“What I do know is that something is going terribly wrong in our once beautiful country.” Nigel Farage doesn’t go as far as identifying exactly what that is, so we are left to surmise, and speculate. “I just wonder if the truth is being withheld from us,” he asks, rhetorically, in the aftermath of the Southport killings, and with a disingenuous air of innocent inquiry. It is, of course, anything but innocent, and his echo of the mob’s inchoate chant – “We want our country back” – is entirely deliberate.
I want my country back, too. I want the values of respect and inclusion to be prized above all others again. I want us to continue to welcome fellow humans who, through an accident of birth, live in mortal danger. And I want the response to a mass killing of unimaginable horror to be measured and sensitive, and respectful of those who have suffered.
Instead we get chaos, disorder and bigotry. The unrest we have seen on our streets over the past two nights I believe can be directly traced back to Farage. And to Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins,........