🚨 Nigel Farage is like a broken record. At #PMQs today he asked Andy Burnham: “Is it not time the government recognised that what is going on in the English Channel is a national security emergency?” He’s been saying a version of this for more than SIX FUCKING YEARS. I went back through his own tweets to see how the story has been told, and I think I know the real reason he keeps saying it. Just from the posts I pulled from his X account, he’s made more than twenty separate declarations, demands and warnings of an “emergency” in the Channel, before you count PMQs, GB News, his Telegraph column, interviews and conference speeches. The label keeps changing: an “emergency”, a “national emergency”, a “migration emergency”, the “migrant emergency”, the “Channel Migrant Emergency”, an “illegal migration emergency”, a “national security emergency” and simply “this emergency”. Just sixteen of those posts show a view count of more than 7.3 MILLION times between them. SIX YEARS of the same alarm bell, rung to an audience of millions. On 10 August 2020, sharing a Telegraph article, he wrote that the crossings amounted to “a national humiliation” and that it was “time to declare an emergency in the English Channel.” By June 2021 he was telling his followers that “Both the UK and the US have an emergency at the border.” In August 2022, on GB News, Dan Wootton asked him whether it was time for the government to declare the crossings a national emergency, under an on-screen caption reading “NATIONAL EMERGENCY?”. “Yes Dan, I do,” Farage replied. When GB News uploaded the clip on 23 August, the question mark had gone: “Nigel Farage: Migrant crisis is a national emergency ignored by Boris Johnson.” Then, on 31 October 2022, he announced: “The Channel crisis has now become an emergency.” “Now”? He’d already been calling it one for two years! Within days he was promoting “EXCLUSIVE polling on the migrant emergency” on GB News, and on 8 November he praised “the @GBNews team” for leading the way “throughout this Channel Migrant Emergency”, adding that the mainstream media “couldn’t care less.” He was a GB News presenter at the time. The emergency was also a programming strand. An April 2023 post was particularly revealing: the Telegraph reported that Suella Braverman (now a Reform UK MP) was preparing to call the small boats crisis a “national emergency”. You might expect Farage to celebrate. Instead he complained that she would use the new powers “to commandeer disused military facilities and fill them up with more young, undocumented males.” When a government actually reached for the emergency label, he objected, because of what it was going to be used for. That tells you what matters to him about the word: what it lets you do. In March 2024 he wrote: “I have been saying since 2020 that we should declare a migration emergency. It has now become a national security emergency.” The same day: “I have been calling this situation an emergency for 4 years. It’s about time @RishiSunak caught up.” So the emergency had “now become” something again, and gained a new word: security. By June 2024 the words “NATIONAL SECURITY EMERGENCY” were on the side of a Reform campaign van in letters several feet high. Under Starmer it became a near weekly refrain. “The Prime Minister should declare a national security emergency in the English Channel” (May 2025). “Starmer refuses to call it a national security emergency. It is.” (May 2025). “This is a national security emergency, and I have said so for years” (September 2025). In March 2026 he cheered Reform-run Kent County Council for declaring “an illegal migration emergency in Kent.” By May 2026 he was writing that “nearly 200,000 illegal migrants have crossed the English Channel since this emergency began,” and that “my government will detain and deport every single one of them.” By August: “The crisis in the Channel has been a national security emergency since the beginning.” Just pause and look at that. The emergency is always brand new (“has now become”) and always ancient (“since the beginning”, “I have said so for years”). Both can’t be true of a sudden event. But they can both be true of a cheap slogan. Then, at Reform’s conference on 4 September: “On my first day as Prime Minister, I will declare a national emergency. Parliament will sit 24 hours a day until all necessary bills have been passed.” The Channel has dropped out of the sentence. The emergency now covers his entire legislative programme, and he didn’t even say what legal basis he’d use. Today Burnham became the fourth PM he’s asked. So here’s what I think is the real reason. Political scientists have a name for what Farage is doing: ‘securitisation’. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde argued in 1998 that calling something an existential threat to security is a speech act. Say it often enough, and get an audience to accept it, and the issue is lifted out of normal politics into a space where speed, secrecy and the suspension of ordinary rules start to look justified. The repetition is the whole point. Six years of “emergency” aims to get the public to accept the frame before anyone debates the policy. None of this is new to anyone who has read Stuart Hall and colleagues’ brilliant Policing the Crisis (1978). They showed how a manufactured sense of crisis, amplified through the media, built public consent for what they called a movement “towards the ‘exceptional state’” or the “birth of a ‘law and order’ society.” This involves greater routine reliance on repressive state features (policing, courts, law-and-order rhetoric), often mobilised through moral panics, that construct folk devils and win popular support for more authoritarian measures. The Wootton clip is a neat illustration, with one twist Hall’s generation never had to deal with: here the politician and the broadcaster were on the same payroll. Real emergencies are supposed to be short-lived, and UK law knows it. Regulations made under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 lapse after 30 days unless renewed, and the Act expressly forbids them from amending the Human Rights Act, which is the very obstacle Farage’s asylum plan is designed to remove. The word emergency is doing work the law won’t. And look at what the emergency is for. Around two-thirds of small-boat arrivals who claim asylum are granted protection, according to Oxford University analysis. “Every single one of them” includes tens of thousands of people this country has formally recognised as refugees. You can’t promise that in normal politics. You can only promise it in an emergency. The crossings deserve a serious policy response. Farage’s answer is a permanent emergency, used to strip away British people’s hard-won rights. And that should worry everyone, whatever they think about immigration.