NO. Nigel Farage didn’t cause the RIOTS. The ELITE CLASS did.

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Ever since riots and protests erupted on England’s streets, much of the elite class has blamed just one man —Nigel Farage.

After releasing a video during the early days of the unrest, in which Nigel Farage suggested, in reference to the person who murdered three little girls, “the truth is being withheld from us”, the leader of the Reform party has come under intense fire.

One after another, broadcasters, celebrities, comedians, and politicians have lined-up to brand the unrest the “Farage riots”, denouncing the politician.

Former head of Counter-Terrorism policing, Neil Basu, suggests that Farage’s social media activity could be investigated for “inciting” rioting.

A former intelligence officer at MI5 says the security services “may” widen an investigation into Tommy Robinson to include the democratically elected MP.

The Times newspaper included Farage, alongside Robinson, in a “rogues gallery” of figures it claims were “fanning the flames of violence”.

And, this week, columnist Trevor Phillips suggested that Farage is “enabling” the politics of the English Defence League, which “is in some ways worse than the conduct of the out-and-out racists”.

Remarkably, he even suggests that Farage belongs in Dante’s eighth circle of Hell, for “exploiting the passions of others to serve their own interests”.

And that’s not all.

Conservative Party leadership hopefuls, who at the election last month were forced to watch Nigel Farage capture one-quarter of their votes, have also been very critical.

Priti Patel has criticised Farage for comparing the latest riots to the Black Lives Matter protests. Tom Tugendhat attacked his “reckless rhetoric”. James Cleverly told Farage to choose between being a “politician or content creator”. And Mel Stride said his comments about the riots were “wrong and misguided”.

Then, last weekend, hundreds of “anti-racism” activists descended on what they thought was the Reform party’s headquarters, in London, to accuse Farage of directly causing the unrest that has swept through England.

Sorry, but am I the only one who finds all this ridiculous? Am I the only one who smells hypocrisy? And am I the only one who finds all this utterly outrageous?

Look, the reality is this. Like him or loathe him, Nigel Farage has been one of the few voices in British politics who has consistently warned about what would happen if the country did not reduce legal immigration and control its own borders.

You don’t have to agree with his politics or like the man to accept this is true.

Under both New Labour and Tory governments, Farage was the only consistent voice on this, warning, in the face of much vitriol, that spiralling levels of immigration, the transfer of legal powers to international courts, and a broken policy of multiculturalism would soon give rise to the very things we saw playing out on England’s streets last week —social tension, ethnic conflict, sectarianism.

And now, the very people from the elite class that spent the last thirty years ushering in these disastrous policies, including the extreme policy of mass immigration, are blaming Farage. Much like we saw in the aftermath of Brexit, with Vladimir Putin, Cambridge Analytica, and Dominic Cummings, the elite class is smothering itself in a comfort blanket, pointing at a bogeyman rather than reflecting on its own actions.

It wasn’t Farage who decimated the very communities that saw the worst rioting last week by ushering in policies like hyper-globalisation, mass immigration, and deindustrialisation; it was the elite class.

It wasn’t Nigel Farage who at one election after another promised the British people they would lower immigration only to then do the very opposite, essentially gaslighting, lying, and betraying voters; it was the elite class.

It wasn’t Nigel Farage who promised over and over again that the British people would “Take Back Control” of their own borders only to then completely lose control of them, allowing an assortment of illegal migrants and criminals into the country; it was the elite class.

It wasn’t Nigel Farage who consistently ignored, in towns like Rotherham, which saw the worst rioting last week, the industrial-scale rape and sexual exploitation of young white, working-class girls at the hands of Muslim gangs while deriding anybody who did dare point to it as a “racist”; it was the elite class.

It wasn’t Nigel Farage who promised the very communities that were rioting last week they would be “levelled-up” only to then rapidly lose interest when it turned out “levelling-up” is difficult and unpopular among south voters; it was the elite class.

And it wasn’t Nigel Farage who spent years after the democratic vote for Brexit fuelling this profound anger and alienation by publicly deriding and dismissing the white working-class as “racists”, “gammons”, and “bigots”; it was the elite class.

But now, the very same people, the very ones who presided over these disastrous decisions, have the sheer audacity to not only ignore how their policies set the stage for the unrest but blame everything on the one man who warned this would happen.

It was a similar story at the election, last month. It wasn’t Farage who manipulated and pushed millions of voters into supporting Reform. It was a natural reaction to an elite class that spans politics, media, and culture that too often looks insular, remote, narcissistic, more interested in itself than the rest of the country.

Farage and Reform, as new research on the election shows, won over millions of voters who are utterly frustrated and fed-up with the broken status-quo, who desperately want an alternative to the failed policies of the established Left and Right.

The top two concerns for Farage’s voters? Stop the boats and lower immigration. And no, they are not fringe concerns. Immigration is back to being the most important issue for ALL voters, because the elite class, not Farage, has made such a hash of it.

While they blame Farage, the fact of the matter is that he’s not just tapping into a radical minority but is much more in tune with the country than the likes of James O’Brien and Anna Soubry, who spend their lives sitting on Twitter/X, blaming Farage for everything and anything that goes wrong in Britain.

Farage, furthermore, is also tapping into other issues that he did not create but which the elite class has managed disastrously, like multiculturalism. While elites repeat in robotic fashion “multiculturalism is a success”, when British people looked at their television screens last week and saw minorities waving the Palestine flag rather than the Union Jack, and Muslims screaming “Allahu Akbar!” on the streets of England, the fashionable claim that multiculturalism is bringing us together, not highlighting our differences, is no longer convincing.

Indeed, more than than three-quarters of the people who voted for Farage last month, 78%, think multiculturalism is making life in Britain worse, not better. And nor is this a fringe view. According to the think-tank More In Common, in the aftermath of the rioting and protests, not even half of all British people can bring themselves to say they are “proud” Britain is a multi-ethnic society. Only 48% feel this way, which drops to 39% for Conservatives and just 20% for Farage’s voters. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of a policy that is pushing people apart, not bringing them together.

And then comes crime, disorder, and the general sense of lawlessness that is sweeping across the country. Once again, while the elite class blame Farage, it was not he who pushed for soft-on-crime policies, failed to build enough prisons, and was forced to let criminals walk free because of these longer-term failures; that was all the elite class.

This is why Farage has been winning over voters who, as the research shows, think court sentences are too soft, illegal migrants should be immediately removed from the country, young people do not have enough respect for traditional British values, welfare benefits are too generous, and that perhaps even the death penalty should be restored for some crimes. In this way, again, he is tapping into the failures of the elite class; their failure to maintain law and order, their failure to keep criminals in prison, their failure to fix the borders, their failure to deport foreign criminals who should not be in the country, their failure to keep the British people safe.

As Elon Musk said during his conversation with Donald Trump this week, the blunt reality is that a country which cannot control its own borders is no longer a country. And this is exactly how many British people feel; that because of the ongoing failures of the elite class they are losing their country. And while the elite class blame Farage, he is ultimately the only politician who has realised his and is speaking to it.

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Farage, too, is winning over people who have become instinctively suspicious if not hostile toward the elite’s obsession with woke ideology, a project that many people see as being completely divorced from reality and the everyday concerns of ordinary people. While most Reform voters support same-sex marriage, they also think rights for transgender people have gone too far and that, on balance, people should not be allowed to “change gender”. They are sick and tired of being lectured to by a morally righteous elite class, which prioritises fashionable dogma over biological reality.

The elite class blame Farage for spreading “misinformation” but they the ones who have been trying to convince us that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, that pregnant women are “pregnant persons”, and that anybody who thinks otherwise should be shut down and stigmatised as a closed-minded “bigot” and “transphobe”. Until Dr Hilary Cass came along with her detailed review, Farage was one of only a handful of politicians willing to call out this nonsense. The elite class didn’t.

And when it comes to economics, too, the elite class blame Farage for all that is wrong but, once again, if you look at his voters you will see he is winning over the very people who were completely shafted by the economic policies of the elite class, by their unflinching embrace of hyper-globalisation and large corporations that use cheap immigrant labour to keep profits high, costs low, and undercut the wages, working conditions, and dignity of working-class voters in Western economies.

Farage’s voters are not yearning for a return to Thatcherism but are economically populist. Most of them, often working-class, without degrees, think rich people get around the law too easily, and that rich people should be taxed more, not less. Most think big business, global corporations, and multinationals exploit workers. And most think workers are not getting their fair share of the nation’s wealth.

The key point is that these are the very people who were completely screwed by the economic model of the last thirty years: London-centric, too dependent on financial services, too focused on the graduate middle-class, too obsessed with helping the rich and big business, too addicted to mass, low-skill immigration, and too disinterested in the people who live, work, and struggle outside the M25.

Most are closer to Donald Trump’s “patriotic protectionism” than Thatcherism —they want an economy that’s not organised around redistribution but policies that tilt the deck back toward the British people, British communities, and British firms, against globalist corporations that care more about profit than the national community, and foreign powers like China. They want, in short, the principle of national preference, putting British people before others, to be embedded into our economy.

This is why, as Lord Ashcroft’s research shows, Reform voters are the most likely of all to think that globalisation has been a “force for ill” because, in short, they’ve been the most likely to have been swept aside by it, to have watched their communities and way of life be completely battered by crony capitalism, mass immigration, and a remote elite class that puts business before people. Farage might not have leaned into this as fully as he could but he has recognised it, using his first speech in parliament to call out large multinationals that don’t care about ordinary people.

As I wrote last year, while launching the first major study of Nigel Farage’s Reform voters right here on this Substack:

“Many Reform voters clearly feel their leaders are more interested in prioritising global corporations over the national community and economy. In this respect, Reform is making most inroads among “national conservatives” —voters who simultaneously feel strongly concerned about immigration and the erosion of their national community and who worry, deeply, about how global corporations and big business are contributing to this, not least by demanding cheap migrant labour to keep their costs low and profits high, irrespective of what this means for the surrounding national community and British workers.”

And, lastly, this is also why these people not only flocked to Farage and abandoned the elite class but think differently about last week’s riots and the protests. Consistently, while most Reformers, like most Brits, distance themselves from violence, they are the most likely to express sympathy for people protesting peacefully, with 83% of Farage’s voters feeling this way compared to 58% among all voters, and to say the protestors have “legitimate concerns”, which more than half of them do.

Clearly, having been angered and alienated by the elite class for decades, having watched their communities and country be overturned, having watched the Black Lives Matter protestors reshape the national conversation through rioting and protests, and having got nowhere themselves with the ballot box, a significant number of Farage’s voters clearly think that peaceful protestors have a point, that perhaps this is the only way of reminding a deaf system that both they and their concerns exist.

Either way, the key point in all this is that while much of the political, media, and cultural class continue rant and rave about Farage, blaming him for everything that just erupted on England’s streets, they are misguided and wrong.

It is the failures of the elite class, more than anything Nigel Farage said or did, that have created this unrest. And it is these failures that allowed Farage to mobilise a unique coalition of voters who are culturally conservative and economically populist —who yearn for national protection from mass immigration, radical Islamism, and broken borders, cultural protection from a divisive and unBritish woke ideology, and economic protection from what many of them see as irresponsible, selfish, globalist corporations that do not really care about their national community.

This is why, as the riots and protests finally died down, Nigel Farage returned to social media to point to new polling, which suggested that, for the first time since the Brexit referendum, in 2016, immigration is once again the top issue in the country.

“The public have woken up and want the kind of action that Labour and the Tories will never deliver”, tweeted Farage. “This is why politicians and the media are falsely accusing me of being involved in the riots”.

And you know what?

He has a point.

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Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 44,000 subscribers across 160 countries, and thousands of paid supporters who make our work possible. Like our stuff? Then help us by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join our community on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X.