Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has predicted that “law and order” will be the issue of this decade to the magnitude that Brexit was in the last.
Mr Farage made the prescient comments just hours before unarmed London police officers were chased out of Brixton by a “hostile” crowd, some armed with pieces of wood and another apparently brandishing a sword.
Police were called to the Overton Road area on Wednesday night following locals reporting “anti-social behaviour and violence” at what the mainstream media termed a “street party”. Officials confirmed 22 police officers were injured, two needing hospital attention.
Speaking on the Westmonster News Postcast aired on Wednesday, Mr Farage said that “law and order” will be the talking point of the next decade.
“The sheer extent to which, now, people are regularly victims of crimes and yet they now have got to the point where they hardly even bother to report them.
“There has been a massive explosion in crime. It manifests itself in all sorts of different ways. Some of it is physical, violent assault. Some of it is theft. Some of it is fraud,” the leading Eurosceptic said.
Statistics have pointed to rising crime across the country, with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealing in January that knife-related crimes in England and Wales had increased by seven per cent to hit a record high. ONS figures from the following month showed the UK to have experienced a 27 per cent increase in gun crimes in just five years, despite the nation having some of the most restrictive personal firearms laws in the world.
“I think you reach a point where people realise that actually, their quality of life is deteriorating to simply the most astonishing degree,” Mr Farage said. “So yes, I think how we deal with law and order.”
The politician also warned that direct interventions in “law and order” alone were not enough, saying that there need to be solutions to “the social problems within society” that lead to some crime.
Notably, he mentioned the “huge class divide” — fearing that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic will “make the rich richer and the poor poorer” — and the “huge educational divide between those who can pay for private education and those who can’t” and the related chances of success in life for those children.
Mr Farage also warned of the new division being brought to the United Kingdom which he argued had never existed before: a racial divide spurred on by the radical-left Black Lives Matter movement.
“And now, in a country that never had this, there is a growing racial divide because people will not be put up with being dictated to by a Marxist organisation called ‘Black Lives Matter’. It just doesn’t work.
“All of those causal factors are likely to lead to more crime, and there’s too much crime already. I see that as a huge issue, going forward,” Farage told podcast host Michael Heaver.