The irony of Nigel Farage’s ridiculous North Korea comparison
4 min read
The freedoms that allow the Reform leader to make preposterous statements on the world stage – the very freedoms that distinguish us from the dictatorships he carelessly invokes – are precisely the ones he seeks to dismantle.
This week, Nigel Farage told a US Congressional Committee that Britain had become North Korea. This comment is amongst the stupidest things Farage has ever said. But I would firmly defend his right to say it, as much as I believe his words to be ridiculous and self-interested. If Britain were North Korea, Farage would be put into a gulag and never seen again. By contrast, Britain has free elections, independent media, the rule of law, freedom of movement, and the right to criticise the government. North Korea has none of these.
The ironic thing about Farage’s absurd comparison is that his own party – Reform UK – wants what every authoritarian ruler wants: to remove rights and freedoms that protect citizens from overbearing government. He wants the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. But the ECHR safeguards press freedom, religious freedom, trade union rights, the rule of law, the right not to be tortured and enslaved and so on. Take those away, and you massively downgrade the protection that UK citizens have against state encroachment in their lives – by governments of whatever stripe.
The UK incorporated the ECHR into its domestic laws in the first place precisely because existing UK laws did not offer enough protection. It used to be illegal for gay people to serve in the UK Armed Forces. When Jeanette Smith and Graeme Grady were discharged from the Armed Forces for being gay, they challenged this blanket ban in the 1990s. The English courts rejected their claims but accepted that their sexual identity had no bearing on their ability to work, nor did it affect discipline. The Strasbourg Court unanimously upheld their claims, applying human rights laws. The Armed Forces now rightly welcome anyone qualified to enter it, regardless of their sexual orientation.
There are so many other situations where the liberty of UK citizens has been protected by the ECHR: like the British Airways employee who won her right to wear a cross necklace at work, the parents whose child was wrongfully taken into care, the autistic man detained in a care facility without proper legal safeguards (that case led to improvements in mental capacity laws) – the list goes on. Dismantling these protections by withdrawing from the ECHR is the start of the road to authoritarianism, dragging us back decades.
UK withdrawal from the ECHR will not “stop the boats”. Reform knows that France, and other European countries will not work with us to solve these problems, as they now are, if the UK were outside the ECHR. The recent UK-France returns agreement, recently secured by the Prime Minister, was based on our common human rights protections. The whole reason why we now need that agreement is that Brexit got rid of the last one (the EU Dublin Regulation). Of course, Farage and the Tories never mentioned this during the referendum campaign. Then, crossings from France shot up post-Brexit.
The truth is that we can have border security – not with gimmicks and lies, but through taking bold, practical actions, which are already delivering progress. The Labour government has achieved record disruption of organised criminal networks over the past year, as the National Crime Agency recently reported; major seizures of boats and assets, efficient asylum processing, reforming asylum accommodation, ramped up returns of those with no right to be here, and – yes – looking at reform of how Article 8 (the right to family life) is applied in our domestic laws. The August small boat crossing figures are the lowest they have been since 2019 – suggesting that we are moving in the right direction. It was the Tories’ devotion to gimmicks – especially Rwanda – that stopped them from taking practical action. It was not the ECHR.
So when Farage compares Britain to North Korea, he reveals not just his contempt for facts, but his own authoritarian instincts. The freedoms that allow him to make such preposterous statements on the world stage – the very freedoms that distinguish us from the dictatorships he carelessly invokes – are precisely the ones he seeks to dismantle. That is the ultimate irony: in his desperation to gain power by stoking division and fear about imaginary tyranny, Farage is creating the conditions for authoritarianism and the dismantling of that old English value we all hold dear: personal liberty.
Tony Vaughan KC is the Labour MP for Folkestone and Hythe.
