Politics: fun time with Farage

By Richard North - March 27, 2025

Despite his many commitments, Farage does find time in his busy schedule to attend the Commons, seen yesterday (pictured) addressing a near deserted chamber during a debate on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill.

The Bill was introduced to the House on 30 January and has passed through its first four stages, bringing it to the Report Stage where the House was considering detailed amendments to a Bill which had already been approved in principle.

But this was the point at which Farage chose to intervene, but not with any comments on the current business. Instead, he chose to regale those few MPs who had bothered to turn up with a spirited rendition of his own preferences.

“We even go for a few pints in a pub, we have a punt on the horses and I am even tempted to have the odd doughnut – I know; that is perhaps the naughtiest of all”, he told them, then declaring the reason for his intervention with the startling observation that “We want to have fun”.

This completely irrelevant point was quickly passed over and contributed nothing to the debate – effectively wasting the time of the House. But it was not time wasted for Farage.

He was using the Commons in exactly the same way he used to use the European Parliament, exploiting the camera record to produce a short video clip for social media and YouTube, all to keep his adoring followers entertained and increase his personal profile.

As it happens, Farage has been getting some mileage out of the “fun” theme lately, the day before his intervention in the Commons having had published an authored piece in The Sun headed: “‘Anti-fun’ Labour is affecting our day-to-day lives with nanny-state agenda… no wonder voters are turning to us”.

Timed to appear (in the print edition) at the same day that Farage stood up for this rare appearance in the House, his piece observed: “Whether they’re slapping new levies on casinos and bookmakers or strangling pubs in red tape, politicians seem to forget how their ideology affects our day-to-day lives”.

We then got the expanded version of the headline, as he concluded “It’s no wonder Labour voters are turning to us. Reform UK is the only party serious about protecting your right to enjoy a pint, a cigarette and to stick a tenner on a football match”.

All jolly good fun, one might think, except that, in another place – as the quaint tradition goes for referring to the House of Lords – Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology at Oxford University, was talking to the Lords’ economic affairs committee on a subject of very great interest to most Reform supporters – and the growing band of ex-supporters.

This was picked up by the online Telegraph, with the headline summarising the thrust of Harper’s evidence. “Britain ‘must rely on immigration’ to compensate for falling birth rate”, it declared, with the sub-head declaring: “Rise in older mothers and one-child households leaves UK at risk of population decline”.

In detail, Harper is saying that the replacement rate of at least 2.1 children per mother, which the UK needs to sustain its population, is unlikely to ever return. Thus, she says, the UK and other ageing nations must turn to foreign-born mothers to boost population growth,

This is precisely the sort of mindless clatter that we’ve been hearing for years from academics and fellow travellers, and it is why we need switched-on politicians to counter these short-term and shallow nostrums which are threatening the continued existence of the UK as a coherent state.

In this particular case, we have Harper seeking to “boost population growth”, as if this was a good thing in this overcrowded island which would benefit from the removal of ten million unwanted and under-producing immigrants and their descendants.

Further, to back up her assertion that the replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother “is unlikely to ever return”, we see cited details of the official fertility rate in England and Wales, which is at a record low of 1.44 births per woman, with the number of children born to British mothers having fallen by a quarter in 15 years.

But Harper neglects to point out that this figure reflects the catastrophic fall in the live birth rate for indigenous white women, while immigrant fertility is in the other of 2.0-2.5 births per woman, or even higher in some communities.

The white population, therefore, is reproducing at well below the replacement rate, while immigrant community populations are set to expand, increasing the proportion of the immigrant stock to the point where the indigenous white population is expected to assume minority status any time from 2030 to 2050.

Continued immigration, therefore, can only accelerate this process, yet we have this brainless academic blathering about unspecified population “decline”, when the real issue is the extinction of the indigenous population.

In this, it should not go without comment that the catastrophic decline in the birth rate for white women coincides with the onset of mass migration at its current, unprecedented rate.

The decline has been driven by pressure on housing stock from increased immigration, which has forced up house prices and rentals to unsustainable levels, depriving young [breeding] families of the basic requisites for starting a family.

Add to this, the growing lawlessness and insecurity in the public sphere, and the financial disincentives that attend starting a family – many of which do not apply to immigrant couples, who have lower expectations and more generous state support – and it hardly surprising that the indigenous breeding rate is collapsing.

Therefore, what we need to see in policy terms is not a call for more immigration, but a bundle of incentives – social and financial – to encourage the indigenous population to breed.

As to a declining population, I struggle to understand why this is bad. In an increasingly mechanised and automated world, for as far back as I can remember, there have been concerns about the number of “useless mouths”, the increasing proportion of the population for which no jobs could be found.

Yet, still we hear the siren calls for more migration, to make up for the shortfall in labour, when those continuing processes of mechanisation and automation can fill the gaps. What migration does, is delay the development of automated processes, creating the very problem it is intended to solve.

But there is another issue here, brought up in a social media comment, which observes that, it is “quite astonishing how morally depraved, decadent and degenerate Western civilisation has become, with widespread abortion, public displays of kink and fetishism, performing transgender surgery on children, adults unprofessionally indulging in their own activism at work.

Part of the reason for the decline in the birth rate is, effectively, the descent into decadence which is affecting much of Western society, and again we need strong voices to point this out.

Not least, we simply cannot have, on the one hand, a population replacement crisis and then, on the other, witness without comment an abortion rate (2022 figures) of 20.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the highest rate recorded since the Abortion Act 1967 was introduced – representing 251,377 abortions performed for residents of England and Wales.

Such unpleasant, sensitive and controversial subjects are – or should be – the stuff of politics, issues which should be prominent in the public discourse, but they will only be so if the politicians assume their responsibilities and make it so.

And, given that the “uniparty” politicians are evading key issues, this is surely the gap which should be filled by the “insurgents”. But, certainly in the case of Mr Farage, who would have us believe that he is part of the insurgency, we find that all he really wants to do is have “fun”.

But the reality is that “bread and circuses” represented by such a stance is the essence of a decadent society, which now best describes our status. Having “fun” in the present circumstances, should be the last of our preoccupations.

Until we have politicians who are prepared to acknowledge our parlous state, in a country which has a prime minister who thinks women can have penises, and is set on putting the disabled to work in order to fund 4-star hotels for illegal immigrants, the slide into decadence will continue.

And Mr Farage does not seem to be one of those politicians.