Conservative immigration betrayals have turbocharged the radical right

Why Farage may be the UK's Trump

Nigel Farage in front of a 2016 poster form the Brexit referendum that shows migrants queueing to cross the Croatian border into Slovenia

The defining feature of our time is the replacement of traditional conservative movements with...well, name your poison. The populist right/ radical right/ far right, whatever you want to call them the dismal truth remains that, with the return of Donald Trump and the probable accession of Marine Le Pen to the French presidency, anti-immigrant, conspiratorially minded, and illiberal politicians are everywhere in the ascendant.

In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform is closing in on Labour and the Conservatives. As far as the Westminster hack pack is concerned, the coming triumph of Faragism is the top story on the news list

If Farage does triumph, it will be because mainstream conservative betrayals on immigration have ignited right-wing fury.

To see how suppose a malign genius wanted to put a rocket under the prospects of the UK’s radical right.

Our supervillain would twirl his moustache and then:

• Let migration rip

• Convince the voters that they are led by liars who promised to control migration while secretly planning to flood the country with foreigners.

• Make sure that leaders never explained to the public why we needed migrants.

• And finally, and crucially, the demon would so enfeeble mainstream politicians that they would never dare take on demagogues but instead give them a free pass to smear and denounce.

The Conservative party has performed all four tasks and you can see the results around us.

1/ Letting migration rip

In 1993 net migration – the gap between the number of people who leave and the number who settle in the country –was close to zero. Thirty years later in 2023, net migration had reached an extraordinary 906,000 in a single year. The Office of National Statistics’ figures showed that about 1 million of the 1.2 million people who came to live in the UK were non-EU nationals. The top countries of origin were India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China and Zimbabwe.

The figures highlight a barely discussed consequence of Brexit, which has had a profound effect on right-wing opinion. The white right can’t talk about it for fear of breaking its taboo on criticising Brexit. The Left can’t talk about it for fear of appearing racist.

But that is no reason why we should stay silent.

Before the UK left the EU, migrants came, overwhelmingly, from Europe. To generalise, they were white and, if they had a religion, it was Christianity.

This did not exempt them from prejudice. Poles and other East Europeans faced hostility. But the mass arrival of non-white and non-Christian migrants since 2020 has supercharged nativist anger, and taken it to a new level.

If you read the Tory press or listen to your friends and acquaintances who are becoming radicalised, you hear many other reasons for moving rightwards: wokeness, the trans campaign, and the denigration of our past are all mentioned. Indeed, they are mentioned to excess.

But mass migration is at the root of most of the radicalisation. It has made older voters feel like strangers in their own country, and alienated them from official culture. Promoting diversity is the only way for the government, BBC and the arts to respond to a multiracial society, and I don’t blame them for that.

But there is no doubt that the emphasis on diversity has led to a backlash against a pious and self-congratulatory elite discourse. White voters feel that they will be the victims of anti-white discrimination. Everyone worries about the pressure on public services.

The opportunities for the radical right are enormous. Farage, Musk and their allies either want to capture the Conservative party or replace it. Both options are open to them because the Conservative party presided over mass migration when it had specifically promised to do the precise opposite.

2/ Misleading the electorate

To people like me from the centre-left the great betrayals of the Conservative years were austerity, Brexit and Liz Truss. To right-wing voters, immigration was the greatest betrayal of all, and you only need the ability to walk in the shoes of others to understand why.

Go back to 2010, and to quote from Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford’s Brexitland, the best study of the rise of the anti-European right

“Immigration was consistently the issue where the Conservatives enjoyed their largest (or only) advantage among voters who had backed Labour. Large parts of the electorate considered immigration to be an important political priority. [They were] unhappy with the incumbent government’s performance and thought the Conservatives would do a better job.”

Cameron responded by saying in January 2010 that net migration of 200,000 was too much and adding

“We would like to see net immigration in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. I don’t think that is unrealistic.”

This must be one of the most disastrous promises made by a British politician. In truth, Cameron must have known it was “unrealistic” for him to make any promises on migration at all.

Britain was in the EU and was signed up to freedom of movement. And when young Europeans fled the Eurozone crisis to work in London (it was a prosperous city back in those pre-Brexit days) there was nothing it could do.

Cameron’s failure to honour his promise led directly to Brexit. Many Conservatives are now trying to rewrite history and pretend that leaving the EU was not driven by a backlash against mass migration. And to be fair there were other causes. But the majority of people who voted for Brexit voted for it because Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove promised to control our borders.

They raised false fears that millions of (Muslim) Turks would flood the UK if we remained.

Then Boris Johnson allowed mass migration after 2019 to reach even greater heights. There are good reasons why: university funding depends on foreign students, our economic model depends on foreign workers, and there were one-off influxes of refugees from Hong Kong and Ukraine. But from the point of view of a voter concerned about migration all of the above was beside the point.

Twice Conservative leaders promised to slow migration, David Cameron made his promise in 2010 and Boris Johnson made the same promise after Brexit.

On both occasions their promises were worthless.

The image of a corrupt and mendacious elite laughing at the voters it cons is the surest way to provoke a hard right reaction history knows.

And that is precisely what has happened. The reaction has been all the more severe because at no point did ministers spell out why we need migrants.

3/ Refusing to explain

Nowhere in all the mock Tory fury about the migration crisis, and in the nutty and failed schemes to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, was there an honest and kind-hearted acknowledgement that migrants were here because we needed them. And that silence led to a greater cowardice.

4/ Giving the far right a free pass

Imagine being a Conservative candidate fighting a Faragist. What briefings would you receive from Tory HQ? What lines of attack would your leaders offer?

They can’t say that voters shouldn’t listen to Farage because he supported a hard Brexit. The Tories supported a hard Brexit, too. They can’t say that Farage has no plan on how to compensate the UK for the economic consequences of cutting migration because they don’t have one either.

During the 2024 general election campaign I wrote that the last prominent Tory to mount an effective attack against Farage was David Cameron in 2006 – yes, that’s right, almost 20 years ago.

“Ukip is sort of a bunch of…fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists mostly,’” he said.

Then he and every other Conservative leader shut up and stood aside while Farage took their vote.

Tory leaders cannot criticise the radical right, even if they want to. If they say it is filled with “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists,” they are not only insulting Farage and his followers, but a substantial portion of the Conservative membership and the Tory hinterland in the Conservative press and wonk world who go along with Farage.

And so they vacate the field, and then wonder why Farage walks all over them.

These are heady days for the radical right. Its supporters are everywhere. Its opponents are too frightened or compromised to fight back.

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Maybe I am succumbing to the stupid optimism which convinced me that Kamala Harris would be the next president of the United States, but I am not sure that Farage is a future PM.

The fact that he doffs the cap to Trump and takes money from Elon Musk leaves him wide open the charge that he will sell out the British national interest to please his American paymasters.

But Farage’s eventual defeat depends on the assumption that Keir Starmer has the political skill to defend migration when necessary and the political courage to take on the radical right.

As things stand, you cannot take either for granted or rule out the possibility that the UK’s descent into stagnation and ignorance has further to go.

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