Nigel Farage is not a ‘patriot’. He is a man who lacks compassion – and provides me with a much-needed laugh

I would like to thank Nigel Farage for with all my heart for giving me a much-needed laugh yesterday.

When our live entertainment industry is on its knees, seasoned performers like Farage step up, diversify and make excellent online content. He posted the picture of a dinghy carrying a few adults and two or three children being rescued by the border force with the caption, “Shocking invasion on the Kent coast”, stirring up the frothing, resentful, discontented racists who blame all their ills on a smattering of desperate souls who have been so battered down by their life circumstances that they risk life and limb to come to a place where they have been assured they will be treated as human beings. Bravo Nigel. In one little tweet you managed to ridicule every “patriot” who twists themselves into a tight knot of hate whenever they see the instinctive human trait of helping out those in need. In this case, fishing some children out of the ocean.

Ah, but of course Farage wasn’t joking. Which makes me feel a little guilty for finding it so funny. After all, he too is a human being and deserving of compassion. Imagine, just imagine, if you were instrumental in achieving something as gargantuan as Brexit, and you were able to convince scores of people to vote to leave Europe because you made them believe the EU were responsible for the amount of refugees we sheltered. (He did, by the by. A friend’s partner told me he was voting for Brexit because he thought there were “too many Somalian refugees where we are”. What can I say? You can choose your friends but you can’t choose their family.) Farage’s sordid tactic of lying wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, sure, but setting basic morality aside for a moment, no one can deny that the man set out to achieve something huge, and he did it.

Imagine still not being content and being hell bent on battering refugees. Poor guy. We are in a pandemic. Cocooning himself in a bubble with family and friends like the rest of us is not his thing. He has to dash about with a film crew in the hope of finding a family of migrants to film, or take a snap of a refugee kid on a rescue vessel. He even wandered into a hotel in Birmingham where refugees were being housed, in the hope of finding one eating a government-funded potato off the buffet.

He’s finding that his antics don’t carry the weight they once did. Other than the same anonymous hate accounts on social media, most folk see this little boat on our shores as a human tragedy and not an affront to our human rights.

When Farage posted a video of refugees being taken on a tour of Anfield, the people of Liverpool posted their own comments, telling him where to stick it. “We look after each other here, that’s what makes my city great. If you don’t like it then stay out of my city” was one of the more polite comments.

He is not the first to be hoodwinked by his hate and mistakenly believes that external changes will relieve him of it. I’m guessing that if every single refugee was sent away this very afternoon, something else would have him raging. If every person of a different hue, who spoke a different language to him, were banished from the UK this teatime, Farage would find some other group to point the finger at and say, “Them! Them! It’s these ramblers that are ruining everything for the rest of us, wandering about breathing fresh air that MY taxes pay for, shutting countryside gates so our native British cows can’t wander off to Lidl!”

His “fix”, of course, is the adulation he gets from those with a similar malaise to him. Under the pretence of “patriotism”, they applaud Farage’s hounding of fellow human beings. True patriots are the ones who wrap a dry towel around a teenager who has crossed deserts and seas on his own and for whom the Channel was the final leg of his desperate journey. True patriots, those who respects their homeland, would never see a child suffer on it.

“Put them up in your house then!” cry Team Farage when faced with a backlash from compassionate, or shall we just say “normal”, people. As someone (sadly not me) responded to a comment I saw on Twitter, “You can have sympathy for a cancer patient without opening an oncology ward in your home.”

I don’t want people to come over here on dinghies. No one does. Criminal gangs of smugglers are preying on these people, taking every penny they have and getting them on these flimsy boats. These murky groups are the ones we need to rugby tackle to the ground. A safe and legal passage to the UK is a mark of civilisation. As is a tour of a football stadium and offer of a meal. Farage and his ilk are not “patriots”, they are traitors to British culture.