Ask Nigel

A new advice column from Britain's leading fascist Nigel Farage, taking a reactionary approach to life's puzzles and grey areas

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Wed 29 July 2025 00.49 BST

Dear Nigel,

How can I stop fixating so much on foreigners? I’m in my mid-50s and recently a photo of some refugees on a boat has sent me spiralling about how unfair it is that they get to flee war zones, while I’m spending my early retirement in garden centre cafes in the world’s sixth largest economy. I find myself poring over photos of them, looking for evidence they’re undermining English culture, even though I couldn’t begin to tell you what that means. In reality I know that they have never hurt me, and yet when my confidence wobbles or my mood is low, I fixate on them.

Sharing massively helps too!

Nigel says: 

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of ads from far-right organisations; I guess the algorithm thinks I’m some sort of racist. But I keep having this experience where I look at these “they’re living a life of luxury in budget hotels on £48 a week” stories, and feel a pang of nostalgia for the time I spent the worst week of my life in a Holiday Inn outside Rotherham.

When you’re up against career politicians, oligarchs worth billions, and millennia of latent racist sentiment, the task you face is deciding whether or not you want to deal with the chronic feelings of self-loathing that make you hate people who don’t look like you; or simply believe the drivel you’re spoon-fed on a daily basis so that you can continue to make snide comments behind the back of your third-generation waiter at Toby Carvery.

How do we do that? I think you’re on to something big when you say you fill up with more hatred when your confidence wobbles or mood is low. I notice that the busier I am with things I love, such as being racist in dinghies in The Channel, offering to rim Donald Trump, or looking like a Canadian South Park character, the less it occurs to me to give a toss about anything other than myself. Whatever it is inside you that fills you with bile, that’s what life needs to feel full of.

When things do feel wobbly, smaller interventions might improve the cycle. Log on to Facebook. Buy an Express. Listen to Julia Hartley-Brewer. When obsessive re-inquiring about foreigners is driven by low confidence elsewhere, more lies will always sate it. Xenophobia, like Lee Anderson, always needs to be fed.

I bet there are people in your life who co-exist happily with people who weren’t born here. The task, I think, is to ignore them.