What a Black Sheep Joke Tells Us About Nigel Farage

One criminal act should not indict a whole community.

As a schoolboy, I crossed the border between Scotland and England every day to go to school. Perhaps that’s why the joke below caught my ear. But it’s the lesson it taught me about how easily some people leap to false conclusions that made it stick in my mind.

Here’s that joke: An artist, an engineer and a mathematician are in a car driving from London to Edinburgh. As they cross the border, they spot a black sheep in one of the fields they are passing and the artist shouts, “Look! The sheep in Scotland are black.” The engineer laughs and responds, “You artists are so imprecise! All you can say for sure is that ONE of the sheep in Scotland is black.” The mathematician rolls her eyes and quietly says, “Actually, all you can say for sure is that current evidence suggests there is at least one sheep in Scotland and that at least one side of it is black.”

That joke came back to me this week when Fayaz Khan, a 26-year-old Afghan migrant who arrived in the UK by small boat, was found guilty of threatening to kill Nigel Farage in a TikTok video. The threat was real and disturbing. Farage described it as “chilling” and said he was “genuinely worried”. Khan is now rightly facing the consequences of his actions.

But it’s Farage’s response to the conviction that I want to focus on. Farage immediately asked on social media: “How many more of these people are we letting into our country every single day?” One man’s crime became a suggestion that ALL migrants arriving by small boat are potential killers. One black sheep, and suddenly the entire flock must be the same.

From Individual Crime to Mass Condemnation

If you missed the story, Khan posted a video in October 2024 after Farage highlighted him in a YouTube video titled “the journey of an illegal migrant,” which referenced “young males of fighting age coming into our country about whom we know very little”. Khan responded with threats, saying “I’m coming to England. I’m going to pop, pop, pop” while making gun gestures and pointing to an AK-47 tattoo on his face. The jury found him guilty after nearly twelve hours of deliberation and yesterday he was sentenced to five years in prison.

This is a straightforward criminal case: one person made a threat, was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced. That’s the justice system working exactly as it should. But Farage is using this conviction to argue that Khan should be deported and to ask the question - his standard tactic when he’s on shaky logical, moral or legal ground - why “we” are letting “these people” into the country. The singular becomes plural. The individual becomes the group.

Farage doesn’t see the issue through the lens of justice. He sees it as an opportunity to boost a narrative in which one man’s crime justifies sweeping conclusions about an entire community. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of seeing one black sheep and declaring the whole flock black.

The Danger of Political Opportunism

Farage knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s been building this narrative for months, if not years. In August, he unveiled “Operation Restoring Justice,” calling for the deportation of up to 600,000 asylum seekers, including women and children, and pledging to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (something that would deny all of us - not just immigrants - important legal rights). He described small boat arrivals as “an invasion” and warned of a “genuine threat to public order”.

Now Khan’s conviction hands him a perfect case study - a violent threat from someone who crossed the Channel. Never mind that between 2018 and 2024, the asylum grant rate for people arriving by small boat was 68%, suggesting that most are genuine refugees - people determined by Home Office experts to have met the strict criteria set out in international conventions and domestic law…people our country has voluntarily agreed to protect by signing various international treaties. But, for Farage, one criminal proves the narrative.

This is how populism works: find an extreme individual case, amplify it relentlessly, and use it to justify policies that would affect the many who have done nothing wrong. Farage’s plan would abandon the UK’s decades-long commitment not to send people to places where they face torture or death. When pressed about this, he said: “We cannot be responsible for all the sins that take place around the world”. The lives of hundreds of thousands - most of whom have never threatened anyone - are reduced to collateral damage in a dark political strategy.

The Presumption We Must Resist

Here’s what makes this moment so dangerous: we’re being asked to accept that Khan’s crime is representative rather than exceptional. We’re being told that his actions reveal something about asylum seekers as a class. That’s precisely the logic the black sheep joke warns us against.

When a British citizen commits a violent crime, we don’t question whether all British citizens should have their rights curtailed. We treat it as what it is: one person’s actions. But when someone who crossed the Channel commits a crime, suddenly it becomes evidence of a systemic problem requiring mass deportations and the shredding of international human rights commitments.

The difference isn’t the crime - it’s who committed it. And that should alarm us.

What Justice Actually Requires

Justice means dealing with Khan as an individual. He threatened an MP. He was prosecuted. He was convicted. The system is working. The Crown Prosecution Service said: “We will make sure that those who seek to intimidate [elected politicians] face the full force of the law”. That’s appropriate.

What’s not appropriate is using this case to argue for detention facilities on military sites holding 24,000 people, mass arbitrary deportations, and withdrawal from the Refugee Convention. What’s not appropriate is the suggestion that because Khan committed a crime, the hundreds of thousands of people who crossed the Channel in desperate circumstances should be detained and deported without proper asylum hearings.

As Open Britain and many other organisations have been at pains to point out in recent months, the UK co-founded the ECHR in reaction to the horrors of WW2, to give ordinary people tools to protect their rights, in normal times but especially when tyrants take power. These protections exist precisely to prevent governments from using individual cases to justify collective punishment. They force us to treat people as individuals, not as members of categories some tyrant has decided are threatening.

The Lesson of the Black Sheep

That old joke taught me a lifelong lesson to be careful about generalisation. One observation doesn’t justify a sweeping conclusion. One criminal act doesn’t prove a community is criminal. One black sheep doesn’t mean the whole flock is black. We’ve all learned that lesson one way or another.

Farage is betting that we’ll forget that lesson - that we’ll let fear override logic, that we’ll accept that Khan’s crime proves something about all asylum seekers. We shouldn’t forget that lesson. Khan’s actions were his own. He’s facing justice for them. It is our duty now to stand firm, to maintain our principles and ensure we never accept Farage’s dangerous desire to normalise the collective punishment of thousands for the crimes of one.

👉 Now, before you go, please take a second to click the ‘like’ button at the top of this article (heart icon) and the ‘restack’ button beside it (circular arrows) - it costs you nothing and tells Substack that our readers value our work.

If you have thoughts prompted by this piece - positive or negative - please do leave a comment (click the speech bubble icon). Short and sweet or long and challenging, we read ALL comments we receive and respond to as many as we can.

And, finally, if you want to be first to read future articles, just click the ‘Subscribe now’ button below and select the ‘free’ option. (We don’t hide ANY of our articles behind the paywall - even our free subscribers get them all.)

Many thanks! 🙏