Nigel Farage debated in the theatre of my secondary school, Benenden, in the middle of nowhere in Kent for the run-up to the 2015 general election. Nearly a decade later he’s still firmly embedded in the UK’s political consciousness.
He’s a Brexiteer, “good friend” of Donald Trump, and has just stepped down as a presenter for controversial TV channel GB News. And despite never having been elected as an MP in Parliament (despite seven attempts), Farage remains one of the most enduring critics of immigration policy on the scene.
When my school hosted the debate in 2015, discussion of Brexit was underway with then UK PM David Cameron promising a referendum if the Conservatives won. We students were gathered to reverently listen to politicians discuss a range of policies, including the referendum.
Though much of it has faded, Farage and his rhetoric still remain engraved in my memory. He was a brash and charismatic speaker who only focused on one subject: immigration. He was a theatrical orator and it seems he won the debate given I can remember little else from that day.
At the time, he used every opportunity as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to talk about immigration, claiming that it left British towns and cities almost unrecognisable — not an uncommon opinion in Kent where boats with migrants would land at Dover, but certainly an exaggeration. He said the European Union (EU) needed to stop boats arriving, just like Australia. Wherever immigration was discussed, Nigel Farage followed.
Farage’s willingness to stir resentment around migration most closely mirrors Senator Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party. Since the 1990s, Hanson has been successfully tapping into voter concerns over migration the same way that Farage has, zoning in on the supposed negative impacts on Australian citizens. Increasingly, it’s a theme that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton seems keen to run with. Not to mention current British PM Rishi Sunak with his true blue imported slogan Stop the Boats. The one key difference is that Farage has never served in Parliament, though he does currently hold the intangible title of honorary president for the relatively new right-wing party Reform UK.
Reform only has one MP in Parliament but has challenged Conservative poll ratings with its anti-immigration agenda. And yet, despite this success, within 24 hours of the election date being set, Farage had announced that he was not, in fact, standing.
Has he finally thrown in the towel and left the UK political arena behind? It was thought he might be heading across the Atlantic after he reportedly received a job offer to help with a “grassroots campaign” in the US — though he denies it would be a role for his friend The Donald.
But it does not seem to be so — and immigration is once more at the centre of election discussion. Farage has again taken up the mantle on the issue and has been writing in The Telegraph this week, claiming the PM called the election for July because he knows his plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda “simply would not work”. He rather optimistically challenged Rishi Sunak to a live TV debate on the topic but was slighted as a spokesperson for Sunak pointed out: “There’s only two people who can be PM at the end of this campaign, Rishi or [Labour Party leader Keir] Starmer.”
In the 2019 election, Farage gave Boris Johnson and the Conservatives a boost by pulling some of his Brexit Party candidates from marginal seats. This week, he has suggested to The Sun that there is room for a similar deal with Sunak. But this was rejected too.
Either way, 10 years and two general elections later, there is something to be said for the durability of a politician who is not, nor has ever been, an MP but still manages to hold public interest. As someone who has gone from watching him speak in my school’s auditorium to discussing headlines about him in the newsroom, there are times when a grudging respect emerges for someone who does not seem to stay gone long.
It takes sticking to what you know to the extreme but, agree with him or not, making a career out of one soapbox issue has kept Farage in politics and clearly voters’ consciousness too.
