Britain isn’t sleepwalking into catastrophe; it’s charging towards it. Last year, a violent rightwing uprising tore through our streets – an attempted pogrom in which racists tried to burn asylum seekers alive, attacked homes and businesses thought to belong to migrants, petrol-bombed mosques and assaulted people of colour in broad daylight. That disgrace should hang permanently around the necks of the anti-migrant right, a warning of where scapegoating and toxic lies lead.
Instead, the revolt succeeded. Anti-migrant rhetoric in politics and the press has grown more venomous. Reform UK now tops polls by a decisive margin. Its leader, Nigel Farage, raises the spectre of “major civil disorder” unless anti-migrant demands are met. Lucy Connolly – who was jailed after calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire and is married to a former Conservative councillor – has been recast as a martyr by rightwing outlets and politicians. I don’t believe in jailing people for such speech, but her canonisation is chilling.
Far-right activists cheered Robert Jenrick, the Tory leader-in-waiting, as he joined one of the anti-asylum protests sprouting across the country. Racist organisers boast that “the mainstream media are echoing our talking points”. Meanwhile, a mosque in Portsmouth was targeted, a nurse has been racially abused on camera in Halifax, a Chinese takeaway was daubed with racist slurs, and masked men tried to force their way into a west London hotel housing asylum seekers. Every racist in Britain feels emboldened.
And yet the shameful role of Keir Starmer’s floundering administration is what brings us to the brink. First, Labour refuses to confront a broken economic model that breeds insecurity and hands extremists their raw material. Witness the party’s botched attacks on support for pensioners and disabled people, and note that average disposable incomes are projected to fall on their watch.
Second, rather than leading against anti-migrant hysteria, Labour feeds it. The party pumps out Trump-style videos of dark-skinned migrants being deported. Farage is chided for “moaning from the sidelines”, while the government gets on with the business of kicking out foreigners. In 2021 the home secretary, then chair of the home affairs select committee, warned that without safe legal routes for family reunion, more people would be driven into the hands of criminal gangs; now she blocks refugees from reuniting with loved ones. Starmer, meanwhile, attacks the Tories from the right, accusing them of running an “open borders experiment”. He claimed immigration had done “incalculable damage” and warned Britain was becoming “an island of strangers”. He later disowned this Enoch Powell-esque language by blaming his speechwriters – confirming himself as the unprincipled frontman of a toxic faction.
Hostility to migrants and refugees rests on lies that almost no prominent politician will challenge. That’s why Zack Polanski’s election as Green party leader is welcome: he unequivocally says that migrants are “not to blame” for crisis-stricken public services, and that we should instead focus our anger at “the private jets, the private yachts, and to multimillionaires and billionaires”. A Survation poll found that a quarter of voters believe people crossing in small boats make up the largest share of migrants; in reality they account for 2%. Forty-four per cent think refugees and asylum seekers are the majority of migrants; the true figure is 16%. YouGov finds that nearly half of the public believe most migrants here are “illegal”, though the vast majority arrived by plainly legal means.
As for the law: the refugee convention forbids penalising asylum seekers for how they arrive. The greatest number of people arriving in small boats are from Afghanistan: a country we first helped destabilise by backing the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war, which gave rise to the Taliban, before we participated in a disastrous 20-year military deployment in the wake of the “war on terror”.
Despite our role in making nations like these unsafe, rich countries such as Britain take in about a quarter of the world’s refugees, a figure that was much lower before Ukrainians fled Russia’s invasion. And by choking off safe, legal routes, governments have pushed more people on to dangerous boats. Seven in 10 voters support people’s right to claim refuge from war or persecution in Britain. The trick has been to demonise the tiny numbers arriving by small boat in order to smear migrants as a whole. Yet when asked about particular groups – doctors, care home workers, catering staff, foreign students – the public mostly rejects cutting numbers.
Labour chooses to cement, not challenge, these falsehoods. We know where that road ends. When France’s Emmanuel Macron adopted the right’s rhetoric and policies, Marine Le Pen proclaimed an “ideological victory” and only grew stronger. Austria’s mainstream parties championed anti-asylum detention and the veil clampdown; the Freedom Party surged in 2024. Germany’s Christian Democrats broke the “firewall” against the far right, backing a migrant crackdown motion with Alternative für Deutschland; the AfD duly advanced.
As happened with these disasters, Labour is shifting the debate on to the terrain the migrant-bashing right desires. Their arguments are legitimised, and they will always outbid you on ferocity and “authenticity”. The alternative is obvious: transformative policies that lift living standards – taxing the well-off to rebuild public services – forcing the right on to the defensive and exposing it as the tribune of vested wealth with no interest in ordinary people’s security. Labour’s leaders are ideologically opposed to that path. So they have capitulated to Faragism. The result is plain: Britain is barrelling toward hard-right rule.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
