There is something deeply disturbing about what happened at RAF Fairford and it isn’t simply the discovery of three suspicious vans near a military airbase.
It is the speed with which some politicians have attempted to turn an unfolding police investigation into political propaganda.
Before investigators had established who the suspects were, what motivated them, or whether there was any foreign involvement, Nigel Farage was already pushing a familiar narrative: Iran, illegal immigration, small boats and Britain supposedly being under attack.
Then came the inconvenient facts.
The five men arrested were British nationals from London.
Not Iranian migrants arriving in rubber dinghies. Not recently arrived asylum seekers. British men.
They have been released on police bail while counter-terrorism officers continue investigating.
That does not prove there was no Iranian connection. Police are examining whether a foreign state may have been involved. But it does demonstrate something extremely important:
Farage was prepared to make an explosive political claim before the basic facts were established.
And that matters.
Farage isn’t some anonymous social media account. He is a Member of Parliament and one of Britain’s most prominent political figures. When he links a potential terrorist incident to small boats and immigration, millions of people hear it.
When that claim turns out to be unsupported, the correction rarely travels as far as the original accusation.
This is the fundamental problem with fear politics.
A murder becomes an immigration argument. A protest becomes an argument about national identity. A terrorist incident becomes an argument about borders. And now suspicious vans near an RAF base are immediately dragged into the same narrative.
It doesn’t matter whether the evidence supports the story. The story comes first.
That isn’t serious politics. It is political opportunism.
People have every right to be concerned about border security, terrorism and foreign interference. Those are legitimate issues requiring serious debate.
But exploiting those concerns by attaching immigration to an incident before the evidence exists is something else entirely.
It is fearmongering.
And we have seen where this can lead. In 2024, false claims and inflammatory speculation surrounding the Southport murders helped create an environment in which misinformation spread rapidly and was followed by disorder and violence across Britain.
You would hope politicians had learned the lesson.
Apparently not.
