In the last week of August 2025, Nigel Farage learned what he must have long suspected: that there is nothing so disgusting that he can’t say for fear of being challenged by the Prime Minister.
For this was the week that Nigel Farage finally said out loud what it’s long been obvious he believes.
It’s not that he believes other people’s problems – even if that means being murdered by their own government – are not ours to worry about. Plenty of people believe that.
It’s that he believes we should have no qualms about sending them back to their deaths even after they’ve come to us for protection.
And the Prime Minister of this country doesn’t feel able to tell him, and more importantly tell British voters, that that is plain wrong.
Not just wrong. Evil.
So it gets heard. It gets repeated. It gets amplified. Our so-called leaders let it pass by in silence. And it gets legitimised.
Yes, you might get the occasional Cabinet member calling this policy proposal by Reform, or that suggestion by the Tories, “unethical”.
But never as the main thrust of their response. Always buried beneath other words. As if the main problem with evil deeds is that they’re impractical.
If slavery were invented today, would the Labour government call it “impractical”?
If torture were invented today, would the Labour government call it “ineffective”?
If child labour were invented today, would the Labour government call it “poor value for money”?
As for Farage, if he’s happy to send innocent people to their deaths, why stop there? Why not throw people back in the sea once they’ve climbed aboard the ship that rescued them? Why not force them back into a burning building once they’ve escaped? Why not just kill them yourself?
But this isn’t about Farage. We know what Farage is.
This is about Labour and the huge vacuum where leadership should be.
In fairness, there are honourable people in the party who have spoken out. Ben Goldsborough, MP for South Norfolk, wrote an article this week which condemned Farage in the strongest terms and didn’t shy away from questions of ethics and morality.
Not long ago Ben Goldsborough’s message would have been standard fare for any mainstream politician of any political hue.
And yet it stood out for how at odds it was with the tone set by his party leadership.
There may be many reasons why the Labour leadership might stay so quiet on matters of good and evil which run much deeper than just being terrible at comms.
There are some in Labour who see “progressives” as the enemy (as if wanting to save lives made you “progressive”), and all this as so much woke nonsense. The MAGA-lite, chums-with-Bannon, brigade of Maurice Glasman and his fellow travellers, who clearly have way too much influence on Starmer.
I suspect there are others who just don’t have the courage to speak out. Easier to hide in the crowd, even when you’re a minister.
But there may be those who just don’t see it. Who have been completely immunised from a basic sense of right and wrong by the political discourse of the last few years.
In some ways they’re the ones who worry me the most. They’re the ones who the Farages of this world, with their talk of “remoralising” the young, with their deluge of unchallenged propaganda and lies, surely see as templates for the politicians and electorate of the future.
Three years ago, at a time when the Tory leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss was descending rapidly into the deepest of gutters, I wrote this piece for West Country Voices about the “normalisation of the unthinkable”.
Since then, the unthinkable has been mainstreamed. The frenzy of the last few weeks; the baying for blood of most of the broadcast and print media; the incitement to violence by elected politicians; the spectacle of former foreign secretaries lining up to say we should leave the ECHR; this is where we’ve been heading now for many years.
The Tory governments of recent memory may be the ones who set us so firmly on this path to losing our humanity. But it’s Starmer’s government, when the country hesitated last summer, ready to turn back, which shoved us on down that path by offering not a murmur of protest and not a word about good and evil.
