Who’d have thought that Nigel Farage would embrace the phrase “think globally, act locally”?

After years of telling Britain to beware Europeans and their supposed lack of good ideas, Reform’s leader has now stolen one from Denmark. It is signing a deal with Kosovo to lease prison cells there in an attempt to cut overcrowding at home. Belgium is looking at a similar move and the Netherlands is weighing up a plan to send inmates to Estonia.

Is this the moment when Farage – whose party has led in the last 67 UK opinion polls but struggles to get over 30% – ditches the performative, unworkable nonsense and starts to take notice of the wider world around him? Of course not. 

While the other countries plan to send abroad only foreign nationals who have been told they will be deported after their prison sentences, Farage claims his plan would see some of Britain’s most notorious criminals, like the Soham child murderer Ian Huntley, sent to jails in El Salvador – an unworkable and ridiculous notion that makes the Tories’ Rwanda fantasies look sane by comparison.

It suggests that at a time when the polls show Americans turning on Donald Trump for his cruel ICE deportations and even the president’s MAGA fans breaking with him over the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, Farage has decided to go all-in on the orange narcissist.

Farage sees the rapid march of America to a dictatorship, where the laws only apply to Trump’s opponents, innocent people are dragged from the streets, the law is ignored, science derided, academic freedom snuffed out and climate change let rip, and he thinks “I fancy a bit of that.” He wants to copy and paste Trumpist policies into the UK.

El Salvador is mentioned not because it makes any sort of sense, but because Trump has been sending illegal immigrants (and some who turn out not to be illegal at all) to a notorious megaprison there. In Farage’s fantasies, we would cage Britain’s most depraved murderers and perverts in rented cells in similar hellholes.

Reform says 10,000 such people could be deported to prisons in places like El Salvador. While very few of us care about the conditions served by people like Ian Huntley, they were born and made in the UK, committed their offences in the UK, have been convicted in the UK and are imprisoned in the UK after a fair trial and by a jury of their peers. Some will be visited by family from the UK.

The idea of sending prisoners like these to serve their sentences abroad would not clear the first set of legal appeals from an independent judiciary here, which is entirely the point. You set yourself up as the defenders of scared ordinary people, whip up ever more fear of immigrants and crime and then tell them anyone who opposes you is a friend of murderers and paedophiles. If you can’t do anything you want within the law, go for the lawyers. 

This will be the basis for Reform leaving the ECHR, for taking control of the appointment of judges, for suppressing the Supreme Court and purging law and order of the “woke” and the woolly. 

In his speech on crime on Monday morning, Farage claimed that “in many parts of the country we face societal collapse.” Really? You might say that the only signs of that come when supporters of Reform and other far right parties attack the police outside asylum hotels and during other “patriotic protests.”

Lucy Connolly, jailed for tweeting approvingly about the possibility of asylum hotels being set on fire during last summer’s riots, was again mentioned by Farage as if she is the victim of injustice because of her rapid trial. He knows full well that she had a rapid trial because she pleaded guilty.

The start of the summer holidays is a strange time to begin an anti-crime campaign. But then, despite the poll leads, there is a slight whiff of panic about Reform at the moment.

Farage repeatedly admitting on national TV that he has “no idea” why one of his councils has awarded its mayor a 600% pay rise is severely embarrassing. Also embarrassing is his insistence that 16- and 17-year-olds should be denied the vote but it is perfectly normal for 18-year-old George Finch to lead Warwickshire County Council, with its £2bn budget.

There is chaos behind the scenes – Reform appears to be in a state of civil war over the behaviour of its former chairman Zia Yusuf, who alienates colleagues and supporters alike. The party is dropping council seats where those elected in May decided to resign and has lost two of its original MPs. Its war on what deputy leader Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero” is a farce – last week Luke Campbell, the party’s mayor in Hull and East Yorkshire, accepted £700,000 from central government to put solar panels on public and private buildings.

Farage fears more questions about his uncosted economic policies, his role in the Brexit disaster, his councillors’ unsuitability for power and his racist candidates. He must know that there are years of more detailed scrutiny to come and so he is on the counterattack; another classic tactic that he has learnt from Trump. 

So be ready for more distractions, smears and lies. More whipping up of fear and loathing. More attempts to destroy the rule of law under the guise of protecting your base from the enemy within.

The Trumpette has learned well, but we have seen what happens when you let people like this into power. Trump’s America may be Nigel Farage’s dream, but it should be our warning.