Nigel Farage says ‘jump’ and too many politicians reply ‘how high?’

Well, he’s back. 

Nigel Farage has declared that he’s trying to enter parliament at the eighth attempt, standing in Clacton, and that he wants to make this an ‘immigration election’. 

Without skipping a beat, much of Britain’s political and media ecosystem leapt up to dance along to his tune. 

The Reform UK leader is already generating pretty much wall-to-wall coverage, and the major parties risk only making an impression insofar as they try to compete with his anti-migrant agenda.   

To the public, this is an election about the NHS and cost of living, but our interests are being absurdly squeezed out of the conversation in favour of an increasingly grubby competition over the small minority of anti-migrant voters who the Tories seem to believe can save them from the oblivion Reform promised. 

This morning, Farage has been pushing his insane net-zero immigration policy and a freeze on so-called ‘unskilled’ immigration.

In terror, the Conservatives sent out James Cleverly to essentially try and match them, announcing a cap on visa numbers, while offering no figures or details on how it would work. 

Because it won’t. 

For one thing, it’s practically impossible to plan the number of visas issued each year to match the number of people who decide to leave the country. 

More importantly, any attempt to do so would exacerbate already dire skills shortages in essential areas like social care, farm work and construction. 

These are the jobs Sunak, Starmer and Farage say British people should do instead, but they don’t propose any funding model that would make that even vaguely plausible. 

We already cut the rights of foreigners to come and do those jobs by ending free movement and launching a Farage-endorsed ‘pick for Britain’ drive to try to bring British people into food production jobs. 

That was a pathetic failure, and in short order the Conservatives brought in sector-specific visas for farm workers and carers and put construction workers on a shortage occupation list for immigration priority, in order to plug the gaps. 

The Tories have since cut migrant care workers’ rights so extensively, banning them from including dependants, that we’ve seen a 76% drop in applications for care worker visas in the last few months. 

That’s not a typo – a seventy six percent drop in applications for care workers. It is a disaster – and it is patients and elderly people who suffer most. 

But the Tories’ new proposals – sparked by the looming spectre of Farage – look set to go even further, worsening the NHS recruitment crisis and seeing waiting lists explode because of the lack of capacity.

Yet as the campaign continues, our politicians never seem to be asked to seriously account for this – why would they? This isn’t the ‘NHS election’ it’s the ‘immigration election’, remember? 

The positive LibDem proposal to fund better pay and develop a sustainable model for care in our society has been totally ignored, along with similarly progressive proposals from the Greens. 

Labour seems to be continuing to hedge their position, relying on both signalling that they’d reduce immigration, but also cutting waiting lists by getting our overworked NHS staff to just work more overtime.

It really isn’t good enough that this is the quality of debate about our most important public service and the future health and care needs of our ageing society. 

Once again, these are apparently things we should sacrifice at the altar of ever lower immigration numbers, which is presumed to be a good in and of itself, and somehow more important than the cost of groceries, our children’s education, the housing crisis, or anything else. 

What’s interesting is how badly politicians of both the main parties and Farage’s Reform come completely unstuck when talking about this issue – they all claim the exact same brand of hostile policies that have failed for the Tories for 14 years would somehow magically work to make immigrants disappear after an election. 

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Farage casually brings in a dose of bigotry to back up his extreme positions. 

His rhetoric against Muslims in particular consists almost entirely of unsubstantiated, inflammatory falsehoods.

In a context where far-right protestors led by Tommy Robinson marched at the weekend in their thousands on our streets against our Muslim communities, it is irresponsible and dangerous in the extreme for our politicians and media not to draw a bold line in the sand against Farage, who has dominated the airwaves for too long. 

This is all straight out of the Trump playbook, though, and they’ve seen it work before. 

While it’s all horribly depressing, it is also the time, if ever there was one, for everyone to speak up for our values. 

We must raise our voices to say we don’t want Farage’s hate echoed by Labour and the Tories. 

We want a debate on investment in our public services, safe, inclusive communities, and affordable lives. 

We can’t rely on mainstream politicians to make this the ‘cost of living election’ or the ‘public services election’ we need it to be, but our communities will be the ones to pay the price if Farage gets his ‘immigration election’. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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