Last month, Nigel Farage, the leader of British anti-immigration party Reform U.K., unveiled his proposals on asylum. International agreements and treaties would be scrapped. Hundreds of thousands would be rounded up, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-style; detained; and deported. Gulags would be established on remote British outposts in the Atlantic. Return deals would be struck with Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and other dictatorships. The ideas are reprehensible but also fantastical, with few details; dubious costs; and, perhaps, low popularity. Doing business with the Taliban polls terribly, even among Farage’s own supporters.
Yet the Labour Party’s meek response merely quibbled with the feasibility rather than firmly condemning the idea of abandoning international law and handing over civilians and money to hostile and bloodthirsty regimes. The government has spent so long blurring the lines between their approach to immigration and Reform’s that they will no longer stand up to the far right.
It is not always about numbers. The United Kingdom receives a tiny fraction of the globally displaced. Asylum-seekers on small boats represent less than 5 percent of overall migration. In 2024, net migration to the U.K. halved from 2023 levels, and yet the discourse is as toxic as ever. It is about the far right wanting a forever war on migrants and, by extension, minorities. Reform U.K. sits in an ecosystem in which remigration—the deportation of nonwhite British citizens—is openly and increasingly discussed. And Labour is playing right into its hands.
In May, in his customary stilted tones, Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered a key speech in which he warned against the United Kingdom becoming “an island of strangers” and accused the previous Tory administration of conducting “a one-nation experiment in open borders.”
The first expression (which Starmer has said he now regrets using) was redolent of the “Rivers of Blood” speech made 50 years ago by racist Tory maverick Enoch Powell. The second, intimating that elites deliberately orchestrate illegal immigration, sounded close to the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy mentioned in the manifestos of several mass killers. The allusions may be inadvertent, but Labour’s refusal or inability to confront the United Kingdom’s metastasizing ethnonationalism is real and serious.
Only one month after the Labour Party’s landslide victory in July 2024, asylum-seekers in several towns across the U.K. were besieged and, almost burned alive in their hotel accommodation by mobs fueled by false reports that someone sharing their immigration status had murdered three schoolchildren (the killer was a British-born U.K. citizen). Muslim, Black, and Asian Britons were also targeted in the racist frenzy.
At the time, Starmer condemned “far-right thuggery,” and more than 1,100 people, many with previous domestic abuse convictions, have since been charged with offenses linked to the disorder. But, according to the latest data, more than 32,000 asylum-seekers were still in hotels at the end of June, providing a potent focal point for protesters, of which far-right entrepreneurs and gullible mainstream media frequently inflate the significance and authenticity, while downplaying the harmlessness. The government seems eager to win the approval of these crowds, no matter how unsavory some of them may be.
Britain’s asylum system is already both byzantine and inhumane. There is no way to apply for asylum outside the country, and no visa to enter for that purpose—which means that those who want to claim it often have to enter by unauthorized means. Vast sums of taxpayer money were spent on physical infrastructure to detect and stop migrants at French ports, only for smugglers to predictably send their cargo on dinghies from the beaches instead.
Asylum-seekers are largely banned from working, rendering them dependent on meager state support and ripe for predation by a sinister underground economy. The government outsourcing accommodation provision to rip-off companies ensures that they are stuffed into unsuitable hotel lodgings. Demagogic journalists and politicians often balk at the idea of luxury hotels being used for foreigners in a nation undergoing a housing crisis. In reality, these places are largely dilapidated, overcrowded places without cooking facilities. Sluggish processing of asylum cases forces them to rot there for many months, though in the end, at least two-thirds are usually successful in their claims anyway.
Upon taking office, having inherited a broken system after 14 years of Tory rule, Labour leaders had a valuable opportunity to reframe and detoxify the asylum issue. Instead, they have adopted an obsessive law enforcement approach that also requires humanitarian solutions, and rather than lowering the rhetorical temperature, they shriek about it from the rooftops. In doing so, they amplify the messages of the far right.
Every day sees a new indignity. Family reunion has been suspended. Migrants could soon be stored in warehouses. International students have been threatened with deportation. Starmer’s social media account pumps out endless dire warnings to foreigners. The supposed political rationale is to neuter the looming threat of Reform U.K.; the result is that disgusted liberal and left-wing voters are deserting them in droves, and anti-immigration voters think them phonies.
There are incidents that provoke understandable fear and disgust—on Sept. 4, an asylum-seeker accommodated in a London hotel was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. But these few occasions are manipulated into bigoted tropes that smear all asylum seekers as potential sex offenders. Last week, a BBC journalist asked Starmer how he would feel if his daughter had to walk past an asylum hotel every day. “I get it,” came the weak reply. The government could push back against this insidious prejudice; it consistently chooses not to, and for no electoral reward.
To adapt a popular meme, Starmer is turning a big dial that says “racism” on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on The Price is Right—but the audience keeps booing.
These are not popular moves. Despite the theatrical warnings of rage merchants such as X-owner Elon Musk and TV pundit Matthew Goodwin that the Brits are rising up en masse against illegal immigration, there are few pitchforks to be seen. Scatterings of genuine local people turn up outside hotels sometimes motivated by just cause, and some try to break into them. Most lurk menacingly.
They are not all fascists, but there is a significant level of coordination and infiltration by extremist groups. Given the round-the-clock media coverage and mollifying by government officials of the “legitimate” concerns of these people, you might think them representative of the wider country. Despite ludicrous headlines warning of Britain “bracing” for more protests and of these groups being “out in force,” they rarely number more than the low hundreds and are frequently outnumbered by counterprotesters. With honorable exceptions, the British media has disgraced itself throughout this episode, with even responsible broadcasters speculating whether “gunboats” could be deployed in the English Channel.
In late July last year, hours after anti-asylum pogroms, a woman named Lucy Connolly posted a racist message on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” At the time, the Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper called the comments ‘sick’ and ‘vile.’ Connolly was jailed for stirring up racial hatred, and upon her release in August, the same paper devoted its front page to a fawning tribute. Connolly was given a standing ovation at last weekend’s Reform party conference, introduced as “Britain’s favorite political prisoner.” Other right-wing outlets have similarly sanctified her as a free speech martyr, giving them plausible deniability over their zeal for racist, violent language.
The legitimization and encouragement of hate has deadly consequences. Last year, a neo-Nazi with a Hitler tattoo walked into an asylum hotel and stabbed a young Eritrean man twice in the chest. Another neo-Nazi was sentenced after wielding a six-inch knife and threatening to kill a solicitor at an immigration law firm. In 2022, an extreme right-wing terrorist firebombed a migrant center before killing himself. Refugee charities are installing safe rooms amid a flurry of death threats.
These events go relatively unremarked and are quickly forgotten. But they represent a growing ethnonationalism that has nothing to do with immigration figures or refugee conventions and everything to do with white supremacy and violence. The British government could, and should, loudly and unequivocally oppose it.
There are communities across the U.K. that quietly host refugees successfully, but these remain uninteresting for journalists and underfunded by government. When members of the public are asked less tendentious questions on asylum, many support measures such as humanitarian visas. A sponsorship program launched in 2022 allowed more than 150,000 Ukrainians to be hosted in people’s homes. If the government wants to counter the sense of decline and lawlessness that people feel when they see small boats and asylum hotels, then they could encourage and facilitate more community-based resettlement and integration efforts.
Voters are right to want control, but they have grown disillusioned after decades of false promises that border theatrics and punitive deterrence measures can make asylum-seekers magically disappear. Repression and conflict have not let up in Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and Eritrea—some of the main nationalities of U.K.-bound asylum-seekers—even if much of the media has given up covering it. One of the world’s richest countries can find room for some of these people. Farage’s equivocation on deporting women and children back to danger suggests that he knows that there is a limit on how much cruelty is politically palatable.
Labour will never get credit for hostile asylum policies from those they are forlornly trying to placate. The government can still maintain a position against illegal immigration while rejecting extremism, making the case for upholding humanitarian protection, establishing orderly asylum routes, and showing bold leadership rather than kowtowing to the mob. Or they could continue feeding the crocodiles, one by one, until they run out of food and are devoured themselves.
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