Liars, damned liars and Nigel Farage

How to incite a race riot

In a rare moment of honesty, Donald Trump told Stephanie Grisham, his White House press secretary, how he lied: “Stephanie, as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.”

Unconsciously – or, more terrifyingly, consciously – Trump was echoing the line of Josef Goebbels that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Nigel Farage, Trump’s British imitator, has learned from his master and is now lying to incite sectarian hatred for political gain.

He is busily exploiting the horrible murder of Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, killed by Vickrum Digwa in Southampton.

Digwa stabbed Nowak repeatedly with his Sikh dagger. When the police arrived, Digwa lied so well he might have been a Farage impersonator himself. He was the real victim, he claimed. Nowak had attacked and racially abused him.

The attending officers did not realise that Henry Nowak was dying. They cuffed him and read him his rights. You do not want to think about the fear and desperation going through the poor boy’s mind in his last moments on earth.

In a statement after a judge had dismissed his claims of racism and sent Digwa down for a minimum of 20 years, Henry’s father, Mark Nowak, said his son “should not have died on the streets of Southampton in police custody. The way he was treated was inhumane and degrading.”

Every word was true, and there needs to be the most thorough investigation into the police’s behaviour. Mr Nowak then added.

“We do not want Henry’s murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension.”

Fat chance of that with Nigel Farage around. Before I go any further, I need to say that there may be truth in the allegation that the police imported American anti-racism after the murder of George Floyd. I have written about how badly woke ideas work in the UK here -

And recorded a podcast with the brilliant Tomiwa Owolade, a critic of transplanting US ideas to the rest of the world, here

(For paying subscribers but with free trials)

But you have to prove that Henry Nowak died because of anti-white prejudice rather than because of a terrible mistake by tired and jaded police officers.

I say “you have to prove it”.

But, of course, Farage does not believe in proving anything.

Without shame or evidence, he declared that “all the values and standards of living in a free country where everybody is judged equally before the law have been trashed and thrown away.”

The appropriate response was “rage”.

If that sounds like an incitement to violence, well, the British far right has always been an alliance of snobs and mobs, and gangs of thugs duly pelted police with missiles in Southampton last night.

Farage wasn’t there of course. The snobs always duck for cover when the fists begin to fly.

As egregious a lie was Reform’s attack on Kemi Badenoch. The leader of the Conservative party had risen to the occasion with a dignity Farage could not manage.

“I don’t want to hear about Black Lives Matter, I don’t want to hear about white lives matter. We all matter.

“Enough of this nonsense where we keep separating everybody and splitting people into different groups. We are descending into tribalism. What I do not like is seeing Nigel Farage jump on this issue when he doesn’t do any work, he doesn’t turn up to parliament, he doesn’t take things seriously, but he sees this as an opportunity to grandstand.”

So what did Farage’s Reform do? It pretended that the [black] leader of the Tory party was saying that white lives don’t matter, when she was clearly saying that all lives should matter.

As I mentioned before Farage is under pressure from Elon Musk and the far right. Yesterday he decided that the only way to beat the far right was to follow the example of Musk, Trump and Goebbels and join it.

In truth, it wasn’t a big step to take. I wrote earlier this year about how Farage and his allies in the media were using false accounts of a crime wave to scare the credulous into voting for him.

Lies are easy but the truth is complicated, and so it is a long but, to my mind, essential read. There’s a paywall and free trial. I hope you will consider supporting my journalism by subscribing.

How Farage gets away with murder on crime

One of the great optimistic stories of our time has been the collapse in crime rates since the late 1980s. What sociologists call the “Crime Drop” or the “Great Crime Decline” saw a 77% reduction in car theft, a 60% fall in theft from the person, a 26% fall in burglary, and a 20% fall in assault across Western democracies.

Here in Britain, headline crime (including theft and violence) has fallen by 90% in the 30 years to 2024 according to victim-survey indicators. Even in the United States, the national murder rate has halved.