Nigel Farage’s Small Boats Moral Panic: How Reform UK Turns Immigration Into Fear Politics

Clacton-On-Sea, Easter 1964: Thousands of British youths from rival “Mod” and “Rocker” subcultures swarm the beach on a bank holiday weekend. Scuffles break out in the seaside town. The actual disturbances are minor – a few broken deck chairs, some rowdy teenagers – yet the national media reaction is anything but minor. Newspapers thunder about rioting youth in terms of “disastrous proportions,” branding Mods and Rockers “vermin” and “internal enemies” who would “bring about disintegration of a nation’s character”. Editorials warn that this delinquent generation could ignite violence to “surge and flame like a forest fire”. Later in the year, on Whitsun bank holiday weekend, the groups descended upon the beaches of Brighton and Margate. Once again the media reported riotous and criminal behaviour and numerous arrests. Thus was born one of Britain’s most famous moral panics, a wave of public outrage and fear out of proportion to the actual threat.

Clacton 1964 later became sociological legend. In Folk Devils & Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen’s seminal 1972 study, the scholar showed how media and authorities constructed the Mod/Rocker clashes as a dire threat to social order, even though such youth scuffles were not unprecedented. Cohen defined a “moral panic” as arising when a condition or group is suddenly portrayed as a menace to societal values by “the media and those in authority.” The Mods and Rockers, in Cohen’s analysis, were cast as folk devils – scapegoats onto whom deeper anxieties were projected and displaced. As Hall et al. later observed, moral panics “crystallize popular fear and anxieties which have a real basis” by pinning them on a convenient social group. In 1964, that group was adolescent bikers and scooterists. Society’s broader concerns about changing youth norms, post-war boredom, and petty crime were channelled into an exaggerated terror of parkas and leather jackets on the Essex coast.

A New Folk Devil: Migrants in Boats

Today, over half a century later, Clacton finds itself at the heart of another manufactured storm. This time the perceived invaders are not British teenagers on holiday, but asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small inflatable boats – and the chief instigator of panic is Clacton’s own Member of Parliament. Nigel Farage, the populist leader of Reform UK (and former UKIP architect of Brexit), won the Clacton seat in 2024 on a promise to “take back control” of Britain’s borders. He has since relentlessly sounded the alarm over what he calls a “small boats crisis.”

Farage’s messaging paints a picture of Britain under siege by seaborne outsiders. He has famously described groups of desperate migrants in dinghies as “the beginning of an invasion” and “a national humiliation.” In one video, he accused the UK Border Force of acting as a “taxi service” for people seeking refuge, stoking public outrage that migrants rescued at sea were being housed in hotels with basic amenities. Through social media posts, talk radio monologues and TV appearances, the narrative took root: the country faced an unprecedented threat from migrants crossing the Channel. Never mind that in reality these Channel crossings accounted for a mere 0.59% of immigration to the UK in 2019 – a tiny fraction of overall arrivals. The image of boatloads of young men on a Kent beach, amplified in tabloids and news broadcasts, was enough to provoke a surge of anxiety. By mid-2020, nearly three-quarters of Britons polled viewed the crossings as a “serious” national issue, and politicians began echoing the tabloid language of “invasion” and “floods.” A moral panic was in full swing, its flames fanned by sensational headlines and outspoken pundits.

The parallels with 1964 are striking. Once again, news coverage has turned a limited disturbance into a societal crisis. Then, it was a few holiday scuffles miscast as the collapse of law and order; now it is a few thousand asylum seekers framed as an existential threat to the nation. As one commentator wryly noted, “Moral panics are manufactured outrages: they have to be made, nurtured, and repeated ad nauseum.” And few are more diligent in nurturing outrage than Nigel Farage. Having built his career on warnings of foreigners overrunning Britain – from Eastern European EU workers to Syrian refugees – Farage seamlessly shifted post-Brexit to a new target: dinghies in the Channel. This modern folk devil has all the ingredients to rally public fear: visibly foreign outsiders, entering without permission, filmed in dramatic fashion on Britain’s maritime doorstep.

Stigma of Race, Nation & Religion

The Channel boat migrants fall squarely into what sociologist Erving Goffman termed the “stigma of race, nation, and religion.” Many are brown-skinned men from the Middle East or Africa – easily othered by those inclined to racism. Many come from Muslim-majority countries – triggering age-old Islamophobic tropes about terrorists or extremists lurking among them. And by definition they are foreigners seeking entry – which in the eyes of nationalists makes them a threat to Britain’s cultural cohesion. The result is a perfect storm of stigmas. Once a group has been marked as a dangerous, alien “other,” it becomes politically easier to advocate harsh, exceptional measures against them. Lock them up on floating prisons; ship them off to distant islands; deny them the chance to ever settle – proposals that would sound outrageous if applied to British citizens in trouble gain traction when applied to asylum seekers.

Stigma does not emerge in a vacuum; it is purposefully wielded. Stigma is  “weaponised” by those in power as a tool of social control. When people become convinced of the existence of a threat to their lives or social order, a sense of heightened solidarity can be fostered, which facilitates subordination to a ruling class and an acceptance of exceptional collective measures that would not otherwise be consented to, including the removal of rights and freedoms. If skilfully directed, the strategy can make even the most peaceful people support such ideology in the name of defending their nation, though the real reasons for going to war against Asylum Seekers may be nothing of the sort.

Another common reason for creating an enemy is to distract a society from its domestic problems. This happens most often under authoritarian regimes, which seek to justify their existence by creating a sense of unity and fear in a population through persuading them that they are facing an imminent attack. In our neoliberal era, elites have found that fostering such stigmas deflects blame for systemic problems onto “undeserving” populations. We see exactly this dynamic in the UK: rather than grapple with the shortage of good jobs, strained public services, or post-Brexit economic malaise, politicians channel public frustration toward migrants. Faced with anger over rising poverty and inequality, leaders serve up a target: blame the “boat people” living in hotels at taxpayer expense.

History Repeating Itself

The moral panic over “small boats” shows uncanny echoes of past episodes. A century ago, in 1914, Robert Tressell satirized how British newspapers incited “a bitter undiscriminating hatred of the foreigner” in the working class. In the 1970s, amid economic turmoil, mugging was sensationally (and falsely) portrayed as a new crime wave perpetrated mostly by young Black men – again marrying fear of crime with racial stigma. Each time, the pattern is the same: a society in flux seizes on an outsider group to serve as folk devils, blamed for larger anxieties.

In Clacton today, one can stand on the same beaches once patrolled by Mods and Rockers and reflect on this recurring cycle. The town’s MP and self-styled sentinel, Nigel Farage, vows to “stop the boats” to save Britain. But many would suggest Britain might instead stop and examine its fears. The young bikers of 1964 did not bring down the nation’s character, nor will frightened families fleeing war destroy Britain’s fabric. Yet the moral panic – the fear itself – can do damage. It can erode our compassion, distort our politics, and lead to cruel policies that betray the very values we claim to defend. The stigma attached to race, nation and religion, once inflamed, is not easily extinguished; it burns through communities, leaving division and hatred in its wake.

The lesson of Clacton’s history is that moral panics eventually subside – Mods and Rockers are now a quaint cultural memory – but the harm done in the heat of panic can linger for decades. Today’s refugees and migrants, maligned and stigmatized, will bear the brunt of Britain’s overreaction long after the headlines move on. As a society, we’ve been here before. We should know better by now. Instead of succumbing to yet another cycle of fear, it is time to break it. That starts by seeing “small boat” migrants for what they are – fellow human beings in need – rather than as folk devils. It requires recognising the moral panic for what it is: a political conjuring trick, one that we as an electorate must refuse to let dupe us again. After all, the targets of moral panic may change – from seaside youth gangs to seaborne refugees – but the script remains the same. And only by learning from history can we finally escape the grip of fear that so predictably takes hold.

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness