Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s new opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems.

• David Cameron: The unlikely villain who casually killed the Conservative Party
• Tony Blair: A sincere deceiver who broke Britain’s trust on migration
• Andrew broke our bond with the monarchy and put the Royal Family at risk
• Dominic Cummings: A human wrecking ball who shows no guilt

In spring 1994, in one of his first acts as a politician, Nigel Farage wrote to Enoch Powell and asked him to help his campaign. In that moment, if we had chosen to pay attention, we could have learned everything we needed to know about the man who would come to define British politics.

Farage had just become a founding member of the UK Independence Party (Ukip) before he contested Eastleigh in a 1994 byelection. He didn’t make much of a stir at the time, winning just 952 votes. But in the heat of the campaign he sent a letter to Powell asking for his support. Powell declined. Undeterred, Farage invited him to stand as a Ukip candidate in the European parliamentary elections the following year and then in the 1997 general election.

This was not an accident. As Farage later made clear, Powell is his political hero. “I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all,” he said. “Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got”.

This is the key to Farage. He is Powell, with a cannier grasp of how to stay just within the bounds of acceptable opinion.

Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech is famous for the vicious racist imagery it engaged in: “… The black man will have the whip hand over the white man… I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” But when you extract that imagery, you find the framework of Farage’s modern day political position.

Powell offered warnings of an immigration emergency: “the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history”. He used similiarly hysterical language deployed by Farage, who at the end of this summer warned that “we really are in very, very big trouble in this country”. Powell advocated for the “re-emigration” of immigrants, which Farage now pursues as “mass deportation”. Powell suggested that immigrants were being “elevated into a privileged or special class”, which Farage today calls “two-tier” policing.

He is less the inspiration for Farage’s political agenda than its co-author. Faragism is the continuation of Powellism, with a marginally more respectable PR operation. It acts to spread hatred and fear, to validate prejudice against those who look or sound different, to diligently reach the very worst instincts of voters and set them free.

The greatest victims of his work are immigrants, whose lives have been made immeasurably worse than they would otherwise have been. But the second set of victims are the British........

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