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The "Great British People" Facebook page, which purports to be from Yorkshire, has had 1.3 million views for its latest video of an elderly white British man crying about his pension. Other videos show reporters discussing "the overwhelming scale of mass immigration" and asking viewers if they miss "the Britain we used to know".
There is a particular kind of political confidence that is indistinguishable, to the untrained eye, from clinical detachment from reality. It is the confidence of a man who, having just won a hand at poker, concludes that the laws of probability no longer apply to him. It announces itself loudly, dresses in a flag, and mistakes the echo of its own voice for the applause of nations. Ladies and gentlemen, Reform UK Ltd has had a good week at the local elections, and the results are as instructive as they are alarming, not merely because Nigel Farage’s vehicle of nationalist ambition has won council seats, but because winning appears to have emboldened the party to say the quiet parts of its manifesto even louder, with the serene self-assurance of people who have never had to read a treaty.
Next in Abuja, four governments will do something that sounds, on paper, like a belated act of economic self-respect. Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon between them the source of roughly two-thirds of the cocoa that becomes the world's chocolate will sign the Abuja Declaration and stand up a Cocoa Value Addition Alliance, a coordinated attempt to stop shipping out raw beans and start capturing some of the value that currently accrues, almost entirely, to everyone else. Nigeria will additionally sign its own Cocoa Value Addition Accord, a domestic compact roping in governors, farmer groups, financiers and researchers into the project of turning bean into brand rather than bean into someone else's bar.
For fifty years, the British political establishment treated anti-immigrant sentiment like a dangerous wild beast not something to be defeated, but a political force to be appeased with legislative red meat. Now, the lion has broken out of its cage, entered politics, and is eating the establishment alive. Margaret Thatcher abolishes automatic birthright citizenship (*jus soli*), trading a centuries-old law of the land for a cold law of the blood. Successive Tory governments spent the next two decades seamlessly conflating "immigrant" with "criminal" in the public psyche. New Labour takes power but refuses to starve the beast. Instead, they introduce the *Life in the UK* test a bureaucratic hazing ritual testing applicants on trivia (like the height of the London Eye) that the Home Office minister who designed it couldn't even answer. Keir Starmer attempts to out-hawk the Right by tightening restrictions and warning against an **"island of strangers."** It backfires spectacularly, accidentally echoing Enoch Powell and alienating his base while ignoring the grand irony: the previous Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak) was the child of immigrants, and most asylum seekers come from countries Britain spent centuries colonizing. The greatest failure of modern progressive politics was refusing to make the affirmative, moral case for immigration. By constantly trying to appease the beast with slightly smaller cuts of meat, the establishment validated its hunger. Today, **Reform UK** hasn't conquered British politics; they’ve simply sat down to a feast fifty years of Westminster cowardice prepared for them. You do not defeat a lion by feeding it politely. You defeat it by refusing to feed it at all.
British demands to carry out criminal records checks on every EU citizen seeking "settled status" in the U.K. after Brexit have proved a major sticking point in talks with Brussels, according to individuals familiar with the negotiations. | Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty ImagesUK criminal check plan for EU citizens is sticking point in Brexit talksBrussels …
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Centre for Nigeria Progress 