A new low for Farage

Last week, I wrote a piece for the New European titled “Nigel Farage MP is even worse than you thought.” Today, it seems clear that Farage is even worse than that piece suggested.

There are many things Reform’s leader could have done in the wake of unthinkable tragedy in Southport. Quietly express his sorrow and sympathy for the victims and their families, and his support for a community that will feel the weight of these events for years. Listen carefully to Yvette Cooper’s Commons statement on the killings, ask the home secretary to provide as much detail as could be made available and then deliver a calm but informed update to those who follow him, and might already have leapt to the wrong conclusions based on social media disinformation. Or even to say nothing at all.

Farage could not find itself within him to do any of those things. Instead, he went straight to Twitter where at 5.34pm on Tuesday he posted a 56-second video. It contained no words for the victims, their families and the people of Southport, save for a mention at the start of his own “horror” at the deaths of three young children at a Taylor Swift-themed school holiday club. Farage next claimed that isolated heckles of Keir Stamer as he laid a wreath showed “how unhappy the public are with the state of law and order in this country”. As is his wont, he then veered off into dogwhistling conspiracy theory.

Perhaps inspired by false claims that the person in question was an asylum seeker on an MI6 watch list, Farage questioned whether the suspect was being monitored by security services before the attacks. He noted that police had classed the tragedy as a non-terror incident, as they did for the stabbing of a soldier in Kent last week, and implied that a cover-up might be in place.

“I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us,” he said, before concluding: “I don’t know… What I do know is something is going horribly wrong in our once-beautiful country”.

This was classic Farage bingo. Putting himself at the centre of things. Spreading rumour without being in possession of all the facts. Using the “I don’t know if this is right but…” defence to cover his back. Linking unrelated events in order to satisfy his own narrative. Nodding and winking to his audience about who might be to blame, while implying that the crisis in mental health provision doesn’t actually exist. Peddling his myths about societal breakdown now and a golden age of Britain back then – because there were never stabbings or public disorder before the days of mass migration, were there?

Directly blaming Farage’s ill-informed, self-aggrandising, flame-fanning video for what took place in Southport overnight feels like a leap that only someone like Nigel Farage would make. Other voices, even more extreme than him, must surely shoulder some of the responsibility. But let’s wait for all the facts, and for Southport to grieve and to clear its streets before we too rush to judgement.

What we can say for certain is this: There is no bandwagon that Nigel Farage will not jump on, no tragedy that he will resist attaching himself to, if he thinks it will bring him a second in the spotlight in which to spread his poison.

The former Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood was one of many to call for Farage to remove the video. He wrote: “I lost my brother to terrorism. To ramp up hatred online by claiming the Southport attack was terrorist-related (culminating in riots, a mosque damaged and 27 police injured) is not just reprehensible but needs addressing. Otherwise it will happen again. Disgusted how a sitting MP deliberately inflames tensions without any justification. Farage should delete this tweet.”

But of course Nigel Farage won’t delete it, just as he hasn’t deleted his tweet incorrectly blaming unrest in Harehills on “the politics of the subcontinent” – even though he has admitted he was wrong.

His Southport video has done 3.4 million views so far. Weighed against that kind of exposure, if you are a moral coward like Nigel Farage, who needs to bother with the facts and the truth?