This week’s Behind the Headlines comes from content editor Xander Elliards. To receive the newsletter direct to your inbox every week for free, click here.
WE had the dubious "pleasure" of welcoming Nigel Farage to Scotland this week, where he delivered his second day running of headline-grabbing press conferences.
His visit to "Edinburgh" (as press were told, it later transpired they meant Broxburn), saw him announce another defection from the flagging Scottish Tories. But it was the previous day that had seen him, backed by giant Union flags, pledge to tear up the rights that journalists – and the rest of us – use to challenge those in power.
It was no empty threat. If past form and present promises are any guide, a Farage premiership would see UK’s press freedoms stripped away as quickly as the “Brexit Party” veneer.
READ MORE: Nigel Farage bid to scrap human rights law could 'accelerate end of the Union'
Reform UK are already undermining the free press with the limited capacity they have in power in councils in England.
In Nottinghamshire, the party’s council leader has banned the Nottingham Post, its online edition, and a team of BBC-funded local democracy reporters in its stable from interacting with the local administration.
That is more than a Trumpian echo. It is a copy-paste policy.
The US president, steamrolling opposing views in a way that would make Putin proud, banned the Associated Press from White House briefings after it refused to start calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. Petty and shambolic, yes. But also very, very dangerous.
In June, when Farage visited Scotland, it was only a matter of hours before he was suggesting that journalists were involved in a far-reaching conspiracy to organise, and then report on, protests against him.
Such fabrications spread like wildfire through the hyper-online, far-right Twitter space, where they are treated as gospel truth.
If Farage was prime minister, how long would it be before he took issue with some newspaper or broadcaster or other and banned them from No 10 briefings? How many months or weeks before it was only Reform’s chosen press getting access to government?
The ECHR is not just words on a page, it provides the legal framework upon which much of the UK’s journalistic output relies.
The Daily Mail – the Reform-supporting paper who breathlessly backed ditching the ECHR earlier this week – know this. In fact, they often use article 10 of the ECHR – which guarantees a right to freedom of expression, for their own ends.
READ MORE: Nigel Farage challenged on far-right infiltration of Reform UK
Just last year, the Daily Mail’s publisher won a high-profile case against having to pay the “success fees” of the people they defame by relying on article 10.
But the day after Farage said a Reform government would strip those protections away, the Daily Mail ran the front page headline: “Finally, a politician who gets it.”
That is not news, of course. It is the opinion of an editorial team who are all too happy to see human rights stripped away from those they deem lesser than themselves.
But human rights are universal. To support their removal is to take the chainsaw to the branch on which you sit.
Will the blowhards running the UK press wake up and “fight for their rights” – even if that means fighting for other people’s as well? I would not hold your breath.
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