The battle lines of 21st century politics are drawn around immigration. Whenever it becomes the principal focus, the anti-immigrant, right-wing flank has won out, often employing racist and xenophobic dog-whistles that become louder and more blatant with every victory.
In the years to come, if immigration continues to define elections, the left will almost certainly continue to lose or, at the very least, the media and the electorate will continue to capitulate to the right. Both trends are already visible and accelerating.
Yet, this should not be acceptable.
It is not enough for the left to simply withdraw from the debate altogether, a tactic legitimised after the 2008 recession when the revolutionary fervour of the international Occupy movement was quickly subdued by the status quo progressivism of Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, and the like. Many of those on the centre-left, without a systemic critique of capitalist power dynamics, did not have the tools to challenge the rise of far-right, anti-immigrant ideology; so, they chose to retreat from the political arena, as if doing so was a mark of moral superiority. Instead of redirecting the ire of a Labour-supporting pensioner away from incomers and toward the economic establishment that had actually failed her, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown saw fit to dismiss Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman”. It was a sign of things to come. The left was no longer willing to fight, and it has been losing ever since.
Rightward submission, meanwhile, is equally unacceptable. The plans drawn up by UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to seize the personal belongings of asylum seekers as compensation for their processing costs are insupportable in their needless cruelty and futility. A gleeful endorsement from far-right thug Tommy Robinson would once have alarmed Nigel Farage. Now, farcically, it satisfies Sir Keir Starmer. That satisfaction is unlikely to attract voters: those searching for overtly callous immigration policies will choose Reform regardless. “Why choose the lite version when you can have the real thing?”
At the next election therefore, having deviated so catastrophically from its historic roots, Labour will find itself out of favour with both the compassionate left and unsympathetic right. According to current polling, the latter will be the chief beneficiary.
So, while immigration is the focus, is the left simply always doomed to lose? Not necessarily. But if the left is to avoid political irrelevance, it must forge a different path.
How Did We Get Here?
The current salience of immigration within British politics is unsurprising. It has been two decades in the making.
It first roared back to life in 2008, when the laissez-faire neoliberal economics that centrist and right-wing parties had spent decades promoting finally came to fruition. As their recklessly unregulated economies collapsed like dominoes, Western governments found themselves saddled with debt and, in response, imposed a brutal austerity programme on their own populations. This should have decimated the conservative neoliberals for generations. Their economic and political models had been revealed as fundamentally unsustainable and unfair. Working- and lower-middle-class people, rather than the bankers responsible, were the ones paying the price.
Instead, the Western right went from strength-to-strength in the 2010s, as the Conservative Party dominated British politics, the CDU gripped Germany and, in the latter half of the decade, MAGA populism changed the face of the United States. These parties managed to reinvent themselves overnight, reviving an age-old weapon: immigration.
Especially in the UK, the populist right was able to divert attention away from the financial crash at the ballot box by focusing on a different phenomenon. In 2004, after eight former Soviet states joined the European Union, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair made the bold decision to relax immigration controls. Unlike France and Germany, the New Labour government chose to put no restrictions on arrivals from new member states, predicting that the expansion of the EU would only lead to an increase of 13,000 people a year coming to live and work in Britain. They were wrong. Between 2003 and 2004, immigration excluding British citizens rose by 86,000, and generally remained at those heightened levels until 2019.
It is undeniable that the British economy’s steady growth in the years that followed was partly a result of this decision; thanks to the arrival of our new neighbours, everyone was getting richer.
However, after the self-immolation of global finance in 2008, a certain Mr. Farage saw an opportunity, catapulting his status from lowly MEP to nationwide poll-leader. It is no surprise that, in the years leading up to Brexit, he targeted the same Eastern European migrants that Tony Blair had welcomed with open arms a decade earlier, nor that he suggested that Turkey’s 76 million-strong population were soon to join the EU. Of course, the latter was a bold-faced lie, Turkey never joined the EU and all such negotiations have been frozen since 2018.
Nevertheless, Farage had achieved his primary goal. A devastated economy and destructive austerity programme had led everyone to search for an enemy. Farage had succeeded in making sure that the immigrant, rather than the financier, was the target in their sights.
What’s in a Mandate?
The Conservative Party broadly followed Farage’s lead. Yet, despite winning the argument and, consequently, winning elections, the Tories were never able to turn their anti-immigration rhetoric into action. Although it became an increasingly central pillar of their policy platform, successive Conservative governments failed to deliver a reduction in net migration to below 100,000. While David Cameron and Theresa May struggled to do so, Boris Johnson didn’t even try, turning the pledge on its head. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the Johnson government was responsible for the largest rise in immigration ever recorded in Britain, now known as the “Boriswave”. From 2020 to 2023, 3.16 million people immigrated to the UK: a truly staggering figure.
The fundamental positioning of the left on this issue of immigration has thus become secondary to a more immediate democratic problem. Voters have repeatedly asked for the same thing – a reduction in immigration – and their desires have been repeatedly ignored. This has been the principal driver in the proliferation of the extremist anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric that now floods our political sphere. As recently as 2015, Farage was advocating for a points-based visa system and a cap on immigration at 50,000 per year. Now, he is openly calling for mass deportations and defending Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s complaints that adverts are too ‘full’ of black and Asian people. Festering democratic discontent has thus allowed Reform’s leader to go from a farcical, peripheral figure to the xenophobic commander-in-chief of British politics. It’s no surprise that he was only able to win a seat in Parliament in 2024 as the full extent of the “Boriswave” was finally being revealed.
On that basis, it would have been far better for the left, and the country, if Cameron had succeeded in bringing immigration down to below 100,000. The economic damage of doing so would have soon been felt; Britain’s plummeting birth rate and ballooning state pension bill simply cannot sustain itself. Within months, voters would have been forced to realise that immigrants aren’t really the source of their own, or Britain’s, woes, and Farage would have been relegated to another decade of petulance in the European Parliament. Instead, fifteen years of Conservative, and now Labour, incompetence means that Farage now has one foot in the door of No. 10 Downing Street. He may soon have the mandate to destroy the rich cultural fabric of the United Kingdom, all because the Tories couldn’t keep the most basic of manifesto promises.
A Place For Nuance
If the left is to take back control of the conversation, it must respect this anti-immigration mandate but offer a compassionate and balanced alternative.
Achieving nuance, however, is no easy feat. Leftists are often too hasty to define themselves in binary opposition to their enemies on the right. It is for this reason that the left’s most prominent disruptive movement takes the name “Antifa” (literally: “antifascist”). It’s also why leftist politicians in Britain, such as Zack Polanski, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, stand steadfastly in support of anyone who wants to come to Britain to work “to build a better life”. Their platform is the very opposite of Reform’s: anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and strongly pro-immigration, if not entirely open-border.
Although that platform has precedent–Marx was famously sceptical that heavily restricting labour flows would necessarily protect workers’ living standards–it prohibits a more subtle understanding of labour markets that used to be a hallmark of socialist thinking. Indeed, socialists should have been up in arms about Boris Johnson’s recent admission on the Telegraph podcast that the primary driver of the “Boriswave” was inflationary wage pressures: that “low-skilled” salaries were simply too high. The Tories’ decision to rapidly expand immigration was not one of empathy but, rather, an effort to suppress the salaries of all workers involved. Such a phenomenon, and a corresponding admission that right-wing capitalists might actually favour mass immigration, does not factor into the simplistic open-borders paradigm.
Compassionate solidarity, rather than anti-Farageism, is thus the best way forward for the left on immigration. It would allow us to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with asylum seekers, who are seeking refuge from war and persecution in their home countries, by aggressively tackling the processing backlog to allow more people to work and build a stable life in the UK. It also enables us to sympathise with the ignored – those who have spent seventeen years voting to lower immigration but also those earlier immigrants who are now at far greater risk of racist and xenophobic attacks because of the Tories’ duplicitous refusal to stick to their promises. And it allows us to create a society where all those who work in Britain are offered reasonable wages and dignified work, with the necessary public services and housing to support them.
If the left is to take back control of the immigration debate, it must acknowledge the concerns of voters without dismissing them as “bigoted”; it must fix a failing asylum system from which nobody benefits; it must actively plan an economy and labour market such that work, wages and living conditions are dignified again; and it must vociferously defend all minority groups that the far-right has set in its sights.
Once the left has rebuilt trust, it must welcome new arrivals with open arms. That is the only path to victory, to a more prosperous, secure, and multicultural Britain.
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