Had Reform merely announced its intention to suspend the asylum system for an entire parliamentary term, I’d have just ignored it. Even to dignify its policy platform with a response is to enter its alternate universe, in which it’s preparing for government. I prefer, if only fractionally, this universe we’re in, where the party hangs by a thread on the results of a parliamentary inquiry into Nigel Farage’s £5m gift from a disinterested well-wisher.
Had Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, gone on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme merely promising a British version of ICE, I still would have ignored it, not due to complacency, more due to a bone-penetrating despair that anyone, even he, would look at the US’s shadow militia, performing staged acts of unfettered violence and inhumanity, and think: “That looks cool – I bet I could get some political capital out of that.”
However, as Yusuf laid out his arguments, they were so dumb, so random, disconnected, hammy and cliche-riddled, just so unremittingly stupid, that it turned out to be impossible not to react. I cannot let his nonsense slide. It would be an insult to words.
An elderly woman, he said, waited 23 hours for an ambulance and the coroner found this contributed to her death. A Welsh 15-year-old’s educational attainment is below the OECD average. Many young people have to live with their parents into their 30s and 40s because they can’t afford rent. How does any of this relate to asylum seekers? Are they displacing elderly people in ambulance-demand? It seems unlikely, although if they are an immediate fix would be to stop masked gangs surrounding their living quarters and scaring the hell out of them. Those are ethno-nationalist thugs, of course, and nothing to do with Reform.
High private rents, meanwhile, are not driven by asylum seekers, who have no right to work even if they arrive through a formal route, and as for Welsh 15-year-olds … well, we have some data here. They’re underperforming compared with English 15-year-olds, who are above the OECD average, indeed, above every other European nation, except Estonia and Ireland. If migrants destroy educational standards, how is Ireland managing to thrive? Why, with its very low number of asylum seekers, is Slovenia full of 15-year-olds who (no offence) suck at reading?
None of it makes sense because none of it was meant to. It’s bilge punctuated by soothing mantras (“Charity begins at home”, Yusuf repeated), aimed at the half-asleep mind dreaming of a whites-only yesteryear. It had that in common with a Trump rally, but lacked his pizzazz. Reform can’t even do neo-fascist mimicry right.
A word entered my social-media lexicon recently, which I wish I’d never had cause to look up, because I wish it wasn’t so useful: “agnotology” is the deliberate creation of ignorance, confusion and doubt. You can do it with misinformation and fake news, or you can do it with half-truths pouring out of bot factories, then leave an entire body politic tearing chunks out of itself as it seeks to establish whether the discursive environment has been deliberately polluted, or whether people are just mean and wrong nowadays. But you can also do it by simply talking nonsense, which we’ve seen writ large in party conference season and its aftermath.
“Let’s build an impenetrable and state-of-the-art defence dome for £10bn, and call it the Britannia Shield, even though that’s already the name of a Oxfordshire roofing company,” says the party that spent vastly more than that trying and failing to build the HS2 train line. “Let’s stop all refugees coming from everywhere, until the conditions for every single Briton at every conceivable stage of life have been improved,” from the party whose only discernible allegiance is to its billionaire donors.
The policies don’t even matter. Florid, premeditated stupidity is an end in itself, to clog the collective consciousness with nonsense, chase down every citizen who woke up in a good mood, with a scintilla of confidence about the future, and kill their mojo. The only defence is to hold your line. Insist on the difference between truth and untruth; guard your precious mojo with everything you’ve got.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
