As the Labour party gathers in Liverpool this weekend for its annual conference, everyone will be discussing one word: Reform. Nigel Farage’s party is polling nationally around 13 points ahead of the Conservatives and 10 points ahead of Labour. Even in Merseyside, whose 16 constituencies used to be Labour safe seats, the party no longer seems assured. The government’s strategy for dealing with this has so far been shaped by an overwhelmingly flawed instinct: if Farage’s latest party is winning votes by talking tough on immigration, then Labour should shift rightwards too.
Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech earlier this year marked a dramatic turn to the right on immigration. That infamous moment marked the publication of a government white paper that promised to clamp down on net migration, and blamed immigrants for overstretching public services – ignoring how chronic disinvestment has left many of those services threadbare. Farage could barely contain his delight at Labour’s new strategy. He congratulated Starmer for “learning a great deal” from Reform UK. Imitation really is the greatest form of flattery.
Labour is not alone in this. Across Europe, the left has repeatedly responded to the radical right by echoing their rhetoric on immigration. In Germany, the previous coalition government, led by Social Democrat Olaf Scholz as chancellor, sharply changed its rhetoric and policies on immigration and asylum as it attempted to see off Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In the February 2025 election, the Social Democratic party received their historically worst result, securing just 16.4% of the vote, while the AfD did better than ever before, with 20.8% – an increase of more than 10% compared with the last election in 2021.
As political scientists, we’ve spent years investigating what happens when mainstream parties “get tough” on immigration, and how this affects support for the radical right. We recently studied what happened to people’s assessment of Labour, and their likelihood of voting for the party or Reform, shortly after Starmer gave his island of strangers speech. The speech helpfully coincided with a period when people were answering a survey for the British Election Study, so we gathered responses from people who were interviewed immediately before the speech, and those interviewed immediately after. The results: the speech made Labour and Starmer less popular, especially among Labour’s own voters. It significantly boosted immigration as an issue in people’s minds. There is no evidence it helped to reduce support for Reform, or convince Reform voters that they should vote Labour.
Recent research from Persuasion UK, a nonprofit, told much the same story. It found that Labour’s messaging around deportations strengthened the importance of the issue while potentially strengthening Reform. This is hardly unique to Labour. We studied more than 70 different elections that took place in 12 western European countries over several decades, and found that when mainstream parties take more anti-immigration positions, it leads to more support for the radical right, not less. We’ve also found that when social democratic parties propose strongly reducing immigration numbers, this leads to less support for social democratic parties at the ballot box. When progressive parties imitate the right, they weaken their own electoral prospects.
The picture that emerges from this research is clear: moving right on immigration doesn’t help Labour. It alienates Labour’s progressive base and fails to win over Reform voters. When Labour defines itself as a party happy to mimic those who scapegoat migrants, liberally minded voters feel betrayed. Many decide that they can no longer vote for the party. Even under first past the post, these voters will move to another party such as the Greens, or stay at home on election day.
At the same time, anti-immigration voters see Labour’s pivot as inauthentic mimicry. Many of them don’t even register Labour’s rightwards shift, since Labour doesn’t fall in their list of parties that might win their vote. For them, if immigration is the defining issue, Reform or the Conservatives will always be the more credible option, no matter what Labour do.
In the short term, presenting Labour as a party that’s tough on immigration is a vote-losing strategy. In the long term, it may even have the opposite effect of bolstering the success of the very party Labour seeks to outmanoeuvre. When radical-right words come from Labour mouths, the nativist and illiberal values attached to these words become increasingly normalised, shifting the boundaries of what is politically acceptable.
Copying the radical right is electorally self-defeating. Social democratic parties that try this route lose their own supporters without gaining new ones, and help to legitimise their opponents in the process. It’s time for Labour to engage in some self-reflection about the type of party it wants to be. At the moment it operates as if advancing a progressive agenda and being in government are mutually exclusive. That is far from the case. It can’t beat the radical right by becoming a pale imitation of it.
Tarik Abou-Chadi is professor of European politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte is associate professor in quantitative political science at the University of Southampton.
