes on an evening to paint crosses on roundabouts or to hoist flags or to go to Tommy Robinson rallies. In this context, you would think that something was happening in our country which was completely out of control and required immediate government action. ‘IMMIGRATION, YOU TWAT!’ I hear you cry. However, although there is obviously an issue of illegal migration into this country, it seems very clear that the far-right is pinning far too many issues to this movement whilst vastly underplaying the ease with which it can be solved.
If we address the former, Farage has stated that, ‘criminals, sex offenders and terrorists’ are now arriving on small boats, adding that, ‘someone that’s crossed in a boat is 25 times more likely to go to prison than a British national’. The second quote, which has also been used by the Conservatives, has been widely criticised as the data analysis from the referenced study compared, ‘2025 prison data to 2021 population statistics which are likely out of date, and appears to use data on the imprisonment of foreign nationals in general to draw conclusion about small boat arrivals specifically’, according to Full Fact. As the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory adds, there is no reliable data on the proportion of small boat arrivals who go to prison. Also, if you relabelled the group as, ‘desperate and poor’, you would expect a higher level of crime. In relation to the first quote, although there have been some highly publicised incidents, the people arriving on small boats undergo security checks at the border where prior criminality is flagged. The Migration Observatory is also worth mentioning here again as its findings show that we simply don’t know how many people arriving on small boats commit crime. I know this feels unsatisfactory, however, not knowing something does not mean that we should guess or attribute the worst of humanity to a group who are, in most cases, fleeing this exact thing (72% of small boat arrivals are granted asylum).
Tommy Robinson, like you will know, has gone further, describing Muslim babies as, ‘time bombs’, and has an anti-immigration stance based on Islamaphobia and his perceived erosion of British values. His followers point to statistics which spotlight disproportionate levels of criminality, with 18% of UK prisoners following Islam when 5% of the population identify as Muslim. Although statistics like this appear compelling when viewed in isolation, peeling back one layer reveals the truth of the matter. Of the 16,000 Muslim inmates in our prisons, taken from a UK population of 4 million, 166 are in prison for terror offences and 1,392 have been charged with sexual offences, two crimes which Robinson is endlessly pinning to this group. Although a thousand sexual predators is a large number, just over 10% of sexual offences are committed by Muslims and, as they account for 18% of the prison population, his argument doesn’t stack up. The other thing to note is that there are four times more Christian sex offenders in our prisons, albeit they are a far larger group in our society. Therefore, although you can get unlucky, the roulette wheel has far more numbers on it than Yaxley-Lennon would have you fear and, more importantly, correlation isn’t justification in itself. The reasons a disproportionate number of Muslims commit crime is due to socio-economic factors, negative stereotyping and government inaction, making, Islamaopobia a cause of the issue in reality. It is also worth a note that most people have relationships with UK muslims and, although anecdotal, I’ve never met their children and worried that they might explode. I am also yet to meet a Muslim or a Christian who promotes violent crime, theft or the sale of drugs, the crimes which a lot of these prisoners have committed and, although I haven’t got a direct line, I can’t imagine Allah/God are best pleased either.
Although the above paragraphs are far from comprehensive in dismantling the far-right’s arguments, my reasoning for writing this is not to provide a database for people to use, as a brief internet browse can provide you with more information. No, the above is simply to outline the facts of the matter which are that the leaders of this movement have taken immigration and, without factual basis or an appreciation of nuance, have pinned as much catastrophe to it as possible. Britain’s economic decline, crime, the strain on public services, housing costs and, according to the 2023 version of Farage, potholes and traffic jams were added to the list of woes caused by migration. Although the far-right’s political approach is deeply immoral, it also defies logic and, if these characters were in my history class, they would be more likely to get a detention than a passing grade.
However, limited to Farage and Robinson, these views could languish away in the background of our society. An ex-colleague used to describe Hitler as man you could meet in any pub, in any country, who sits at the bar projecting a load of nonsense about how the world should be run. The thing that elevated him, and the ideas of the far-right today, are the masses of popular support around them. The question to then be asked is, ‘Why?’ Why are these people who are obviously lying gaining any traction at all?
The first place to start is probably with Kier Starmer’s seeming inaction. If we all think logically, Starmer would have ‘stopped the boats’ yonks ago if it was easy. Politically, it is the most effective thing he could do at this moment to save the fortunes of the Labour Party. However, there’s clearly something stopping him and, shock, there is. The Refugee Convention, European Law, International Law, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Good Friday Agreement, to name a few. With all of these safeguards which protect human beings in place, sending the navy in the English Channel to send the migrants back to France, as Farage suggests, would be met with legal challenge. In Britain today, it couldn’t happen. Therefore, if this issue matters to so many why doesn’t he remove this legal red tape? This always sounds good in theory, like you are decluttering a house, however, this could damage the peace in Northern Ireland, along with our basic human rights which, when we are discussing an issue which only accounts for 4% of the total migration to the UK, doesn’t seem entirely worth it. If you look at Brexit, that was driven by a desire to reduce immigration and boost the economy, neither has happened as a result, with Brexit being a driver in the latter getting worse. Finally, again if you use logic, a 20 mile trip across the English Channel in a dingy not fit for a shallow lake is not something anyone would engage in unless they were desperate. Compassion and empathy needs to be at the centre of any decision on this issue and I suspect Starmer is aware a wrong turn on the solution could haunt him for the rest of his life.
So, how does all this feed into the far-rights hands? Starmer has done an appalling job at articulating the issues around immigration and the complexities of the solutions. Instead of being the adult in the room, he has followed a childlike line of appeasement with populist ideas which has, in turn, provided them with greater validity. In reality, he should be playing a far more parental role where he explains the issues around immigration and why the problem is so difficult to solve. Fundamentally, he needs to move politics back to where it belongs, from idealism to realism.
The other element stoking this fire is the feral enemy, ‘social media’. This can obviously spread disinformation and can assess your sensibilities to feed you the reels and shorts of your dreams. However, they are also very short in length. This has provided a lethal cocktail where an isolated, out of context, fact or ‘fact’ can be delivered to you over and over, until you become an ‘expert’ in your ideology. In any other area of life, this would not be the way we would deliver education. I would never start a new term by showing ten second clips of Hitler screaming anti-Semitic bullshit in a bid to improve subject knowledge. However, although phenomenally destructive, social media is perfect for a populist who is desperate to provide simple solutions to complex problems. Also, in the case of Farage and Robinson, it allows their reported ‘charisma’ to shine. This vibrant, easy to digest form of politics is obviously attractive to someone who is being conditioned to reduce their attention span, especially when the mainstream alternative is politicians glitching over their appropriate word choice and veiled responses. However, the latter is partly a product of politicians wanting to ‘get it right’ and is also born from the idea that politicians are there to work hard for the public interest and agonise over our futures. In a world where projection rather than expertise is king, where food bloggers aren’t chefs, where therapist influencers have studied at the school of ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ and where podcasters know nothing more than a quote from Plato, we find ourselves with cosplay politicians who know nothing of history, science or, bizzarely, what good, moral politics looks like.
So, I suppose the last question to ask is, why does all of this matter? At a recent rally organised by Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk stated verbatim, ‘whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.’ Although untrue today and completely baseless in relation to his argument, I do feel there is a world where this prophecy could become true if we aim it at the far right and social media. In fact, I would go further than Musk and say that, if we become persuaded by the scrolling, misinformation could well bring down Europe’s democracies. This is because the prosperity of our democracies rests on the votes of people who should have some understanding of the realities of our political issues. This then ensures that our political parties promote policies based on fact as opposed to leaning into the populist narrative as the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, Labour are currently doing. As soon as prejudice overtakes fact and these prejudices appoint leaders, history is very clear in it’s lesson: in the best case scenario, our countries are run badly and take a long time to repair as populists tend mismanage budgets to fund what they’ve overpromised. In the worst case scenario, we go to war, as far-right nationalists approach to foreign policy is, by its definition, a promise to put their country’s interests first. This can work well if you are the most powerful country in the world and, as we have seen with Trump, can lead to a bounty of arse kissing and deference. However, if you are Britain, a nationalist leader is likely to cause confrontation, which they will either have no interest in deescalating or are unable to do because of their nationalist principles. You may feel that these prophecies are a little far fetched for a world which hasn’t seen a global conflict for nearly a century, however, we need to remember the state of play we’ve already assimilated to. In our world today, the climate has just passed the point of repair, a rapist runs America and a man who ideolises Putin is on course to run Britain. Stalin famously said that, ‘one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.’ Applied to political controversy, the same rule applies, however, just because we can get used to an erosion of morality, it doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to it.
So what’s the solution? – Like myself, some members of our society need to have a good sleep. Once they have woken up, they should read something with known impartiality, in some detail, about the issues they FEEL passionate about. They can then make an informed choice and decide whether these feelings have a basis in reality… Failing this, and I know I shouldn’t talk about it, but there’s a club I’m thinking of starting.
Tomorrow's Chip Paper 