Good morning. In a speech yesterday that would have been considered extreme just a few years ago, Nigel Farage said that a Reform government would not just abolish indefinite leave to remain for new migrants to the UK – but rescind the status of those who have already been granted it, and force them to apply for new visas. He said that the policy was necessary for one reason above all: “to wake everybody up to the Boriswave”.
You might have noticed that term in the past few months: it has been used repeatedly in the mainstream media to describe the increase in inward migration from outside the EU after Brexit, when Boris Johnson was prime minister. What you may not know – what even some of those deploying it may not fully understand – is that “Boriswave” is not simply a pithy description of a sociological phenomenon but a term coined and popularised among the online far right, used in unapologetically racist terms to describe new arrivals to the UK, and then rapidly laundered into the mainstream.
