SKIMMING news programmes on the recent hate-fests outside asylum hotels in Epping and Falkirk, I stumbled across a clip of the former Conservative Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey on Good Morning Britain.

In it, Vaizey was opining that Keir Starmer’s government was in trouble. He said — I kid you not — that despite making up only 4% of total annual immigration to the UK, the small boats had “caught the public’s imagination beyond their genuine impact.”

He made the point without a hint of self-awareness. As if the public had reached this strange, uninformed position of its own accord, and not as a result of his government and Starmer’s chanting: “Stop the boats” on repeat until it was branded on the collective psyche. As if the geysers of anger had spurted out of the ground unbidden and not as a result of politicians tampering with the fire hydrants.

Nigel Farage may have catalysed the current outpouring of xenophobia with his infamous UKIP Breaking Point poster; but it was the parties in power that nursed people’s wrath. Their rhetoric and policies have brought us to a place where many are convinced their ills are caused, not by deindustrialisation, austerity or the neglect of their elected representatives, but by a handful of desperate fugitives.

Sure, these demonstrations have been hijacked by neo-fascist groups bussed in to cause trouble. But for that to happen there has to be resentment to exploit. The resentment is the fault of politicians who find it more expedient to feed people’s misconceptions than to counter all the false propositions served up by rabble-rousing racists.

On Talk TV, Jeremy Kyle appeared to be on the point of combusting as he shrieked about the UK being a soft touch for chancers. Addressing the disproportionate number of single male asylum seekers, he said that if he was fleeing danger, he’d never leave his family behind. Yet when dinghies overturn in the Mediterranean, other, like-minded commentators say: “Why would you put your child on one of those?”

Nigel Farage says Reform........

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