Farage is sounding more desperate than ever – these figures explain why

Andrea Rizzi, a journalist with Spain’s El Pais newspaper, put it best. The global right wing, he wrote as footage of thousands of migrants arriving in Ceuta from Morocco was being beamed around the world, are “hyperventilating with happiness”. By the time Nigel Farage stood up on Monday to prove Rizzi’s point in characteristically unedifying fashion, the massive majority of the 60,000 people estimated to have made the crossing had been returned, most of their own accord after discovering that the online promises of what they would find on arrival had been blatant lies. Farage, displaying a suntan so deep that his Reform UK colleague Sarah Pochin must be close to complaining about him appearing on her television, would have known this. But the facts don’t fit the sort of feelings he has always been so desperate to foment. “What happened in Ceuta over the weekend shows you just how serious this situation is,” he claimed, while studiously ignoring what had happened in Ceuta over the weekend. It was an expansion on his even wilder claims from Friday that “Unless we get a Reform government, those scenes you are seeing in Spain today – many of those young men, lots of them dangerous, will be heading towards Calais and coming to our country.” No matter that Ceuta, a Spanish city, is literally in North Africa, or that onward travel from there to mainland Spain is heavily controlled. And presumably due to time constraints, he also failed to mention the 72 people known to have died while attempting the futile crossing. There are no prizes for predicting that Farage would soon be arriving on the only territory where he ever seems truly comfortable: the tightrope perennially stretched between “legitimate concerns” about immigration and outright racism. Beset by various investigations related to both personal and party donations, he is floundering as never before. The decision to call a by-election in Clacton has backfired hilariously and, even if he were to win 100 per cent of the vote, will do nothing to calm the storms whipped up by him secretly accepting £5m from a Thai-based billionaire, or his close relationship with the convicted fraudster George Cottrell, a scion of an aristocratic family who reportedly calls the supposedly “anti-establishment” Farage “daddy”. Like a faded pop singer seeking to calm a fractious crowd by crooning the opening bars of his only major hit, Farage is back on the immigration beat. Cravenly desperate to be taken seriously in other policy area, his political curse is to be entirely ineffective, if not ridiculous, on any other subject. Even Monday’s tilt at a quasi-defence policy left egg on his face. “Operation Fortress”, his plan to deploy the Royal Navy to send “small boats” back to France, has not only been derided by naval experts and dismissed by France, but managed to feature a warship on its front cover, HMS Ocean, that was sold eight years ago and is currently the Brazilian Navy’s flagship, NAM Atlântico. Of course, he is not alone in seeking to exploit the scenes from Ceuta for political advantage, just as he did the murder of Henry Nowak. “Far-right politicians across Europe on Friday seized on the chaotic scenes of migrants arriving in Spanish territory as evidence for what they see as the perils of immigration,” reported The New York Times last week, citing Farage alongside fellow “anti-immigrant leaders” Jordan Bardella in France and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. But what makes Farage’s current predicament particularly precarious – but no less dangerous than his past attempts at sowing division and dangerous distrust – are the numbers. Despite a very recent spike, small-boat crossings have plummeted by 45 per cent this year, falling from 23,500 to 13,000 between 1 January and 23 July. The comparison with 2024 is down almost 20 per cent. Farage has also long expressed deep disapproval of “legal” migrants. No matter that their number includes his last wife (German) and current girlfriend (French). But here too the numbers simply don’t support the bilious rhetoric. Net migration dropped from a peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023, to 171,000 in the year to December last year. If you are wondering why the likes of Farage have not expressed undiluted delight at Sir Keir Starmer’s delivery of figures beyond even their wildest dreams, the answer probably lies in research published by British Future in May. It found that 67 per cent of immigration sceptics believe net migration increased last year, and six in 10 people who would like to see immigration reduced believe it is still rising. Farage’s core voters, in other words, are even more detached from reality than they were when they voted for Brexit and he absolutely, desperately needs to keep them that way. So he will almost certainly be updating his Nazi-redolent “Breaking Point” poster, first unveiled on the morning that MP Jo Cox was assassinated by a white supremacist terrorist. And he is highly likely to continue his attempts to pretend that any crime committed by a brown or black-skinned person is somehow evidence that all brown or black-skinned people are suspect. And if he continues to be ludicrously indulged by much of our media then the results could be truly hideous. Neighbour turned against neighbour, ethnicities demonised, millions maligned. “This is a battle for the future of our civilisation,” he said last week. “I can’t put it any more plainly than that.” And in a way, he’s right.