Nigel Farage has hired a new media staffer who published hundreds of articles that focused on whipping up anti-immigration hysteria in Europe while he was writing for the right-wing Breitbart website.



During his years at Breitbart London between 2015 and 2018, Liam Deacon churned out an extraordinary number of sensationalist stories about immigrant crime while promoting the activities of far-right, anti-Islam figures like Tommy Robinson and Anne Marie Waters and attacking familiar targets of the European far right like Angela Merkel and Sadiq Khan.

After leaving the publication, Deacon worked briefly for the Daily Star before joining the Brexit party as a press officer in June.

More than 2,600 articles on the far-right site carry Deacon’s byline. He started regularly writing for the website in April 2015 as the European migrant crisis was rapidly escalating.

Some of his output involved mundane tabloid news — Deacon’s byline appears on the story about the man who officially changed his name to Buzz Lightyear, and the boat that was named “Boaty McBoatface” — or stories which touched on traditional right-wing culture war issues.

But mainly, Deacon wrote pieces focusing on Muslims, crime, and immigration.

Between April 2015 and the Brexit vote in June 2016, he published nearly 800 stories for the website, of which 450 were about immigration, the migrant crisis, or Islam. Many of his stories were filed under website tags such as “Sweden migrants”, “migrant benefits”, “Sharia in Britain”, and “Muslim rape gangs”. It represents a significant body of work that pushed anti-immigration European narratives.

These stories were often taken from mainstream news outlets — many used the Mail Online as the source material — then rewritten with amplified anti-immigration themes and headlines.