The purpose of this article is, somehow, to raise the debate on immigration away from personalities to actual policy as mainstream political parties, and now Reform, are just not talking about it. They are not prepared to define either the problem or the solution. In fact it has become increasingly obvious that they don’t want members engaged in policy debate at all. Much of the dismay voiced over social media about Reform chairman Zia Yusuf and his influence on Nigel Farage is surmise but what seems crystal clear at the grassroots level is that he has effectively shut the members out of anything more than cheerleading. My local chairman, for one, resigned in total frustration at his lack of communication. Signs that all was not right go back to last summer.
LAST September my TCW article ‘Patriots of the world unite – behind Reform’, in which I described my British identity as being deeply entwined in our culture and history, proved popular with my local Reform party chairman and he proposed sending it to local members, but the nominating officer for the party (a close associate of Nigel Farage) blocked it for frankly flimsy reasons. Was I off-message? Somewhat disquieted, I then wrote ‘What to do about immigration? Reform must spell it out’ as I was concerned at the lack of a policy to deal with immigration.
Farage has since unsettled many Reform stalwarts with his seemingly soft messages on immigration and culture, and a reluctance to deal with demographics.
In an interview with Steven Edgington, for example, he said: ‘It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people. We simply can’t do it‘, stating that it was not even his political ambition to do so. When he was asked if he was concerned that in the last 20 years the white British population has declined from 87 per cent to 74 per cent, he simply replied ‘No’.
In an interview with Winston Marshall, Farage elaborated this position: ‘We have a Muslim population growing by about 75 per cent every ten years . . . if we politically alienate the whole of Islam we will lose . . . by 2050 goodness knows what kind of a terrible state we are going to be in.’ Rather than seeing the cultural and political threat to the country’s democracy and way of life this poses, a concern that a poll last year showed more than half of Tory voters share, he appeared more worried about alienating future Muslim voters.
By contrast, Rupert Lowe MP has consistently proved the stronger voice on problems arising from Islamification. Last May he spoke about the ‘large amounts of the Muslim population voting on religious lines’. After the election he told GB News that he was concerned that the UK could become an Islamist country.
On immigration, he has advocated tougher solutions. Reform, meanwhile, are just not talking about it. They are not prepared to define either the problem or the solution. Reform’s refusal – joining with mainstream media, political parties and Whitehall – to debate this openly, discouraging discussion of necessary solutions to immigration, has disappointed, if not infuriated, many of its core supporters, leaving us feeling that the future of our country is out of control, rendering us helpless. That is exactly how the powers that be want us – frightened and submissive.
Lowe, however, has refused to be silenced before and after Reform suspended him on bullying accusations. Most recently, on March 22, he set out his own proposed practical solutions to resolve the immigration crisis, such as a voluntary scheme with generous allowances for certain individuals to leave, foreign aid suspension, refusal of visas, use of taxation, enforcement of tariffs and visa expirations, reform of indefinite leave to remain, longer times to apply for British citizenship and deportation of legal migrants who refuse to speak English, claim benefits but are not contributing and so on. All of which deserve open and honest debate, unimpeded by fears of racism or islamophobia accusations.
In an interview with Julia Hartley-Brewer a few days before, when asked if it was policy differences that caused Lowe to have the whip removed, Farage had said: ‘Deporting whole communities some of whom were born in Britain, is, how shall I put it, diplomatically, tricky‘. What Lowe actually said was: ‘If a foreign national family member knew that their husband or brother was raping young white girls, repeatedly, and failed to act? Then yes, they should be deported. I make no apologies for stating that. If that means thousands go, that means thousands go.’
Ironically, this happens to be Reform’s policy too. Reform, in ‘Our Contract With You‘, stated they would withdraw citizenship from immigrants who commit crime with the exception of some misdemeanour offences.
Lowe has made it clear that he thinks deporting illegal migrants as they arrive is nowhere near enough and that all illegal migrants who are already here must be deported: ‘That is the real challenge, one that has been entirely ignored for too long. We must have the courage to do what needs to be done.’
In an interview with Peter Whittle of New Culture Forum a few weeks ago he set his thinking out in detail: ‘What’s happened is our immigration is out of control – both legal and illegal. So the first thing we have to do is deal with the illegals – they have to go . . . they should be detained and deported . . .
‘Foreign prisoners – 10,000 we now know how many – they should be deported . . . the penalty is, if you come illegally you will never be allowed legally.
‘Then you have got too much legal immigration which causes a much bigger problem . . . you need zero net immigration – and that is not great if you are losing your best people. There are lots of good people who come in but then I think there are so many who are strongly of the view that their culture is better than the Christian culture that they are coming to that they continue to live their lives in the way they want to live their lives – they may work effectively, but they are not integrating, they are not living by our rules. They are not effectively accepting our culture, they still want their own culture.’
Farage and Lowe have also crossed swords over the Muslim grooming gang cover-up scandal. Elon Musk’s tweet that Reform needed a new leader must have been highly embarrassing for Farage, as was his apparent endorsement of Lowe as a possible replacement. In an interview with Dan Wootton, Lowe pondered on whether his suspension was ‘because Nigel thought I was getting too powerful [or] because Zia Yusuf thought I was talking too much about deportation or mass deportation, or the Pakistani rape gangs?’ He said he simply didn’t know.
What has not been lost on Reform members is that Farage has notcarried out his pledge that the party would launch their own inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal if Labour refused to investigate themselves. Now Lowe, in an astute political move, has launched his own rape gang inquiry, with a crowd-funder which has reached an amazing £500,000 in just over a week since he set it up.
If that is not a clear sign of public concern over the issue I don’t know what is.
Farage has complained about what he alleges to be the ‘overt racism‘ he says has been shown online to a senior member of Reform, who I think we can assume is the chairman. This plays straight into the calls for Islamophobia laws when any opposition to Islam is conflated as racist.
Islam, with all its issues, is the poster boy for concerns about immigration in general, but we should not let that occlude the wider debate on the sheer numbers of people of the Islamic faith coming into our country with the myriad problems that this is giving rise to, including what appear to be endemic rape gangs. Rupert Lowe seems prepared to address this. It is less clear that Nigel Farage is.
Lowe’s approach seems to be to restore Britain to something more like it used to be, with reasonable expectations that our long-established culture will be able to survive. Reform’s fast progress stalled with l’affaire Lowe, and although it has picked up somewhat my hunch is that it will stay that way until they come up with a robust immigration policy. That, as far as I can see, is the way to win the next general election.
