Charities and volunteers who help asylum seekers get to the UK should face potential criminal prosecution, Nigel Farage has said in an interview with a rightwing US podcaster. While the Reform UK leader did not specify which organisations should be targeted, he and other senior Reform figures have been heavily critical of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), which has faced a campaign of intimidation for its work in rescuing asylum seekers in the Channel. Speaking to Benny Johnson, a podcaster who has previously written for a series of rightwing US outlets, including Breitbart News, Farage discussed the arrival of asylum seekers on small boats, calling it “literally an invasion of people who could cause us enormous harm”.
Johnson asked him: “Do you believe in criminal penalties for those who facilitated this invasion of the English Isles?” Farage replied: “Totally, totally. The role of the NGOs, the role of those that are sponsored by taxpayers’ money, because they’re nice, they’re good, they’re kind. They have actually aided and abetted criminality in absolutely every way.
Calling for charities and campaign groups to be prosecuted for their work has echoes of the efforts by the former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to try to cement his grip on power. A Reform spokesperson said Farage’s comments “speak for themselves”. In his conversation with Johnson, Farage repeatedly raised what he said was the issue of Muslim asylum seekers arriving in the UK, citing what the example of Michigan, the US state where rightwing agitators have sought to whip up anti-Muslim feeling.
Farage said: “We are importing into our countries … people who will do us enormous harm, who will change, disrupt our lives in every way, in fact make our way of life potentially unrecognisable.” Saying that European countries such as the UK and France had a greater problem with migration than the US, Farage said if Donald Trump was followed in office by a “weak politician” who did not tackle migration and stand up for “American, English-speaking Christian values” then the consequences would be dire. Farage told Johnson: “If we don’t, this show of yours will be illegal in five or 10 years’ time. Literally, you’ll be banned for hate speech.” Elsewhere in the interview, Farage speculated that five UK nationals arrested near RAF Fairford late last month before being bailed had been undertaking “a dummy run for a proper terrorist attack on UK forces”.
He added: “I’m deeply, deeply shocked that they’re out on bail whilst there are other people in this country who have said things that the establishment now thinks are racist, who are held inside behind bars without, frankly, proper charge. So it’s what we call here two-tier policing.” Farage has a habit of sometimes making his message more robust for rightwing US audiences. He has appeared several times on the web TV show hosted by the disgraced far-right pundit Alex Jones, who was sued by bereaved parents of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones said had been a hoax.
Farage was criticised by some Jewish groups for using these and other US interviews to discuss tropes and conspiracy theories associated with the far right and antisemitism.
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