The recent controversy over England Flags and Christmas Lights in Kent once again reminds the public of a repeated weakness of Reform UK’s approach to politics.
Their constant need to sweat the small stuff to the point of flailing, failing, and drowning.
To recap, the parish council of the village of Harrietsham in Kent had issued a permit by Kent County Council to install Christmas lights on lampposts on their stretch of the A20. However, there was a catch. The flags that had recently been installed on said post needed to be removed first, as they represented a safety issue for the workers installing the lights.
Peter Osborne, Kent County Council’s member for highways and transport said “Flags on streetlight columns pose a risk during installation, so they must be removed to ensure the lights go up safely and can be enjoyed by everyone.”
But in August the Reform-led Kent County Council explicitly stated that it would not be using public money to take down any of the flags.
This leaves Harrietsham between a rock and a hard place. Since they can’t take down the flags, it means they can’t put up the lights.
A natural question emerges here.
Why exactly did the Reform-led Kent County Council weigh in on the flag issue in the first place?
Why could they not simply have left things to the people who knew better about issues of safety and process? It isn’t as if the issue of obstructions on lamp posts is entirely new or completely revolutionary. Surely this could have been delt with by local people who knew what they were doing, rather than an on-high demand for an ideology-driven demand.
Had Reform’s KCC simply left things be, or issued a less demanding diktat regarding public money on the removal of flags, it might be the case that the flags could have been taken down, and then put back up again later, and the Christmas lights could have been saved.
As it is, the heavy handed demand that no council money be used to remove the sudden proliferation of flags has resulted in a much bigger loss – the traditional Christmas lights.
This trend seems to be a broader emblem of Reform UK’s approach to politics. Focus on a small, not-serious issue, issue some kind of hard statement or firm line, and ignore or dismiss wider consequences.
The small boat migrations are an excellent example of this. Nigel Farage has previously described the boats as a “Growing threat to our national security” and a “genuine threat to public order”.
However, as a percentage of all unregulated migration, small boats are a tiny issue.
As an immigration concern, the London School of Economics has pointed out that small boats represent just 2% of all migration into the UK.
Of that two percent, a very small number are actually illegal migrants.
Between 2018-2024 the Migration Observatory reports that 68% of people crossing into the UK by small boat have a genuine asylum need, and so were granted the right to stay in the UK – as is their human right under international law.
Yet Nigel Farage and his pollical colleagues want desperately to focus on this small, arguably insignificant number.
The vast majority of actual illegal immigrants in the UK are people who initially came legally on visas of one kind or other, and then ended up overstaying. If Nigel Farage is genuinely concerned about illegal immigration, it might be worth talking seriously about visa management and the less exciting prospect of proper paperwork handling.
Of course, if he were to do that, it might inconveniently contradict his stated aim of slashing at Civil Service expenditure. After all, processing visas and properly responding to people breaking their rules requires lots of people to properly handle the amounts of paperwork involved.
Yet this isn’t even the biggest issue. The biggest problem is that if Nigel Farage were to get his way, and have more of the small boat migrants turned away or stopped, the Christmas lights he’d be blocking is the UK’s obligations under international law.
Asylum isn’t a gift. It isn’t a present. It isn’t some nice thing that lefty-do gooders hand out because they feel sad. It’s a globally recognised international law. One that the UK signed up to in good faith as a team player in the global international system.
If we start picking and choosing the international obligations we do and don’t like, and start shirking responsibilities we once eagerly signed up to, what does that say about the UK as a country, and what does it say to the rest of the world? Why should anyone work to make the world better, if the moment they encounter the smallest part of it that they don’t like, they can just give up.
Nigel Farage and Reform UK would quite happily focus on the tiny issue of the 0.6% of total migration that arrives on small boats and don’t have a legitimate asylum claim, and in the process grossly undermine the UK’s wider credibility as a country that take global rule of law seriously.
If Reform actually started focusing on problems at the level to which they are commensurate with real importance, they might realise that passing heavy handed diktats over flags and 0.6% of migration might not be worth it, and that issues around real tax costs and economic growth need focus. Of course, if they do that, they might find the problems are actually not the sort of thing that populist solutions can solve.
Which is why Nigel Farage recently had to embarrassingly walk back his tax cut plans.
And why maybe they need to realise that fiddling with flags in villages isn’t actually something serious political parties should be sweating over.
