Britain’s Choice: Liberty or Fear

Nigel Farage’s rhetoric meets Britain’s reality: while he praises Putin ‘as an operator’ and blames the West for ‘provoking the bear,’ Britain stands firm with Ukraine and faces the real costs of his politics at home.

Nigel Farage has given Britain a demand masquerading as a plan. From a hangar with a mock departures board and a crowd primed for theatre, he promised to “stop the boats” by yanking us out of the European Convention on Human Rights, ripping up the Human Rights Act, and deporting “absolutely anyone” who arrives here without permission—women and children included. He warned of “major civil disorder,” called the arrivals an “invasion,” and framed the whole question with a simple challenge: “Whose side are you on?” That is precisely the question this article answers—and it begins with the character of the man posing it, because character and credibility are never incidental to the fate of a nation.

There is a long shadow behind this sudden talk of emergency. In his schooldays, a letter from a teacher at Dulwich College urged the headmaster not to make Nigel Farage a prefect, citing racist and neo-fascist views; Channel 4 News later unearthed the document, and Farage denied its claims. People grow and change, of course; that is the hope of civil society. But when, decades later, the same person reaches for the language of dehumanisation—“invasion,” “breaking in”—and builds a politics of scapegoats rather than solutions, the public is entitled to ask whether the youthful posture became the adult programme. The pattern is the point.

There is another pattern, too — one that speaks not only to temperament but to the model of leadership he admires. In 2014 he named Vladimir Putin the world leader he most admired “as an operator.” An operator, indeed: of poisonings, censorship, and war. One can admire ruthlessness, but Britain was never meant to be governed on those terms. When a politician praises a strongman who jails journalists and poisons opponents, and then returns home to propose neutering judges, sidelining rights, and intimidating the press, the comparison stops being a cheap shot and starts looking like a through-line. Britain is not Russia. We should be wary of importing its habits.

And when Russia invaded Ukraine, what did Farage say? Not that Britain must resist, but that the West had provoked the attack, that somehow the responsibility lay with us rather than with Putin. As missiles fell on Kyiv and Kharkiv, he chose not to condemn the aggressor but to excuse him. That is not realism. That is appeasement.

Set his words against the reality: the black smoke curling over tower blocks, the shattered glass on a railway platform strewn with toys and prams, the patched blue-and-yellow flag raised again after another strike. While Ukrainians fight for their survival, Britain has trained tens of thousands of their soldiers, supplied missiles and air defences, committed billions to their cause — because that is who we are. We arm the victim, we sanction the aggressor, and we do not shift blame away from the invader.

Farage’s admiration for Putin “as an operator” and his excuses for Russian aggression are not patriotism. They are an insult to Britain’s pride in standing with the invaded, not siding with the invader. Britain’s choice was made long ago: when tyranny rises, we stand with those who resist it.

And there is the legacy that has shaped our present crisis more than any other: the rupture with Europe he drove and celebrated. Before Brexit, the Dublin system gave us a lawful way to return asylum seekers to the first safe European country they entered. The moment we left, that mechanism ended. The legal bridge that once allowed swift, orderly returns was dismantled, and the smugglers understood what that meant faster than ministers did. You cannot burn the bridge and then rage that the river is suddenly uncrossable.

After character, the test of any politician is whether his remedy survives contact with the facts. Here the contradictions are glaring. He says the only path to control is to leave the ECHR and strip away the Human Rights Act. Yet the very countries he points to as successful—major European democracies—have tightened border enforcement and accelerated returns while remaining under the same human-rights framework. Germany, for example, has deported people, including to Afghanistan, while still bound by the Convention’s absolute bar on torture and inhuman treatment, a reminder that rights law constrains abuses; it does not ban enforcement. The existence of rights is not the death of borders, and their absence is not the birth of security.

He tells us we are on the brink of “major civil disorder,” that “it is an invasion, as these young men illegally break into our country,” and that the question is whether we stand with “women and children being safe on our streets” or with “outdated international treaties.” That framing is designed to short-circuit thinking: to make prudence sound like betrayal and to cast law as the enemy of safety. But it collapses under scrutiny. The Convention we are urged to abandon was shaped by British minds in the aftermath of war as a set of guardrails against the very abuses Europe had just endured. It is woven into peace settlements and international agreements—so much so that leaving it would jeopardise the Good Friday architecture in Northern Ireland, a reality today’s government acknowledges. If stability and safety are the goal, tearing at the threads that hold the settlement together is a perverse place to start.

He insists that “if you come to the UK illegally, you will be detained and deported and never, ever allowed to stay—period,” and clarifies that “women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.” He speaks of deals with regimes such as the Taliban to take people back. This is not a slip of the tongue; it is the heart of the proposal. A country that has long prided itself on refusing to send people to torture would be asked to write cheques to precisely those governments we once denounced. It is not an argument for control; it is an admission that cruelty has become the tool of choice.

Strip away the slogans and a second set of contradictions appears. The plan boasts sweeping reach—hundreds of thousands removed—yet offers no serious operational map of where people would be held, which safe countries would take them, and how the courts of this land would be gagged into silence. Even advocates of a harder line concede the practical obstacles are colossal. The price tag presented to the press is a political number, not an audited one, and the “new command” structures are bureaucratic rebranding layered on top of long-straining systems. When questions arrive, they are dismissed as defeatism. In a democracy questions are not defeatism; they are due diligence.

The most telling flaw is the core claim that rights must be collateral damage to restore order. It is the oldest false choice in politics: your safety or your principles. Britain has always answered that with a third option—both. The reason you do not abolish the referee to speed up the match is that you will not like the sport that follows. The reason you do not abolish judicial scrutiny to accelerate deportations is that power without scrutiny does not stay in its lane for long. The power invoked to detain the stranger is the power that will one day knock on your door.

It is easy to stir anger; it is harder to convert it into a policy that does not eat the foundations it stands on. The rhetoric of invasion is crafted to make you feel besieged, to see a family in a dinghy as a hostile column. It invites you to respond with the policy instincts of war rather than law, to valorise force and denigrate process. But we are not at war with families. We are a country with borders, laws, obligations, and a tradition of combining firmness with fairness. If we forget that, the loss will not only be measured in statistics and budgets but in the shrinking of our own idea of Britain.

Some will say this is sentimentality, that the world is ugly and only uglier tools will work. But even on their own terms, the proposals are weaker than they look. A government that leaves the ECHR and suspends the Refugee Convention would find cooperation harder, not easier. European partners would not share data with an outlier they cannot trust to respect basic standards. Returns depend on agreements; agreements depend on credibility; credibility depends on the very reputation the plan would torch. It is no accident that legal scholars and seasoned civil servants call the scheme a fantasy of force. The hard power it fetishises would evaporate the moment our soft power—our word, our reliability, our law—was thrown away.

There is a deeper moral danger in normalising the notion that every problem yields to detention. When you announce that no circumstance, no person, no child is exempt—“everybody on arrival will be detained”—you are not projecting strength; you are confessing poverty of imagination. A confident state triages, prioritises, distinguishes. It separates traffickers from the trafficked, economic migration from flight from persecution, bad-faith claims from genuine fear. A confident state does not need to put infants behind razor wire to prove it has a spine.

Now return to the lines he delivered and invert them. “Whose side are you on?” he asks. Are you on the side of a Britain that tears up the post-war settlement it helped write, or the Britain that keeps its word? Are you on the side that pays despots to take people back, or the side that secures fair, humane, enforceable returns through agreements that last? Are you on the side that calls people an “invasion,” or the side that calls them people and still holds the line? The choice is not between compassion and control. The choice is between theatrical cruelty that isolates us and practical control that restores order without dismantling who we are.

And if you doubt that a different course exists, look beyond our shores. Other European democracies, still bound by the same rights architecture, have tightened border checks, accelerated processing, and increased removals without torching the legal scaffolding. You can dislike their specific policies and still recognise the most basic point: the Convention is not a straightjacket that prevents enforcement. It is a seatbelt that prevents the state from hurling people into the path of torture and death. Those who sell you the story that only a wrecking ball can open a locked door are not offering you a plan; they are selling you the thrill of smashing something.

There is, in all of this, a test of patriotism. Some think patriotism is a clenched fist and a loud voice. Real patriotism is a steady hand and a good memory. We remember that British jurists helped design the very rights regime now treated as foreign imposition. We remember that the peace in Northern Ireland relies in part on commitments embedded in those standards. We remember that our allies trust us because we are predictable in the best sense: bound by law, not by the temper of a single man. And we remember, above all, that the mark of a great country is not that it never faces hard choices, but that it refuses to answer them with the cheapest instincts.

What, then, would it look like to be serious rather than theatrical? It would look like rebuilding the operational muscle that Brexit allowed to atrophy: a returns system rooted in fresh bilateral deals with European neighbours (as Yvette Cooper, the Home secretary, has commendably been working towards); a standing, credible partnership with France on joint patrols, intelligence sharing and fast-track returns; a processing system that decides cases in weeks rather than years, so that those without claims are removed swiftly and those with protection needs can begin to contribute rather than languish in limbo. It would look like targeting smuggling gangs with the same focus we apply to counter-terror finance, so that the market for the Channel crossing dries up because the business model has been smashed, not because toddlers were frightened into submission by the threat of a barracks. It would look like modest, clearly defined safe routes calibrated to remove the perverse incentive to risk the sea. None of this requires abandoning our commitments; it requires honouring them and making them effective.

You will notice that the moment we talk about the mechanics of control—agreements, timetables, staffing, evidence thresholds—the shouting fades and the work begins. You will also notice that these are the very pieces the hangar speech did not offer. Instead of the spade and the ledger, we were shown a prop departures board. Governance is not a stunt. It is a grind. If a politician refuses the grind and reaches for the stunt, he is telling you what he values.

The truth is that there is nothing radical about proposing mass detention as the answer to everything. It is the laziest imitation of authority. It is easy to lock the door; it is hard to build the house. It is easy to vilify a court; it is hard to write a law that works. It is easy to call a boat an invasion; it is hard to construct a system that removes those with no right to remain and integrates those who do. That is the work of a serious country. That is the work worthy of Britain.

I return, finally, to those lines he delivered like a verdict. “We are not far away from major civil disorder.” Then lead with calm, not kerosene. “It is an invasion.” Then speak with accuracy, not agitation. “Whose side are you on?” Then stand with the side that keeps faith—with our allies, our treaties, our peace settlements, our own word. “If you come to the UK illegally, you will be detained and deported and never, ever allowed to stay, period.” Then answer: if you cross illegally and have no claim, you will be removed swiftly and lawfully; if you have a real claim, you will be protected swiftly and lawfully. The period at the end of that sentence is the rule of law, not the roar of a crowd.

To those who thrill at the promise of rupture, I say this. A country is not made great by the volume of its threats but by the quality of its vows. Ours were taken in the ashes of war: that we would not torture, that we would not disappear people, that we would not send them back to the lash and the cell. Those promises were not made to foreigners; they were made to ourselves. Break them once and you will discover how quickly the ground beneath your own feet crumbles.

So, yes, let us answer the question. We are on the side that stops the boats by making law work, not by making law vanish. We are on the side that punishes the smugglers, not the already brutalised. We are on the side that refuses to pay tyrants to solve our problems, because a bribe to a tyrant is never the last cheque you write. We are on the side that knows strength without justice is just force, and force without wisdom is just noise. We are on the side of a Britain that remembers who it is.

And here is the quiet, confident promise of that Britain. We will control our borders. We will return those with no right to be here. We will protect those who need our protection. We will work with our neighbours so that this island is safe and respected. We will keep faith with the agreements that have kept our peace. We will not tear down the institutions that keep every one of us free from the knock at midnight. We will do the hard, patient, grown-up things that are the true measure of national strength.

That is an answer to “whose side are you on” that does not need a slogan. It needs only a memory of what this country has already achieved when it refused the shortcuts of fear. And it needs the courage, now, to refuse them again.