Spending the summer in rural Greece provides a strange perspective on Britain’s rapidly accelerating immigration debate, now a regular staple on the news here. As a highly nationalistic ethnostate, where the Greek flag is omnipresent — I can see one fluttering over my neighbour’s house as I write — the idea that raising the national flag in the country it belongs to could ever be controversial is beyond popular comprehension. Similarly, London’s relative lawlessness is regularly discussed with shocked disbelief: the murder of a Greek tourist in London, now mere background news in Britain, was a headline story in peaceable, orderly Greece.
As a country on the front line of migratory waves from Western Asia and North Africa, popular opposition to mass migration in Greece is a given — I once had my camera thrown into the sea by angry locals who presumed I was working for an NGO — but the issue has been largely neutralised by the hard approach to extra-European migration displayed by the Right-wing government. The adoption of national-conservative stances has brought none of the liberal opprobrium which targets countries like Hungary; certainly, none of the affluent British tourists crowding the local beaches and tavernas, who would view Farage as a threat to their nation’s deepest values, appears to view Greece as a benighted pariah state.
What passes beyond Greek understanding, then, is the pose of assumed helplessness displayed by British governments: it is generally assumed that in a democracy, for a government to survive, it must do what its voters wish. Nigel Farage’s unveiling this week of Reform’s policy of detention and deportation of illegal migrants represents Britain lurching towards this European mainstream status quo, and not the one which parochial British pro-Europeans would wish it to be. For everything that Farage announced is already being implemented in Greece, under the stern eye of the country’s new Minister for Migration, Thanos Plevris, a convert to Greece’s governing and notionally centre-right National Democracy party from the national-populist LAOS party, far to the right of Reform.
The Greek coastguard has managed to stem the flow of migrant boats from Erdogan’s Turkey, which openly uses migration as a weapon against Greece, by the simple expedient of pushing them back, illegally and often forcefully. It deals with European and NGO criticism by blankly denying it is doing so. Facing a new migration wave from eastern Libya, which overwhelmed the southern island of Crete this summer, the Greek government suspended the right to claim asylum for any migrants arriving from North Africa. In what the Washington Post, with the solipsism of American journalism, describes as the country’s “Trumpian turn”, migrants are now detained on arrival, and held in prison-like internment camps until they can be deported. Those who accept deportation will be sent on their way with a €2,000 stipend: those who refuse face prison terms of between two and five years. In Greece, it is now a criminal offence for NGOs or anyone else to help migrants reach the country’s shores. Such hardline measures balance “the rights of third-country citizens to seek asylum and the right of Greeks, who cannot see boats coming and a government not reacting”, Plevris has declared: “Greek citizens should know that under no circumstances are we going to become a country of open borders or a country where those who come will be welcomed with flowers.”
Like Poland, whose new liberal government suspended asylum claims from its eastern, and now heavily militarised, border in February, Greece’s suspension of the asylum process is taking place within the ECHR which Farage has vowed to leave — in both cases citing the provision for overriding the right to asylum in the event of “in time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. Poland’s confrontation with Belarus, and behind it Russia, eases the process within the context of Europe’s embroilment in the Ukraine war. For Greece and Plevris likewise, the migrant wave from North Africa is an “invasion” and a threat to both Greek and European security. The European Commission’s migration spokesman has merely stated that “We are in close contact with the Greek authorities to obtain necessary information on these measures”, citing Greece’s “exceptional” situation. Indeed, as Greek officials declared to Politico, “neither EU ministers nor the Commission raised any objections regarding the suspension”, but instead “the new Greek legislation has aroused particular interest among [European] ministers, as it is seen as the strictest ever submitted at EU level”.
“Greece’s suspension of the asylum process is taking place within the ECHR”
Returning to Britain’s more parochial debate, it must first be noted that the detention and deportation of irregular migrants is now the stated policy of both conservative opposition parties as well as, credibly or not, the Labour government. The same Farage who a less than a year ago declared he would not be “dragged down the route of mass deportations”, because “it’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people”, is now promising the mass deportation of 600,000 irregular migrants in his first term. The Conservative Party is accusing Reform of “copying its homework”, declaring its ownership of mass deportation as a policy, while the Prime Minister vows: “If you come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return.” The entire framework of Britain’s heated and decades-long migration debate has been changed, perhaps irrevocably. Contrary to the fantasies of the migration extremists who have brought us to this point, Britain’s political parties have not weaved a dark spell of extremism over a pliable electorate, sadly unenlightened by their Bluesky threads. Instead Britain’s politicians have been dragged here, against their will, by a popular anger now uneasily straddling the line with open civil disobedience. As in the old coarse joke, now that the principle has been firmly established, all that remains is to haggle over the details.
And it is the details we may rightly quibble with in Farage’s dramatic announcement. As Poland and Greece have shown, while Reform’s stated policies are provably achievable, it is not necessary to leave the ECHR to do so. Indeed, attempting to do so will likely mire Britain in a second coming of the interminable Brexit crisis, with low-information liberals declaring that the ECHR is all that stands between the ordinary voter and the return of slavery, torture and summary execution that apparently typified British life before 1998. Given the convention’s political importance to Irish Republicans distrustful of unencumbered Westminster rule, leaving its purview would likely return Northern Ireland from its current position of an irrelevant anomaly to its traditional role as a baffling and unresolvable irritant to mainland British governance. As with so much of Britain’s tangled and unhappy relationship with continental legislation, the issue at hand is not so much the ECHR itself, but rather the problem of factions within the Westminster state, in its courts and civil service, using it as an excuse to pursue their own ideological ends against the will of the British people, for decades expressed democratically to no effect, and now in the streets with sudden, startling success.
As the venerable American observer Christopher Caldwell recently observed of Britain’s increasingly unhappy and volatile state, while “Blair enshrined the European Convention of Human Rights in British law and empowered a Supreme Court to vet parliamentary decisions”, the “democratic prerogatives of the British Parliament are almost absolute”, such that “Britain’s proudly (or notoriously) sovereign parliament could abolish these Blairite guardrails in an afternoon”. Both simpler and more transformative than leaving the ECHR, the obvious course open to the now probable incoming Reform government, preparing for a landslide victory, represents something closer to the transition between political regimes than winning an election. It is indeed the reversal of Blair’s own constitutional revolution, now sanctified as an ancient pillar of the state by the apparatchiks it empowered. When even New Labour grandees such as Jack Straw and David Blunkett propose sacrificing the ECHR, we must view it as we would a general’s ceding of an already untenable border fort to preserve his deeper lines of defence.
To preserve the British state, Farage must strike deeper, and return its institutions to democratic control. The alternative to total political reform, as the not-especially excitable historian Robert Tombs observes, is not an endless continuation of Blairite high summer but the gathering stormy clouds of an “English Revolution”, whose ramifications for the British state and the various peoples it claims to represent are impossible to predict. Just as Tombs declares, a period of political transformation “as momentous as the 1832 Reform Act”.
In his Oxfordshire aircraft hanger, unveiling his mocked-up departure board, Farage presents the country, and is himself presented, with the choice between a controlled descent from a disastrous course or an uncontrolled crash landing. The nation’s stability increasingly rests on his unproven ability to take back control, returning Britain from its parochial isolation to the European mainstream. If those who brought us here fear Farage’s course correction to the Britain of the 1990s, the prospect of his failure should frighten them more: if the British state cannot reverse its mistakes, the logic of events will cast them on a far more hostile shore.
