Good morning. Consider the policy slate: British residents with settled status should be deported. We should guard against demographic change by increasing birthrates instead of migration. The special treatment for minorities in a “two-tier” justice system must end. There should be fewer black and Asian people on TV. And you can’t be English unless you’re white.
A few years ago, views like these belonged firmly on the fringes – and while the occasional unreconstructed backbencher might get some publicity by voicing them, they would swiftly be dismissed as irrelevant cranks. No longer. That laundry list is an amalgamation of the views held by parties now deemed mainstream and their allies in the media – and yet the blunt fact that Conservatives are echoing policies that once belonged to the BNP, or that Nigel Farage and the Daily Mail are adopting tropes popularised by Tommy Robinson, somehow seems taboo to point out.
Most recently, the Tory junior minister Katie Lam proposed deporting legal residents to create a more “culturally coherent group of people” – and Reform’s Sarah Pochin complained that “every advert” seemed to feature “black and Asian people”. But they are far from alone. Today’s newsletter takes you through the precedents and the policies that demonstrate a shift so vast we barely notice it any more. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
NHS | Health service bosses are seeking an emergency injection of £3bn to cover unexpected costs, a move that presents a fresh problem for Rachel Reeves as she seeks to fill an estimated £30bn hole in the public finances.
UK news | A former UK asylum seeker and convicted sex offender, whose case sparked riots in the summer, is back in custody and faces deportation after being released from prison accidentally over the weekend.
Immigration and asylum | The Home Office has squandered billions of pounds on asylum accommodation due to long-term mismanagement of a “failed, chaotic and expensive” system, according to a report published by a powerful parliamentary committee.
Argentina | The party of Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, has won Sunday’s midterm elections after a campaign in which US president Donald Trump announced a $40bn bailout for the country and made continued aid conditional on the victory of his Argentinian counterpart.
Louvre heist | French police have arrested two suspects believed to have helped steal crown jewels worth an estimated €88m (£76m) from the Louvre museum in Paris, a week after one of the country’s most spectacular heists in decades.
In depth: The ideas that smashed the Overton window open
You will be familiar with the concept of the Overton window, and how constantly discussing an idea in mainstream discourse can shift it from a fringe theory to something utterly unremarkable.
In the UK, the greatest engine of that phenomenon in recent years has been the rise of Reform UK and its increasingly serious prospects of gaining power at the next election. Because Nigel Farage retains a veneer of respectability, he is a natural candidate to sand down radical views and make them palatable for a mainstream audience. But he and his party have brought plenty of others along with them. Here’s how some of those policies have shifted in recent times.
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Remigration | ‘They will also need to go home’
2010 | The British National party proposes a policy of “voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants and their descendants who are legally here are afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin”. The policy is a partially sanitised descendant of National Front calls for the compulsory deportation of all non-white immigrants, along with their descendants, summarised by the slogan: “Stop immigration. Start repatriation.”
2025 | The idea that legally settled status may not prevent deportation gains a foothold in mainstream political discourse. Labour’s proposal of extending the wait for settlement and citizenship rights from five years to 10 does not go as far, but implies workers on the brink of citizenship will be faced with a lengthy additional wait. More extreme is Reform UK’s policy: that those who have already secured indefinite leave to remain could suddenly be deported if they do not meet a stricter new set of rules.
But the party whose approach appears most consonant with past extremism is the Conservatives. They propose retrospectively stripping indefinite leave to remain from anyone whose income falls below £38,700 or receives benefits, including the state pension, social care and even potentially maternity pay. In some respects, that is a more extreme policy than the BNP’s, since it has no voluntary component.
A junior minister often described as a potential future leader, Katie Lam, goes further still, saying: “There are … a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to,” adding, “They will also need to go home”, leaving “a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people”. When asked about Lam’s remarks, Kemi Badenoch’s spokesperson says they are “broadly in line” with party policy.
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Birthrates | From ‘BREED OR DIE!’ to lessons from Hungary
1983 | Spearhead, the National Front’s house magazine, runs a cover story with a picture of a white mother and child with the headline: “BREED OR DIE!” Its description of “the white race imperative” echoes a 1979 pamphlet urging white women to be “breeders for race and nation”, and a long history of disproven fascist claims that ethnic minorities breed at a much faster rate.
2025 | There is a broad expert consensus that declining birthrates present a demographic challenge in the UK and many other countries. But the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which links this phenomenon to a deliberate plan orchestrated by shadowy elites to gradually overwhelm the “native” white population with non-white immigrants, finds growing popular support, with a third of Britons polled in 2023 believing it.
Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch warns that “people [are] not having enough children” and “we cannot solve it with immigration”. Reform UK has reportedly sought advice from Viktor Orbán, who has openly embraced the “great replacement” theory in Hungary, on welfare policies to increase the birthrate. And a Reform UK spokesperson says: “We’re trying to cut immigration drastically … At the same time, to fix that population crisis, we’re trying to encourage British people already here to have kids.”
GB News, the house broadcaster of the populist right, runs a sympathetic interview with the originator of the “great replacement” theory, and runs other stories hinting at the same analysis, like one headlined: “How do ethnic majorities become minorities? It doesn’t make you racist to ask this question.”
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“Two-tier” policing | Tommy Robinson’s coinage moves into mainstream
2010s | The idea of a “two-tier” system, which privileges the rights of minorities over those of white British people, is firmly on the fringes. In 2012, Tommy Robinson complained of “a two-tier system, where Muslims are treated more favourably than non-Muslims”. In 2019, he described a “two-tier police force that treats crimes within the Muslim community differently”. His theory is largely ignored in the mainstream.
2025 | The pernicious idea of “two-tier policing” becomes politically commonplace, entering wide circulation thanks to Robinson, and then Nigel Farage, after the Southport riots last year. (You can read more about that in this First Edition from last August.) Robert Jenrick made a similar claim about the policing of protests over Israel’s assault on Gaza earlier that year.
The phrase “two-tier” becomes a standard item on the front pages of rightwing newspapers, appearing in the Mail 358 times in the last year. And the epithet “two-tier Keir”, used in parliament by Robert Jenrick, on social media by Nigel Farage, and on X by Elon Musk, is adopted as shorthand for the claim that the prime minister is deliberately disadvantaging white British people, particularly those on the right, against ethnic minorities and immigrants.
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Britishness and Englishness | National identity as synonym for whiteness
2009 | Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, sets out a view well outside the political mainstream: “British … has a meaning as an ethnic description,” he says. “Collectively, foreign residents of other races should be referred to as ‘racial foreigners’, a non-pejorative term … We don’t subscribe to the politically correct fiction that just because they happen to be born in Britain, a Pakistani is a Briton. They’re not.”
That summarises a much broader tendency on the far right, often left implicit, to distinguish between the “indigenous” British or English people and those of an ethnic minority background whose national identity is always viewed as contingent. It is a strand of thinking that can be traced back to Enoch Powell’s warning in his “rivers of blood speech”: immigration risks making Britons “strangers in their own country”.
2025 | Suella Braverman, the former home secretary and backbench Conservative MP, writes a piece for the Daily Telegraph saying that “for Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity”, and for that reason, she is British Asian but not English. Isabel Oakeshott – the right-wing journalist and provocateur whose partner is Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice – makes the implicit claim that those from ethnic minorities can never be British: “In the world according to Keir Starmer if I grew up in, say, Somalia, I could credibly claim to be Somalian. Could I? Really? I think that would be laughable.”
That presumption – that an ethnic minority background automatically raises questions about the legitimacy of your national identity – finds an echo in comments from Robert Jenrick, who complained of “not seeing another white face” in a Birmingham neighbourhood, which made it “one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to … That’s not the kind of country I want to live in.”
Keir Starmer’s infamous “island of strangers” comments, which he later said he regretted, pointed to the same kind of analysis – and echoed Powell, he said unwittingly. Farage has repeatedly hinted at the same view – careful to emphasise this is not about race, while saying things like: “I’m very concerned that we have whole areas of our towns and cities that are unrecognisable as being English,” claiming: “But they’re not unrecognisable as being English because of skin colour. They’re unrecognisable because of culture.”
On Friday, Reform’s Sarah Pochin said that seeing adverts with too many “black and Asian people” “drives her mad”. Labour’s Wes Streeting called that racist yesterday. But the Conservative shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, was unwilling to go so far, even as Pochin issued a limited apology. “It’s not language I would have used,” he said. “But we should acknowledge the public do have legitimate concerns about large-scale immigration and discussing that is certainly not racist.”
What adverts have to do with immigration was left unexplained.
What else we’ve been reading
This extract from Anne Enright’s new essay collection, about the death of her mother, grounds its exploration of grief and the passage of time in rigorous attention to the objects that fill the family home. It’s extraordinary. Archie
If you didn’t read it this weekend, Sally Williams’ deep-dive into the (increasingly younger) women getting hair transplants is a captivating. Poppy
Marina Hyde’s last interview was with Nigel Farage more than a decade ago. Her meeting with the Hollywood star Glen Powell, who emerges as “a one-man cargo cult for Hollywood’s vanished primacy”, is a fine follow-up. Archie
I enjoyed Aisha Down’s dystopian look at the ways the internet could fall apart – a much more plausible risk than you might imagine. Archie
On a similar note as today’s First Edition, Jason Okundaye’s piece this morning on the death of one nation conservatism and the rise of blatant racism is an excellent read. Poppy
Sport
Premier League | Tottenham cruised to a 3-0 victory against Everton, scoring three headers, two from the outstanding Micky van de Ven and one from Pape Matar Sarr. Meanwhile, Arsenal beat Crystal Palace 1-0, Burnley beat Wolves 3-2, Bournemouth beat Nottingham Forest 2-0 and Aston Villa beat Manchester City 1-0.
Cricket | England finished the group stages of the World Cup with a dominant eight-wicket win against a limp New Zealand, after bowling them out for 168 in 38.2 overs. Amy Jones finished unbeaten on 86 as England won with 124 balls to spare.
Formula One | Lando Norris eased to victory at the F1 Mexico City GP to lead the drivers’ championship by one point from his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri.
The front pages
“NHS needs extra £3bn to avoid rationing care, Reeves is warned” – that’s the Guardian, while the i paper has “No 10 in talks to water down day one workers’ rights amid new growth warnings”. “Worried Wes: voters are in despair” says the health secretary, through the Metro. The Financial Times leads on “US expects Beijing to delay rare earth export curbs as trade truce hopes rise”. “Billions wasted in migrant hotel chaos” is the splash headline in the Telegraph, and it’s similar in the Daily Mail while the Times calls them “flawed hotel deals”. The Express runs with “Tax rises will result in higher food prices”, calling it a warning from supermarket bosses. The Mirror has “Tragedy of mum killed by £20 black market skinny jab”.
Today in Focus
The great Gen Z revolt
On the podcast, Nosheen Iqbal talks to protesters in Nepal, Madagascar and Morocco – as well as Chatham House fellow Dr Nayana Prakash – about the gen Z movements toppling governments across the world.
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Alese Johnston was sitting on the couch one Sunday morning, reading the Wall Street Journal, when she came across an article by a 60-year-old writer who felt he’d become boring – always telling his friends the same stories. “I do that,” Johnston thought.
A couple of weeks later, when she turned 70, she committed to doing 70 new things over the course of the year. Read Paula Cocozza’s excellent A new start after 60, to follow Johnston’s foray into the new – equipped with a website, a spreadsheet, and one rule – to keep doing things she never done before.
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
