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It’s funny what stays with you. When I was 12, I appeared in a stage version of a WW Jacobs short story called The Monkey’s Paw. It was first published in 1902, so spoiler alerts are probably unnecessary.
Briefly, the eponymous paw bestows three wishes upon the holder, with the caveat that they will be granted in circumstances that will fill the wisher with unbearable regret. The father of the house sceptically wishes for £200; the following day an emissary arrives from his son’s workplace to reveal that he has died in an industrial accident and the company will pay compensation of… £200.
The story ends with the son’s mutilated corpse knocking at the door of the family home as his parents, having wished their son back to life, rush to expend their final wish on returning him to his grave. The memory haunts me still.
When Keir Starmer wished for an end to the ballooning immigration figures that followed Brexit and inevitably dominated political discourse in the country he had recently begun to govern, he appears to have done so on a monkey’s paw. It remains remarkably under-reported but, due to policies both inherited and introduced, his wish has come true in spectacular fashion. In 2023, net migration peaked at 944,000. In 2025, it fell to 171,000.
In the first six months of this year, the number of people crossing the English Channel in “small boats” fell by 38 per cent compared to the same period last year. The number of asylum seekers housed in repurposed hotels has fallen by 32 per cent since December.
You could be forgiven for not knowing some, or any, of these figures. Celebrations by individuals and outlets dedicated to decrying immigration in general, and recent rises in particular, have been muted to say the least.
But you can be certain that Nigel Farage is across not only the numbers but also the compelling case, best articulated by Sam Freedman in his excellent Comment Is Freed Substack, for net migration moving into negative territory in the near future. In other words, by the next election, the number of people leaving the country may exceed the number of people arriving.
And that is a nightmare scenario for a single issue politician whose single issue is immigration. (Technically, I suppose, Brexit makes him a double issue politician, but these days he is even more reluctant to talk about Brexit than he is the £5 million secret gift he received from a crypto billionaire shortly before announcing policies that would benefit crypto billionaires).
His first instinct was, as ever, to bullsh*t his way out of trouble, telling the BBC’s Nick Robinson that the fall was caused by an exodus of dissatisfied young Brits. This nonsense went unchecked at the time but, thanks largely to the tireless advocacy of Sunder Katwala at British Future, the BBC subsequently issued a correction.
Last week we saw exactly where Farage will go next. When he took the decision to completely disregard the express wishes of Henry Nowak’s family, the carefully considered words of the judge at the trial of his murderer, Vickrum Digwa, and the wider facts of the case – he did so from a position of dangerous desperation.
His burgeoning but bogus narrative of victimhood and anti-white discrimination is a close cousin of the ridiculous Great Replacement conspiracy theory. First mooted by the French author Renaud Camus, it posits a “globalist elite” masterminding the replacement of white Europeans and Americans with darker-skinned immigrants in order to dismantle Western culture. It deliberately renders people of colour enemies by dint of their skin tone, not their conduct.
So because Henry Nowak’s killer is brown-skinned, all brown-skinned people are suspect. And because the alleged perpetrator of a hideous crime in Belfast this week is Black and reportedly an immigrant, all Black people are suspect. Especially the immigrants. Ten years ago, when a different flavour of xenophobia drove his Brexit campaigning, it was people with names like Nowak who were threatening “Britain’s historic way of life”. Today, it’s anybody who’s not white.
It’s notable that he rarely has anything negative to say about white criminals. Indeed, when Sarah Everard’s murderer was found to be a serving, white police officer, he insisted that “we must not allow” her murder to “turn in to attacks on men and attacks on the police”.
And as the salience of immigration figures diminishes, his rhetoric around race is going to get even uglier. The “pure, cold rage” he called for and has already seen on the streets of Southampton is now in the process of becoming a permanent fixture of our national landscape. Every time a person of colour commits a violent crime, especially against a white person, Farage will be priming the fuse.
Keir Starmer’s dream came true. Immigration is plummeting. But there’s no monkey paw to wish away the hideous figure now knocking at the country’s door.
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