Politics: not a good day

By Richard North - February 24, 2026

When the national newspapers and broadcast media covered Reform’s press conference in Dover, they mostly dealt with the policy proposals set out by Muhammed Ziauddin Yusuf on the subject of immigration.

Few, if any, reported at any length on Farage’s laboured introduction – his gasps for breath betraying his lifetime addition to the noxious weed.

Farage referred to the Matthew Syed article in the Sunday Times (which I reviewed on Sunday), and his concerns about Balkanised Britain.

Rather than diversity, Farage concluded from it, “actually what we’ve got in many of our towns and cities is division, deep, inbuilt cultural division, and a growing sense amongst huge numbers of British people that something is going horribly wrong”.

What the media missed, therefore, was a rather pointed commentary when Farage continued, saying: “Unless we are able to provide a proper democratic antidote to this, then I fear we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme-right ethno-nationalism. And I think we’re beginning over the last couple of weeks to see some specimens of it”.

“Nobody, nobody over the last quarter of a century has done more to defeat the genuine, intolerant, abhorrent extreme far-right than me”, he said. “We did it with the British National Party and we’ll do it with whoever else follows”.

Just before handing over to Mr Muhammed, he then warned: “it’s important we get a grip on this because there is no issue other than legal and illegal immigration that has broken the bond of trust between the voters and those that govern us, more than this issue”.

If you let the words drift over you, it is easy to miss the nuances, but one commentator on X was quick to pick up the deeper implications of this speech. It was, he said, “a masterclass in self-preservation dressed as principle”

Noting the warning of a “really worrying, dangerous form of ethno-nationalism” rising, he saw Farage crowning himself as the supreme vanquisher of the “genuine intolerant, abhorrent, extreme far-right”. Nobody had done more than him, he insisted.

As an illustration of how that little homily was received, our commentator dubbed it as “poison to any Englishman who values his people’s continuity”. Ethno-nationalism isn’t “dangerous” or “abhorrent”, he wrote: “it’s the unapologetic recognition that Britain, the England of cathedrals, Shakespeare etc and the native stock who built it, belongs primarily to those whose ancestors forged it through blood, sweat, and millennia.

He reminds us that Japan guards its homogeneity without apology and India does the same. Only in the West are natives shamed for wanting the same. Therefore, Farage’s attack isn’t on extremism; it’s on the instinct for self-preservation that every healthy nation possesses.

The Reform leader fears it, we are told, because it exposes his project as civic nationalism lite: flag-waving multiculturalism with stricter borders, but no defence of the ethnic core.

From there came the crowning irony, recorded by our commentator: Mr Muhammed, Reform’s Pakistani-origin shadow home secretary, unveiled the “ICE-style” Deportation Command from Dover, the very white cliffs symbolising native defiance. Capacity for tens of thousands detained, ramped-up flights, visa bans on high-risk nations, scrapping indefinite leave, banning church-to-mosque conversions.

Mr Muhammed called illegal migration an “invasion,” vowed to “stop the boats,” deport illegals en masse, leave the ECHR and derogate from blocking treaties.

This was “tough talk” but actually calibrated to avoid the real taboo. Nowhere did either Farage or Yusuf address the demographic engine: legal chain migration from the Islamic world, differential birthrates, parallel societies, no-go areas, grooming gangs shielded for fear of “racism,” mosques outnumbering churches in historic towns.

Reform’s plan deports some boat people and failed asylum claimants while the native English birthrate craters and settlement continues unabated. “Net zero” migration? This is a slogan that permits endless legal inflows as long as outflows match.

There was no reference to zero non-European net migration; no remigration incentives for non-integrating groups; no explicit priority for the indigenous in housing, jobs, welfare.

Essentially, the proposals were seen as “a firewall against genuine ethnic consciousness: look tough on illegals, hire a migrant to front it, reassure the establishment you’re not ‘that’ kind of right-winger”.

The critique went on to say that Farage’s boast “nobody has done more to defeat the extreme far-right” is grotesquely accurate in the worst way. He dismantled Ukip’s sharper edges, purged ethnic realists, turned Reform into a containment vessel for patriotic rage.

He disowns “ethnonationalism” to stay electable, platforms diversity hires like Yusuf to deflect smears, and herds natives into a party that promises borders without preserving the people those borders exist to protect.

The result, we are told, is managed replacement, at a slower pace perhaps, but no reversal. This is not salvation. It’s the establishment’s preferred opinion, red meat rhetoric, brown faces in key roles, endless disclaimers against “intolerance”. Farage isn’t fighting for England; he’s fighting to keep England from fighting for itself.

But then comes the rub. “The natives see through it. Ethno-nationalism isn’t rising because of ‘extremists’ it’s rising because the native English are being erased, and men like Farage would rather virtue-signal against their own kin than name the replacement.

Our commentator concludes: “Britain for the British natives. Full stop. No compromises, no brown-washing, no civic illusions. Anything less is betrayal”, adding: “If Reform won’t say it, others will”.

Looking at the same speech, Pete comes up with a different slant in his Substack blog. Farage, he says, is planting Reform firmly in the centre right and by “whoever else follows”, he is referring to Lowe’s Restore Britain.

Pete thinks it’s a canny move on Farage’s part. It goes a long way to making those who call Reform far-right look even more ridiculous than they already do, but it also shifts the burden on to Restore.

This party’s leading figures are certainly dabbling in ethnonationalism which means that Lowe (broadly a meritocratic civic nationalist) will struggle to denounce the idea without burning much of his support base.

But then if he endorses it, he moves the party into the far-right sphere, to become the de facto mainstream far right party. It doesn’t matter how carefully he attempts to disambiguate – he won’t succeed.

The danger is that the honourable ambition of reserving our own country for its native peoples is so easily hijacked and, if Lowe isn’t careful, he will leave the back gate open for neo-Nazis, who will poison his reputation, just as the cybernats did for the indyref.

Politics is a reputation game, Pete reminds us. A party like Restore needs to attract people to the right of Reform but reject all the retarded conspiracy theories of the horseshoe right. If the party shares a stable with them, the very people the party does need will think twice about publicly endorsing it.

To avoid this, Restore needs a clear party definition, a system of ethics, a vision and research-based policy with daily comms that build on that – not least to avoid the obvious ambushes. But what we’re actually getting is low effort disposable talking points which are every bit as expendable as Reform policies.

In their absence, Farage has effectively been able to ambush Restore, implying without overtly naming it as an extreme ethnonationalist party, while Lowe’s delay in properly defining his party leaves it open to doctrinal crankery which is completely at odds with his conservative values.

This bodes ill for Lowes venture, which could now fold as swiftly as it has come into being, leaving the field open to Farage’s “civ-nat” Reform which welcomes all colours and creeds and does nothing to reverse the tide of demographic replacement.

Yet, despite this battle being played out in the open, it seems to have passed by the legacy media. All in all, therefore, yesterday was not a good day. The desperate need to contain the ethnic replacement of the British peoples is no further forward as Farage drifts his party to the centre, leaving his base stranded, with a rival party struggling to define what it stands for.