When Nigel Farage appeared to ape Donald Trump by noting the problem of migrants mistreating British wildlife, his comments were swiftly condemned. Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Wednesday, the Reform leader suggested that ‘swans were being eaten in Royal Parks in this country’ and that ‘carp were being taken out of ponds’. Who was to blame? ‘People who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so’, he said, in particular eastern Europeans. During the US election campaign last year, Trump had provoked considerable controversy (and some enjoyable memes) after saying that Haitian migrants were ‘eating the dogs’ in Ohio.
BBC Newsnight subjected Farage’s claims to a po-faced debunking
The Independent quoted the charity that runs the Royal Parks saying, ‘We’ve not had any incidents reported to us of people killing or eating swans in London’s eight Royal Parks’, as if to suggest there was no basis at all to what Farage had said.
Next, the paper quoted the RSPCA, which in fact confirmed that a viral video where an agent investigates a migrant family suspected of hunting and cooking a swan is real. While this horrifying episode was from 15 years ago, this nevertheless supports Farage’s contention that this a real and worrying issue.
Notably, the paper, like others who criticised his comments, could find no one to rebut Farage’s claim about carp, presumably because the fact that Eastern Europeans have been plundering British carp has long been widely known. ‘Many of the waters that we control are being systematically raped and pillaged by migrants’, said Andy Jackson, Secretary of the Angling Association, in 2010. This followed the accession of a number of Eastern European countries to the EU in 2004 which led to a large influx of migrants to the UK.
That hasn’t stopped some jumping in with furious denunciations. Labour’s Clive Lewis accused Farage of ‘peddling wild conspiracy theories’.
‘What the fuck is Farage doing?’ was the urbane reaction of the ex-BBC bores at the News Agents podcast, with Jon Sopel suggesting there was ‘no accountability or evidence base’ to what he had said. On Sky News, when Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns said that there had been a ‘serious issue’ with river Witham ducks being stolen and eaten when she was a councillor in Boston, Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire put her head in her hands in scorn. Presenter Darren McCaffrey then admonished the Lincolnshire mayor: ‘You can’t just go around saying you’ve heard stuff, can you?’ BBC Newsnight likewise subjected Farage’s claims to a po-faced debunking from Victoria Derbyshire.
Yet while it may the case that there have been no reported incidents of migrants eating swans in royal parks, it doesn’t take much to find news stories on this cruel and alarming phenomenon in the rest of the country. Here are just a few of the headlines I came across:
‘Poles lead plunder of Britain’s carp’, reported the Guardian in 2007. ‘Carcasses and piles of feathers found next to cooking pots at migrants’ camp’, wrote the Daily Mail in 2008 (below the immortal headline, ‘Swan bake’). ‘Immigrants blamed for pillaging fish and swans from river’ – the Telegraph, 2010. ‘Immigrant was cooking swan amid bird bodies’ – the Standard, 2012. In 2015, even the BBC reported that ‘Illegal fishing by gangs and migrants “must be tackled”‘.
Far from being a ‘conspiracy theory’, the lurid tales just keep coming. By 2012, the carp problem got so bad that officials began to ‘patrol rivers to stop Eastern Europeans eating carp’, reported the Standard. In 2013, Sky News reported that a Queen’s Swan had been ‘found cooked near Windsor Castle’. In 2014, villagers in ‘sleepy’ Earith, Cambridgeshire blamed ‘migrant workers for stealing all their ducks’. In 2014, a convicted swan killer told the Standard: ‘I like the Queen and didn’t know what type of bird it was… but it tasted nice’. Clearly, there many new arrivals who are both ignorant of our rules around wildlife and who do not share our veneration for it.
While news stories seem to have dropped off in recent years, plenty of videos can be found on social media which show people making off with UK wildlife. Take the man walking along a bridge holding a swan. Or the man carrying a goose in a lift.
News reporting on this phenomenon seems to have given way to citizen journalism posted to social media in recent years. One reason might be the regrettable decline in local journalism. It would also track with the ‘Great Awokening’ of our media-political class since the early 2010s, after which stories portraying migrants negatively became significantly more taboo (would ‘Poles lead plunder of Britain’s carp’ run in any paper today, let alone the Guardian?).
Still, we do know that between 2020 and 2022, police recorded a 59 per cent increase in crimes against swans, ducks and geese, with nine decapitated swans among the 62 victims. And with many such crimes never reported, in the view of the RSPCA these figures are just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. Clearly, this gruesome trend hasn’t just stopped off its own accord in recent years. Last May, for instance, two men, Anas Azizi of Brighton and Sirwan Salih of Derby, were convicted of night poaching of pheasants on Titsey Hill in Oxted.
One is left with the question of why Farage’s comments were jumped on in this bizarre way. Politicos who imagine themselves to be unimpeachable arbiters of truth tried to make out that a decades old problem relating to immigration is in fact entirely a myth. These are the very figures who accuse Farage himself of being ‘Trumpian’, ‘conspiratorial’ and ‘post-truth’.
It seems that not only do they want to have a go at Farage, whom they despise, but whose poll lead they are utterly powerless to dent – they also seem to think they can quash the rightful outrage about another ugly factor of mass migration through sheer force of sneering.
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