U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has taken to employing anglicized forms of Trumpian rhetoric and emulating the president’s stances on immigration in an apparent effort to stave off growing electoral threats from the country’s truly MAGA-esque forces.
As Britain’s broadsheets and tabloids have begun to notice, the prime minister has channeled Trump in increasingly frequent and obvious ways. Seemingly borrowing from the Trump playbook, he pledged to “cut the weeds of regulation” in a January op-ed for The Times, and more recently described his approach to the development of nuclear power stations in England and Wales as “build, baby, build,” echoing Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill.”
In December 2024, he criticized government workers in the U.K. civil service, saying that while there was not a “swamp to be drained here,” too many were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” A union leader for those workers accused him of invoking “Trumpian language.”
But toeing a tougher line on immigration has been at the center of the shift. On Monday, ahead of his party publishing a white paper on the issue, the prime minister accused the previous government of conducting a “one-nation experiment on open borders” and argued that without stricter controls the U.K. risked becoming “an island of strangers.”
I’ve already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here.And I won’t stop there.
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) May 14, 2025
Starmer’s language drew criticism from members of his own party and forced Downing Street to reject the alleged evocation of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood”—the notorious 1968 speech in which the Conservative MP predicted that immigration and multiculturalism would reduce citizens to “strangers in their own country” and result in the eventual death of British national identity.
“In terms of rhetoric on immigration, I would describe what happened as a very significant lurch to the populist right,” said Maria Sobolewska, professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “This kind of language heavily borrows from right-wing fear-mongering around separate lives and supposed immigrant self-segregation.”
But as much as Starmer may be evincing more hard-line stances that reduce the political proximity between himself and the president, political scientist Colin Hay said that the backdrop of this is the growing popularity of Reform UK, an offshoot of the defunct UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by a man that The Wall Street Journal has dubbed “Trump with a pint.”
Nigel Farage’s party, which campaigns primarily on the promise of cutting net immigration figures, made enormous gains in the recent English local elections, winning 677 of the roughly 1,600 contested seats. Reform snatched support from Labour and the Conservatives and, in doing so, appears to have mounted the biggest challenge to the two-party structure of British politics in recent memory.
Farage has also borrowed from his ally Trump’s agenda and rhetoric, such as by declaring after the local elections that he wanted “a DOGE in every county.” He also said that local workers involved in DEI or climate change initiatives should be “seeking alternative careers.”
Hay told Newsweek that the election had “reinforced the impression in Labour’s thinking” that a tougher stance on immigration is necessary to avoid hemorrhaging more of its voters. He added that, in any Americanized analogy of contemporary British politics, Farage would be cast in the role of Trump, and Starmer the one currently viewing the Democrats‘ 2024 defeat—fueled in part by anxieties over the U.S.-Mexico border—as a cautionary tale.
“The Labour Party is not the carrier of Trumpian politics here,” Hay said. “It is responding to it.”
Karl Pike, professor of politics and author of Getting Over New Labour, similarly told Newsweek that Starmer’s stance on immigration appeared driven by “a kind of electoral fear of Reform and of Farage’s politics in particular.”
However, he said that attempting to shore up its electoral chances by leaning to the right on immigration is not the “safe, genius strategy the Labour leadership thinks it is.” He pointed to recent polling from Persuasion UK, which found that only about 11 percent of Labour voters could be classified as “Reform curious,” while the share from the left-wing Greens or Liberal Democrats was significantly larger—29 and 41 percent, respectively.
“The vast majority of Reform voters as historically ‘anti-Labour voters’ who are simply not, and seemingly never have been, in the Labour electoral universe,” Persuasion UK wrote in a summary of the findings.
Sobolewska told Newsweek: “Instead of fixing the cost-of-living crisis which delivered them the victory in the first place, [they] are adding political salience to an issue that is historically very bad for them indeed. At the same time, they ignore all the 40-odd seats where the liberal parties are second place, strangely believing that their lurch to the right will not cause backlash on the left.”
Starmer’s personal diplomacy with the president—rather than any political similarities, increasing or not—has seen payoffs. Trump praised the prime minister as “terrific” for the special relationship between the two countries after they struck a deal on enhanced market access and reduced trade barriers, particularly tariffs on British automobiles and steel.
But domestically, attempting to outflank right-wing electoral threats with his own “Trumpian” tactics risks alienating the wider base that brought Labour to power and leaving Starmer stranded between two irreconcilable electorates.
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