Meet the most dangerous woman in Britain – if your name’s Nigel Farage | Personal Finance | Finance
Nigel Farage owns the immigration issue today but that could change (Image: Getty)
Farage has momentum, money and a compelling message. He has just published Reform UK’s manifesto for the Welsh Parliament elections, predicting the contest will “put an end to Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership”. It contains crowd-pleasing promises such as income tax cuts and new roads, and there will be many more as the general election approaches. But we all know what his big vote-winning move will be.
Farage owns the issue dominating British politics: immigration. He is the only politician who seems serious about stopping the boats, protecting our borders and fixing our broken asylum system. And the money is flowing. Reform UK received more than £5.4 million in major donations in the last three months of last year, more than any other party.
But gaining power will not be easy. Farage will face unprecedented tactical votes from leftists who hate him. Reform is the party that voters are tactically most likely to vote against, according to a poll by More in Common demonstrations.
Another major threat to Farage now emerges. And it’s coming from a direction no one expected.
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It’s the first time in decades that a Labor home secretary is getting serious about fixing Britain’s immigration system. Her name is Shabana Mahmood and she is the only serious politician in the cabinet.
He has just returned from a trip to Denmark, where he examined one of Europe’s strictest asylum regimes first-hand. The Danes have tightened family reunification rules, restricting permanent residence and requiring immigrants to integrate and contribute before accessing the full welfare state.
And it works. Asylum applications have decreased and immigration is much more tightly controlled.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen aims for “zero asylum” but is not a right-wing populist. Instead he is the leader of the centre-left Social Democratic government.
He framed it as a left-wing policy, arguing that uncontrolled immigration hurts working-class communities the most.
Mahmood wants Britain to learn from this model, even if it means ignoring howls of protest from ‘open border’ Labor activists and metropolitan snobs at The Guardian newspaper.
Farage must have been horrified. Like most European countries, Denmark has its own populist anti-immigration party, the Danish People’s Party. Support exceeded 20% once. Now it is down to just 2.6%.
Mahmood is taking radical action and, if successful, could neutralize immigration as a political issue and with it Farage’s most powerful weapon.
That’s a big “if” of course. Some of his ideas are already controversial. Reform chief Zia Yusuf dismissed proposals to pay some asylum-seeking families up to £40,000 to leave the UK as a “reward for entering illegally”.
Mahmood also faces legal restrictions. He accepts that Britain cannot deport people who cannot apply for asylum to countries deemed unsafe, including Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan, the three biggest sources of asylum claims.
His biggest challenge will come from within his own party. As we know, a disheartened Prime Minister Keir Starmer is likely to make a U-turn at the first whiff of a backbend rebellion. But if he acts tough and immigration falls, Nigel Farage may find his chosen political battleground suddenly looks very different.
Something could save him. Mahmood may be a serious force, but comedians such as Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband dominate. These serial incompetents may still offer the election to Farage.
