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4 hours ago
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It was only last week that Nigel Farage declared he was no longer a one-man band with the announcement of a handful of key appointments. Though that does not mean his “Mini-Mes” can yet be trusted to be allowed out on their own. Baby steps and all that.
Nige would rather die than let someone else hog all the limelight. It’s not that his team would screw up. That would be just fine. The worry is always that they might do too well. Might reckon they could live without him. Farage needs to watch them all like a hawk.
So, fresh from his embarrassing Chagos trip that made him look like a halfwit, Nige was to be found in Dover on Monday morning. For an event that had been billed as Zia Yusuf’s first major speech as Reform’s Home Office spokesperson.
It was Farage who would give the introductory speech. Farage who would control the Q&A with the media. Farage who would get to have the last word. Zia’s job was merely to act as the satellite who wouldn’t exist without Nige. To be the charisma-free zone that comes so naturally to him. To deliver his speech with as little charm as possible. The angry homunculus.
Nige kicked things off. There was an invasion of foreigners. He spat out the word “diversity”. Legal migration was set to cost us £200bn. Odd that he’s so unbothered about the costs of Brexit, for which he was largely responsible. Most of the people in Gorton and Denton couldn’t even speak English, he said. We were encouraging the far-right nationalists. No one had done more than Nige to combat the rise of the far right. Really?
Weirdly, Farage seems to think he occupies the centre right having fallen out with Rupert Lowe. The reality is that he has appropriated and normalised most of the far right’s ideas.
Then it was time for Yusuf’s 30 minutes of hate. A tirade of misery. There was a sign on his lectern, saying “shadow home secretary”. Which he isn’t. Nor is he an MP, so there is no way of holding him democratically accountable. At heart, Zia just isn’t very brave. Daren’t risk standing for parliament.
Nowhere in the UK was safe. He was the son of immigrants and had reluctantly come to the conclusion that the Brits had been far too generous in welcoming them. If he could relive the 1980s, he would have had them deported. Come to think of it, he might just have them deported now anyway. Pour encourager les autres. No foreigners should take their citizenship rights for granted.
Zia shook his head. Immigrants were best sent back to where they had come from. The ones who came from Britain would be distributed to other countries around the world via a televised national lottery. The look of horror on the faces of those who found themselves being sent to war zones would be a ratings winner. It was all for the best. Muslim men were all second-class citizens. Apart from him, of course.
The invasion would be stopped, Zia said. We would detain everyone arriving in the UK on a small boat. There would be up to 288,000 deportations a year. And once we had got rid of all the illegal migrants, Reform would start on the legal migrants by revoking indefinite leave to remain status.
He was putting everyone in low-paid NHS jobs on notice. There would be local schemes encouraging people to grass up their neighbours. A monthly election held by each local authority in which white people could vote for which foreigners they want to deport. We just needed to learn to think of it as something like a gameshow. Keeping alive the British spirit.
Zia was putting the fun back in Britain. America shouldn’t be allowed to have all the excitement of ICE agents on every street corner. It would rekindle our sense of adventure as men in balaclavas accidentally shot a few people. What could be more thrilling than leaving the house in the morning and not knowing if you were going to get back home alive?
The longer Yusuf talked, the more hardline and deranged he sounded. As if being this way gave him some credibility and self-importance. Though it’s hard to believe this is a vision for Britain that anyone but the Reform hardcore will embrace.
Zia is also obsessed with the radicalisation of many Muslims. You can’t help wondering at what point he got radicalised by Farage. He ended with a call for the return of Judaeo-Christian values. An odd shout for a Muslim man. Maybe he gets a special exemption. Maybe he also hasn’t clocked that most Christian leaders have condemned Reform’s immigration policies as profoundly unchristian.
No matter. Zia had one last policy up his sleeve. He was going to stop all churches from ever becoming places of worship for other faiths. Though he did draw the line at making church attendance compulsory. So if the churches stayed empty, so be it. Though he did think the country would be in better shape if everyone did go to church once a week at a minimum. There’s something immensely reassuring about hearing people who don’t go to church themselves explaining why it would be so beneficial for the rest of us.
Come the questions, Nige once again took charge. He couldn’t help himself. There were one or two things he needed to clear up. Burqas needed to be banned, otherwise Muslim women might find themselves mistaken for Antifa activists. Or ICE agents. And yes, he did have a better grounding in theology than any of the archbishops and bishops. Just know this: God hates foreigners.
