Nigel Farage and the British Battle over Immigration

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

It seems that Nigel Farage has again become the man of the hour in British politics. The politician behind the 2016 Brexit referendum that saw the United Kingdom leave the European Union is back. His Reform UK Party is surging in the polls as the crisis over immigration and refugees has reached a boiling point in the country. For them, immigration isn’t just one policy among many. It is an existential question.

At the party’s annual conference in Birmingham this month Farage announced that he would be launching a new “Department of Preparing for Government.” He told members to “be ready” for a possible early general election in 2027.

So what’s going on? Reform UK has now been ahead in the polls for almost half a year. It marks the longest time that a party outside Labour or the Conservatives has led in the polls this long. Reform UK has consistently been averaging 30 to 31per cent, enough to put it well ahead of all its rivals. If an election were held now, it would be the largest party by far, albeit probably short of an overall majority.

Dissatisfaction with the state of the country certainly underpins support for Farage. Among those whose current party preference is Reform UK, a remarkable 89 per cent, according to Ipsos, are pessimistic about the prospects for the economy.

But it really comes down to immigration. According to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 81 per cent of those who voted Reform UK in last year’s general election believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country’s culture and 73 per cent feel that migrants have been bad for the country’s economy.

Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system made the 2024 election the least proportional general election in British history. Labour won a landslide 411 seats and a 174-seat majority with just 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest of any majority party on record. While Reform UK won just five seats, it gained 14.3 per cent of the vote, the third-highest vote share, ahead of the Liberal Democrats and Greens. As well, 900 Reform UK councillors won seats in this May’s local elections.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government still sees the nation as an artifice that stands in the way of “international cooperation.” Only very reluctantly will they turn off the tap on the flow of migrants. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, under their new leader, Kemi Badenoch, seem to be ideologically incoherent, while scared silly by Farage’s momentum.  They are fighting for their electoral lives for the support of anti-immigration, socially conservative British voters, who are now moving towards Farage.

That’s because after Brexit, the UK government of then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson opened the door to the rest of the world. In total, 4.5 million people arrived in Britain between 2021 and 2024, primarily from India, Nigeria and China. One in every 25 people living in Britain today came during that four-year window.  

And they coincided with a spike in illegal migration, as tens of thousands of asylum seekers also entered Britain every year, many sailing from France on flimsy dinghies. Legal immigration is still running at a pace of just under half a million a year, nearly twice the pre-Brexit average. Illegal boat crossings are also on a record pace so far this year.

While Britain left the EU, it remains a member of the European Convention on Human Rights. Farage has vowed to leave the ECHR if elected, which he says would allow Britain to deport migrants deemed to be in the country illegally. Reform UK says it would freeze most migration and deport those who arrive illegally.

William Galston, Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, reminds us in “Liberalism Without Illusions,” published in the summer 2025 issue of the journal Democracy, that liberals “often suffer from the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.”

But this is a major error, he contends. Today’s populists know better. They battle their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture. They oppose most immigration, not only on economic grounds, but also because immigrants can challenge, and over time change, long-established cultural traditions and norms.

Liberals consider national boundaries and loyalties as forms of irrationality. But most people in democracies still value attachments to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family, and compatriots. “This does not mean that we can ignore the suffering of refugees, but the responses required of us may be limited,” Galston maintains. Disregarding such attachments “is inapplicable to the real world of politics.” His views certainly apply to today’s slow-motion political earthquake in Great Britain.

Just a few weeks before last year’s general election, Farage made a surprising decision to run for office. Other than Brexit, he had a long track record of political near misses. He had lost seven previous tries to get a seat in the House of Commons. This time he was elected. That battle was about laying down a marker for next time, he remarked. This spring, Starmer admitted Reform UK is the “real opposition.” For Farage, the situation seems like manna from heaven.

 

Eastern Mediterranean Countries Watch the Gaza War

 By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Three months before he was assassinated by Israel last September, Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened to strike Cyprus if it allowed Israel to use the island’s air bases or other military facilities during a future war in Lebanon.

His threat was not random -- the country has long maintained close economic, political and strategic ties with Israel, much to Hezbollah’s irritation. In recent years, it has hosted multiple joint air defence drills and annual special forces exercises with Israel focused on potential threats from Hezbollah and Iran. The two countries have a defence cooperation program, and Cyprus also has a defence attaché in Israel as part of what it calls “active defence diplomacy.”

Of course, when we say “Cyprus,” we mean the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, which actually controls only the southern, ethnically Greek part of the island. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has been a de facto state ever since the Turkish invasion of 1974 that partitioned the country.

And since the two parts of the island have also caused Greece and Turkey to remain at odds, this has had wider ramifications in the eastern Mediterranean. There is an additional cooperation agreement between Cyprus, Greece and Israel, which, Cyprus maintains, is aimed at “strengthening peace, stability and security in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

Greek Cyprus is also home to two large sovereign British military bases, and it is obligated to help ensure the security of these facilities. In January 2024, the Cypriot government affirmed its neutrality and non-involvement in any foreign military operations, after aircraft launched from the British base at Akrotiri participated in counterstrikes against Yemen’s Houthis, who were attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides reaffirmed a few months later that his country was not involved in the conflicts “in any way.”

Still, the Akrotiri base has been extensively used in facilitating air transport of military supplies to Israel during the Gaza war. The American military has also used the island to transport assistance to the war-torn territory. So commercial shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean could be directly threatened or caught in the crossfire. Even the Houthis could conceivably launch solidarity attacks at targets, including Cyprus, given their long-range suicide drones and missiles.

While Greece, Cyprus, and Israel have strengthened their ties through formal agreements, the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran in June served as a major endurance test for this evolving trilateral partnership. In the lead-up to Operation Rising Lion, the Israeli name for the attack on Iran, Greece and Cyprus served as pivotal civilian air hubs. Hours before Israel’s assault, its entire civil airline fleet was quietly relocated from Israeli to Greek and Cypriot airports, to protect Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel’s main airport, from potential Iranian retaliation and to guarantee emergency evacuation routes in case of airspace closure. Though reportedly unaware of the full rationale behind the sudden influx, Athens and Nicosia permitted the landings, despite increasing their own exposure to the threat of retaliation.

While much of the international community distanced itself from Israel amid the Gaza and Iran conflicts, Athens and Nicosia sought to actively mediate, aiming to contain escalation without equivocation about Israel’s right to self-defence. On June 14, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, held a direct call with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, while Cypriot President Christodoulides revealed that Iran had asked Cyprus to deliver a message to Israel.

Greece and Cyprus value the strategic relationship they have cultivated with Israel to counterbalance Turkey. For Israel, the reliability of Greece and Cyprus confirmed the relevance of the trilateral alignment. Israeli Ambassador to Greece, Noam Katz, captured this sentiment in an interview June 21, underlining the broader extent of this relationship:

“The Greece–Israel friendship is based on shared values and interests. We face common challenges and opportunities for the inter-connectedness of Indo-Pacific and Europe, and we maintain open channels of communication. Even where we may disagree, Greece is a friend. A very good friend.”

Greece, Cyprus, and Israel have advocated for greater U.S. involvement to strengthen their alignment in what is known as the “3+1” mechanism, established in 2019 during a trilateral summit in Israel with then-U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo alongside leaders from the three states. Cyprus and Israel view this as an opportunity to bolster American priorities such as the Abraham Accords, the agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.   

On the other hand, Turkey’s support for Hamas has dimmed any possibility of rapprochement with Israel, so Turkish Northern Cyprus is increasingly viewed by Israel as a potential military threat, and a hub for intelligence activity and coercive operations by Turkish security forces. According to Western intelligence, drone and missile bases in Kyrenia and Famagusta (Girne and Gazimagusa in Turkish) pose a direct ballistic threat to Israel.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “Blue Homeland” (Mavi Vatan) doctrine calls for aggressive use of the Turkish navy to assert sovereignty in disputed areas of the Aegean. Turkish vessels routinely challenge Greek and Cypriot ones, even in their own exclusive economic zones. Disputes over maritime boundaries and energy exploration rights have led to heightened tensions in contested waters. So, as long as the expression “the enemy of your enemy is your friend” holds true, the “3+1” relationship will endure.