Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has predicted during an exclusive GB News interview that there will be further unrest over so-called two-tier policing and accused the Prime Minister of being out of touch with public opinion.
Asked by GB News Political Editor Christopher Hope why he did not condemn the violence in Southampton, Farage said: Because I warned there’d be even more violence unless we took some action. Isn’t it marvellous. Six hundred MPs all come together to say, let’s unite, let’s unite, let’s condemn the far-right thugs, let’s condemn them, but let’s do nothing.”
He added: “The printed documents that have come from the police chiefs, specific instructions not to police people equally. I mean, can you even believe that there it is in black ink in documents handed down. Police officers are trained on this, so of course I condemn all violence. I always have, but what they don’t want to listen to in the Commons is that if you don’t get rid of the perception reality both of two-tier policing, and you finish up with lots and lots of angry young white working-class men.”
On accusations that his response fuelled the unrest, he said: “They will, because they want to avoid the issue. I mean, they can’t even admit we’ve got two-tier policing, but it’s there in black and white. These are the instructions that the police officers are given.
“I’m really sorry, but I have had so many emails in the last 72 hours from serving an ex-police officers telling me about race training, how they’re told you’ve got white privilege, you are part of an institutionally racist organisation, getting history lessons on south Asian history, black history, being lectured to.
“You could argue, well, we had the Macpherson Report, etc. 25 years ago, you could argue that there were embedded still some old attitudes within the police. Let’s take that as being true, for argument’s sake. We have now gone so far the other way that we literally have anti-white discrimination going on in terms of hiring, promotion, and activity on the ground.
“When I did that big video that got all those millions of views, I was quite careful not to blame the police officers themselves too much, because of the culture under which they’re living. A chap spoke on the phone yesterday, he said, ‘You know, my biggest fear as a police officer isn’t facing threats or violence on the streets’. He said we live with that, it’s part of the job. He said it’s somebody making an accusation that I behaved in a way that was racially prejudiced, because that will lead to my immediate suspension, whether it’s true or not.
”There are procedures for this, and if someone says they’ve been stabbed, you, as a police officer, have to physically check. They didn’t do that. They handcuffed him, which is very interesting. What threat did he pose? I am critical, but in their heads is they were attending an incident where racist language had been used, and that was their biggest fear.
“When George Floyd happened, we had Sadiq Khan and many others saying yes, it’s right to express fury and rage, and we had Churchill statue being defaced, the cenotaph being vandalised, statues being torn from their plinths and thrown in docks in Bristol, rioting going on, police officers being injured, they delighted in fury and rage.
“I was very careful. I defy any fair-minded person to watch that video and not be angry, so I wanted to express it as cold rage, not hot anger, not fire and outburst. Cold rage means that you’re boiling inside about it, but you’re not in any way, and you’ve known me long enough, I’ve never, in 35 years of being in politics, advocated people going outside the law, not once.”
Asked if he had “failed the prime minister test”, Farage said: “No. The entire political class, well, 600 of them, were against me yesterday, screaming, shouting. Interesting, actually, the look of fear on their faces.
“Real fear, because they know I’m more in touch with the great British public than they are on this. The great British public are a very fair-minded lot, and they absolutely want everybody that is here legally to be treated equally before the law. They’re getting angrier and angrier. The divisiveness comes from two-tier policing.”
He added: “As a result of DEI policies, as a result of positive discrimination, people are now being employed by the police, promoted within the police, not on their abilities, but on whether they’re filling the right number of quotas.
“If you do that, you necessarily lower the level of quality of policing, and what we are demanding as a party is that DEI is got rid of, everybody’s treated equally and fairly, and promotion comes on merit. Take Hampshire. Southampton was where this appalling murder happened. Whilst Priti Patel was a Conservative Home Secretary, there was published the Hampshire and Isle of Wight race report, and through that a means of literally indoctrinating every police officer that to be accused of racism is worse than being accused of being negligent at doing your duty as a police officer. This all has to go.”
Asked if he had reached out to Henry’s family, he said: “No, I mean, the sister reposted some of Jenrick’s stuff, and the mother, we are going to meet. I don’t know when, but we have agreed to meet.”
He said predicted that there will be more public unrest: “There will be further division. Everything he [Henry Nowak’s father] doesn’t want to happen will happen…I don’t know a single person who hasn’t lost a child, whether it’s through illness or murder or a drowning accident, or whatever, I don’t know a single parent who’s been through those tragedies who would not like to see something done to stop it happening to others.
“On a human level, when he heard the blaring sirens, he must have thought, ‘Thank goodness, help’s at hand’ and he got the opposite. You ask me, as a father – I think all of us are more fearful of our late teenage kids going out and having fun, whether it’s going to a concert, going to the pub, whatever it is. I think we’re all more fearful for our kids going for a night out in our cities now than we’ve ever been, I’m afraid, and I really, really do.
“But I go back to the core point that I believe in my 35 years of being involved in current affairs and politics, I have never seen a time when our political leaders and most of our mainstream media have been more out of touch on their reflection of an incident than they’ve been over the course of the last three days.
“Just to say we must come together, just to say we’ll crack down hard on the far-right, what you have to do is provide solutions. The only solution here is genuine radical change to a perverse agenda that has now swung a pendulum from what may well have been a problem to too far in the other direction, and that is what I’m seeking. And if this goes on through the summer with more riots and more bad behaviour, it’s not inciting it, I want it stopped.
“The violence, I always call it out, but more important than calling out this violence is to try and prevent more of it.”
On the Prime Minister’s accusation that he has whipped up anger, Farage said: “The Prime Minister will accuse anyone that disagrees with his out of touch, out of date, woke agenda of division, of racism, of goodness knows what.
“We have a Prime Minister with his head firmly stuck in the sand, who is a decade behind where public opinion has become on many, many things, and Mr Musk, of course, he expresses things in a certain way, and we know that, and that’s who he is, but it’s the Prime Minister that’s out of touch with the country.
“Musk isn’t going to butt out, he owns X. There are 15 million British people on X. He is not going to butt out. It’s as simple as that. But the Prime Minister, the whole of the front bench, they’re out of touch with the country on this, I promise you.”
