Farage and Lowe are Fanning the Flames Again

Farage's 'white lives matter' speech shows the far-right death spiral in action

I wrote last week that Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe are dragging Britain down a sort of “death spiral.” As they spar for the keys to the far-right kingdom – a largely online realm of ethno-nationalists – they’re dragging the rest of us down with them.

Farage provided us with an excellent case study of the cycle in action this week. His ‘emergency address’ on Tuesday saw him plumb new depths of depravity – almost certainly an appeal to the far-right fervour brewing amongst Lowe’s tribe.

The Reform leader is caught in a storm of questions about his crypto benefactors and the past conduct of his Makerfield candidate. But of course he didn’t address any of that. The “emergency,” Farage tells us, is that white people are under attack.

Despite passionate pleas for civility from the victim’s family, Farage weaponised the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak by a Sikh man. He presented the police’s poor response to the murder as iron clad evidence of “two-tier policing” and “anti-white prejudice.” He called out for a response of “pure, cold rage”, telling the public that “White Lives Matter.”

It’s an escalation on an existing theme. Reform has been on a crusade against so-called “two-tier policing” for some time. The concept is, of course, completely ridiculous. This country is notoriously quick to round up Palestine protestors and surprisingly lenient with events like Tommy Robinson’s recent hate parade. Not that facts hold any power here.

The other false insinuation, other than police being biased against white people, is that this kind of violence is inexorably linked to migration. Sikhs, interestingly, have traditionally been a sort of model minority for many on the right – Tommy Robinson has repeatedly praised the Sikh community – but it would appear that desperate times call for someone new to be thrown under the bus.

Farage’s address teleported me back to late 2010s and early 2020s. When I was living in Texas, ‘White Lives Matter’ was a rallying cry for neo-Confederates and other unsavoury types. It was then a direct response to the growing Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and it paired up neatly with silly arguments about “white genocide” and calls to make America a white ethnostate.

Farage's comparison of Henry Nowak to George Floyd was particularly revealing. When Floyd's murder ignited the Black Lives Matter movement, Farage treated it as a dangerous cultural contagion and compared its activists to the Taliban. Now he reaches for the same imagery himself.

So in summary: Farage’s rhetoric is often couched in dog-whistles, a subtle game of winks and nods. But this one was more like a racist fog horn. The radical Restore Britain gang have been castigating the Reform leader for his perceived weakness on identity politics - and this seems like an attempt to tell them that he’s heard them.

So Lowe, of course, had to go further. Restore Britain pledged that it would summarily execute Nowak’s killer Vickrum Digwa and deport his “foreign family.”

“Laws will change, the country will change, everything will change,” Lowe wrote on X. Elon Musk quoted his tweet, adding that “it is this or death.”

In the wake of the frenzy, the far-right descended on the streets of Southampton where eleven police officers were injured. The publicity around Nowak’s murder has been like jet fuel, Neo-Nazis and Tommy Robinson’s clique leveraging the scandal as a recruitment tool.

We’ve seen the violence that can erupt from this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric – it can very easily spill out into the streets. Once politicians start telling people that they are victims of a vast conspiracy against them, that the authorities are covering up the truth, and that the country is being stolen from them, it becomes increasingly difficult to control what happens next.

For Farage and Lowe, those drastic potential consequences are completely secondary to their battle for control over the rising populist tide. They don’t really care.

The danger of the "two-tier policing" narrative is that it can easily become self-reinforcing. If far-right activists are arrested, that supposedly proves the authorities are targeting them. If they are left alone, it proves the authorities are weak. Either way, the grievance carries on.

Farage and Lowe both benefit from a political environment in which every confrontation, every arrest and every public controversy can be folded back into the same story of victimhood and betrayal.

Without a fundamental rethink to our political system, this kind of race-based politics will just get more and more normalised. Reform and Restore’s race to the bottom this week has seen the national media talking about “two-tier policing.” The public discourse is shifting towards their framing of the world.

I wrote last week that putting an end to this death spiral once and for all will involve bringing back mutual trust. To build a democratic counter force that can win hearts and minds, relegating extremists back to the fringes of politics.

But to do that will require a confrontation with a broken system. A system that fails to solve people’s actual problems, ignores entire blocs of voters, and bends to the whims of uber-wealthy bankrollers like Elon Musk and Christopher Harborne.

Until that day, the far-right cascade will continue.