Whose side are you on? The End of History was supposed to have rendered this question obsolete, in favour of a universal brotherhood of all humanity. This week, though, Nigel Farage set out plans to bulldoze what’s left of that dream. In a fiery speech, he framed the ever-rising number of small boat crossings as an “invasion”, a “scourge”, and a “threat to national security”, before proposing to resolve this threat by Brexiting all over again — this time, from the rest of the “rules-based international order”.
It’s long been an assumption of that international order that national and international interests are naturally coextensive. For Farage, though, the effect on national migration policy of international human rights law proves that the latter is the enemy of the former. So, in the name of British women and children, international law has to go.
Reform’s “Operation Restoring Justice” would see illegal migrants securely detained in former military bases, before deporting them without any right of appeal, even to countries currently deemed “unsafe”. Reform would, Farage pledged, use persuasion and, if necessary, clout to force countries to accept returnees, while negotiating “fallback” deportation options in third countries. Destroying identity documents would be criminalised, as would returning after deportation. The whole operation would be powered by a new deportation force, driven by enhanced data-sharing between bodies such as police, social services, DWP, HMRC, and the DVLA.
If this feels vastly more radical than any Tory proposition to date, this is thanks to the structural changes Reform has proposed to Britain’s legal and institutional frameworks, in order for the programme not to be killed by lawfare. Farage proposes to do what neither Labour nor the Tories has to date been willing to attempt: repeal or disapply every international law, treaty, and membership whose provisions might obstruct deportations. This would, he pledged, include leaving the European Court of Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act that entrenches ECHR governance in British law, and disapplying treaties governing treatment of refugees and people at risk of torture or human trafficking.
If Farage is now proposing to go goblin mode on Britain’s legal and institutional architecture, this is surely downstream of the political and sociocultural permission structure created by Trump’s unapologetically nationalist “America First” second term. In particular, this has included far-reaching measures to close the southern US border, and to deport those currently working in the USA illegally. At the policy level, this has naturally invited reflection among British migration restrictionists on what measures would be required in order for something equivalent to be implemented here; but the impact is also cultural. Online, British and American public conversations are effectively one undifferentiated Anglophone discourse. And in this space, the post-Trump gulf between British and American approaches to border enforcement has inflamed our simmering migration debate.
This issue was already contentious. It played a central role in the Brexit vote, and has since only grown in salience as successive governments have sought to offset faltering growth with the economic sugar-rush of population increase. The actual scale of Channel migration is dwarfed by the legal kind, especially since the so-called “Boriswave”. But as the volume of illegal small-boat migration has increased year-on-year, leaders’ apparent inability to prevent the boats arriving, or expel their passengers from the country on arrival, has become as emblematic as EU “free movement” once was, of the way government after government promises to curb migration, only to admit that sorry no, we can’t control the borders after all because reasons.
Pent-up public frustration at this studied inertia now bubbles up with ever-greater frequency, and in ever more frankly race-delineated terms. It lay behind last summer’s Southport riots, and fanned renewed concern earlier this year over the persistence of largely Pakistani rape gangs in many British towns. Starmer is now evidently so concerned about the ambient condition of Britain’s “community relations” that as Baroness Casey prepared to pubish her report in June that some active grooming cases include alleged perpetrators who are asylum seekers, Labour sought to anticipate and defuse public disorder by rushing out a slew of new mitigatory measures. But the mood since has continued to sour, and a steady flow of headlines this year, documenting sexual attacks on British women and girls by migrants hasn’t helped. One such attack triggered this summer’s wave of asylum hotel protests.
The contrast between Starmer’s thus far ineffectual efforts to “smash the gangs”, and the online feed of viral Trumpian border-control content, also lends credibility to Farage’s claim that the failure of successive British regimes to grip this issue is a matter not of political possibility, but political will. Though he stopped short of calling Starmer a traitor, in his speech Farage accused the Labour PM of taking the “side” of international courts over that of the British people. The small boats crisis, Farage thundered, “poses one fundamental question. Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of women and children being safe on our streets, or are you on the side of outdated international treaties, backed up by dubious courts?”
In presenting the question as a Schmittian one of “sides”, that pits vulnerable women and children against abstract treaties and impersonal courts, Farage has launched a fresh broadside in the metapolitical battle that’s raged since before Brexit, between particularists and universalists. The choice of women and children makes the picture more emotive, but in its most general terms, the divide is between those who imagine “citizenship” as drawing an imaginary line around a subset of people in order to define the political in-group, and those who wish to expand the in-group to include everyone on the planet.
For those most committed to the universalist vision, it’s obviously right and just that universal human rights should take precedence over national ones, even where foreign criminals are concerned. This outlook tends to cluster at the top of the social scale, and in its home-grown form arguably has roots in the globe-spanning mentality typical of the erstwhile British imperial ruling class. In its modern, postcolonial form, the regime it produces is — pace Farage — still very British, whether in its generosity to outsiders, its punctilious respect for rule of law, or its assumption that everyone in the world is as individualistic as we are. It is also deeply British in the exceptionalism underlying its core premise, that it’s only by an accident of birth that most people didn’t have the good fortune to be born in Britain, and this unhappy predicament should be treated with sympathy.
Many otherwise quixotic-seeming features of British policy in areas such as migration, naturalisation, social housing, and “community relations” make perfect sense in the context of this Anglo-universalist mindset. But the difficulty, for its adherents, is that people are generally much more willing to be generous about who counts as “us” under conditions of abundance. When resources grow scarcer, people naturally prioritise those closest to them. In this sense, the Left is correct to argue that austerity is a driver of anti-migrant sentiment; but they are mistaken to imagine it’s the driver. Some people are simply more interested in their immediate community than “all of humanity”. And even in relatively individualistic cultures such as Britain’s, this instinct will loom larger as scarcity bites, as it very much has after decades of deindustrialisation, financial crisis, austerity, trade chaos, pandemic, rising taxes, flatlining wages, inflation, and political instability.
“When resources grow scarcer, people naturally prioritise those closest to them.”
But even as the particularist muttering has grown louder, it’s done so within a legacy policy environment that institutionalised the optimistic, expansionary universalism of the End of History, back while the good times were still rolling. And this institutional setup is tended by the kind of comfortably-off politicians, lawyers, and journalists who are generally less affected by scarcity than those they govern, and thus still willing to be generous. Whether through this simple lack of awareness, institutional conservatism, moral conviction, or who knows what other motivation, this class has clung to a political regime designed for a more optimistic age, even as the British electorate has begged repeatedly at the ballot box for leaders willing to change tack and prioritise the in-group, even in such simple symbolic acts as deporting serial criminals to their country of origin.
One can fill endless Right-wing column inches with arguments over how exactly to define that in-group. The deeper Schmittian battle, though, is between those who accept in principle that some boundary must be drawn, and those who think “us” means all of humanity. That the media class still skews to the latter view is attested by the fact that three of the first four press questions, after Farage’s press conference, focused on the danger to asylum seekers in being sent back to unsafe countries. To a universalist, the interests of those coming to Britain from around the world should obviously weigh equally with those of the people already here. To a particularist, meanwhile, this seems at best impractical if not actively disloyal to the in-group.
Even Brexit didn’t dislodge the universalists, though the presence at Farage’s press conference of reporters from every major mainstream paper suggests that their worldview no longer sets the agenda quite so effortlessly as it once did. But even if the mood has unmistakably changed at the level of the electorate, so far the only Western leader to make more than symbolic efforts to undo the internationalist regime has been Donald Trump. Results have, so far, arguably been mixed, and most of America’s vassal nations have responded by reiterating their commitment to America’s pre-Trump programme of internationalism, presumably in the hope that things will go back to normal after he leaves office. But should Reform be elected (a big if) and actually deliver on Operation Restoring Justice (an even bigger if), this would make Britain the first major American imperial ally to set about re-ordering itself in the image not of the old, internationalist America but the new, Trumpian particularist one.
This prospect faces many hurdles, not least Farage’s personality, Reform’s to date relatively thin talent pool and (unless something unexpected happens) four more years of Starmer’s lawyerly devotion to the very human-rights architecture Farage wants to destroy. Even so, this week Farage’s uncanny ability to catch and capitalise on the public mood effectively shunted “human rights” another step away in popular perception from axiomatically positive, and another step closer to general opprobrium as a Schmittian enemy of the British people.
It’s too soon to call when, but I have every expectation that even if Farage doesn’t achieve it from No. 10, this consummate politician will eventually score his second Brexit. This time, it wouldn’t be from entanglement with Europe; it’d be from an international system of rules and ideals that, underwritten (until Trump) by America, set the terms for 75 years of Western geopolitics. What comes after that is anybody’s guess. For the sake of public order, though, we have to hope that when it does happen, this second Brexit is more successful than the first at reducing immigration.
