Swan-eating migrants? How Farage is trying to out-Trump Trump

On LBC Radio on Wednesday morning, Nigel Farage launched his latest attack against migrants living in the UK, telling host Nick Ferrari that “swans are being eaten in royal parks” by Eastern Europeans – specifically Romanians, of whom I happen to be one.

Take it from me: Romanians don’t eat swans. Too chewy. The idea that emigres en masse are stalking Hyde Park with nets and roasting swans for dinner has no evidential basis, but it has exactly the qualities a conspiracy theorist needs: visceral, grotesque, hard to disprove, and easy to share. The fact that I’m having to explain that it isn’t true shows just how far we have sunk.

What’s obvious to me is that, in his own little way, Farage is trying to out-Trump Trump. The playbook is familiar: take a grain of rumour, mix it with cultural prejudice, then present it as fact. Feeling matters more than evidence. Ask for proof, and the answer is always that it is hidden, suppressed, or self-evident to those “in the know”.

Once unleashed, these stories can mutate endlessly. If not swans in London, then geese in the shires, ducks somewhere else, until they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the pets in Sedgfield. And because these assertions are never truly falsifiable, they are endlessly reusable.

Farage doesn’t need to believe what he’s saying. Who knows what he really thinks, but this is, after all, a man who attended one of the most expensive private schools in the UK, Dulwich College, before going on to have a career as a City banker. He’s not so naive as to confuse pub gossip with fact – but he repeats it because it works. It gets him on air. It stirs up mistrust of migrants. It captures a vibe.

“If you get the direction of travel and the principle right and people trust you on that, then the detail follows,” Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice said on Times Radio this week. Tice had been asked how many migrants would be deported under his party’s plan to scrap indefinite leave to remain. “How long’s a piece of string?” he replied when pressed.

If there’s a direction of travel we are following, it’s one in which a “vibe” is an appropriate substitute for evidence. We used to say facts don’t care about your feelings. Now feelings don’t care about your facts.

Perhaps conspiracy theories are a natural occurrence in a world riven by inequality. One need only look at the concentration of wealth and influence to see why the idea of an elite cabal, pulling political strings and exploiting its connections, feels plausible to many. Elon Musk has more wealth than entire nations, and with it has bought his way into the White House.

The consequences, however, are not abstract: they are corrosive. These assertions feed prejudice, such as that against Eastern Europeans, who are already the target of countless lazy stereotypes, and normalise the idea that entire groups can be smeared without proof. They degrade political discourse, because if the leader of a party can traffic in tales from the internet’s underbelly, why should anyone else stick to the truth? Above all, they weaken democracy itself, by undermining our trust in institutions, the media, and one another.

What’s to be done? At a minimum, we must refuse to let this kind of rhetoric pass unchallenged. Journalists must demand evidence rather than nodding along. Citizens must strengthen their own media literacy, learning to separate rumour from reality. And we should amplify voices that humanise, rather than caricature, migrants – because every time Farage peddles poison, it is people, not just reputations, that suffer.

A few months ago, Edi Rama, the Albanian prime minister, marvelled at what has happened to our country. “Eighty per cent of the things that are said, or are written, or are accepted as a normal part of the discourse in today’s Britain are things that [before Brexit] would have been totally unacceptable, totally ridiculous, totally shameful,” he said.

So yes, it feels beneath me to dignify the swan story with a response. But to let it go unchallenged would be to allow a lie to fester. Farage may not believe in swan-eating Romanians, but he believes in the power of conspiracies to divide. And that is why they must be exposed for what they are – cynical theatre at the expense of truth.