What Explains the Rise and Rise of Reform UK?
The who, what, when, how and huh of why Reform has gained so much support in such a short period of time
Hello there! 😀
You may have noticed that Reform are doing well in the polls right now. This has led to a range of reactions from bed-wetting horror to joyful excitement.
In a previous post, I used the latest release of the British Election Study Internet Panel (BESIP) to look at what happened to people who voted Labour at the 2024 election (spoiler: not many are still intending to vote Labour).
However, given the polls, the just as interesting story is people who are saying they will vote Reform at the next election:
Who are they?
What do they believe?
What is the most plausible reason they are voting Reform?
Let’s tuck in!
Who Are Ya?!
In the 2025 BESIP, Reform came in at 32% vote intention, which is more than double what they managed at the general election just a year earlier. That put them 9-points ahead of Labour in second place on 23%, with the Conservatives trailing at 16%.
The first way Reform pulled this off is by keeping hold of almost everyone who backed them in 2024. An astonishing 95% of their voters have stuck with them, which means they had a stable foundation from which to build.
The second reason is that they’ve added new support, pulling in voters from other parties and from people who didn’t vote at all.
The largest group is former Conservatives, who make up 24% of today’s Reform voters. That shows how much Reform has managed to unite the right behind them.
The next biggest group are people who didn’t vote in 2024 at 18%. That’s very impressive because non-voters are, by definition, the hardest group to mobilise.
Then there are the ex-Labour voters, who make up 9% of the current Reform coalition. That’s a big number but it’s not as dramatic as you might think given how much attention the idea of “Labour to Reform” voters has had in the media and from Labour/Reform politicians themselves.
Finally, there’s a mix of people who previously supported other parties, about 5% combined of the total.
The oldest group are the people who switched from the Conservatives. That’s not bad news for Reform, given that older voters are both a large share of the population and the most likely to turn out.
The group who stayed loyal to Reform are the most male. But across the board, all types of Reform voter are more likely to be men than women.
The former non-voters stand out in a few ways. Only 21% of them have a university degree, which is lower than other groups. They also have the lowest household incomes and the lowest rates of home ownership.
All five groups are at least 90% white, but among them, the ex-Conservatives are the whitest.
The majority of every group voted for Brexit, but only 56% of the former non-voters backed Leave in 2016, making them a bit of an outlier.
The former Conservatives are the most middle-class, with 12% in higher professional jobs. At the other end, non-voters and ex-Labour voters are the most working-class with the highest percentages in semi-routine and routine jobs.
It’s also worth underlining just how much more working-class Reform’s electorate looks compared to Labour’s. In my previous article, I showed that people who stuck with Labour from 2024 to 2025 were very middle-class, with 20% in higher professional jobs and an average household income of over £56,000. Both of those figures are much higher than anything we see among current Reform voters.
What Do They Believe?
First, let’s look at these groups’ past voting behaviour.
People who stayed Reform in 2025 were mostly Conservatives in the past, though in 2015 they split evenly between Conservatives and UKIP.
The 2025 Conservative-to-Reform switchers were previously loyal Tories right up until this year.
Former non-voters really did tend not to vote in past elections.
Former Labour voters turn out to be more swingy than the label suggests. They had split between Labour and the Conservatives before going strongly Labour in 2024.
The “other party” group were also mainly Conservative before splitting off after 2019.
Every group had a bump in UKIP support back in 2015, but it was never overwhelming. This is not simply a case of voters drifting back to where they were ten years ago, but looks like a genuine shift in political loyalties.
The BESIP also lets us map people’s views across different dimensions:
economic left–right
cultural liberal–conservative
political efficacy (this means how much you feel your political participation matters. People with high efficacy believe they can influence politics and that the system responds to them.)
populism (how much they see politics as a struggle between ‘the people’ and a corrupt or out-of-touch ‘elite’)1
All the results here are relative to the average BESIP respondent.2
Every group of Reform voters is more socially conservative than the average and their scores are fairly similar.
Where they diverge is on economics. The most left-wing are the former Labour voters who are well to the left of the average respondent. At the other end, the most right-wing are the former Conservatives who sit well to the right. The other groups cluster around the average.
All groups are more populist, which fits with the choice to support a populist party in the first place. On political efficacy, former non-voters and former Labour voters are more likely to feel powerless or disengaged.
But what do these voters actually care about? Here, the BESIP is useful because it doesn’t rely on tick boxes and respondents can type in their own words what they see as the most important issue.
Across all groups, immigration dominates. It’s the majority issue raised everywhere, ranging from 53% of former Labour voters to 71% of those who stuck with Reform from 2024.
The economy is the second most common issue. It comes up for between 14% of Reform loyalists and ex-Conservatives and 25% of ex-Labour voters.
The “negativity” grouping are answers where the respondent expressed dissatisfaction with politics (whether specific politicians, parties or politics overall). This shows that, for some Reform voters, their support is about a deeper anger that the whole system has let them down.
There was then a follow-up question asking which party the respondent thought was best placed to handle the issue that they named. Here, Reform are way ahead with everyone. They are not just holding their nose and choosing the least bad option, but believe Reform is the one best placed to deal with what they care about. The fact that so few people answered “no party” suggests Reform’s support is not just a protest vote.
Compare that with what I found for Lib Dems in 2024, where many who switched to them did not actually name them as the best party on their issue. That looked more like a non-of-the-above choice rather than some active commitment to liberalism.
It’s also worth comparing current Reform voters’ answers during the 2024 election to the same question.
Back then, many were Reform curious, but large numbers also said “no party”. That tells us that in 2024, they were already unhappy with the choices available to them, even if they did still pick a party at the ballot box.
Immigration
The results on the “most important issue” question strongly suggest that immigration is at the heart of why people are moving to Reform. The BESIP asks people to place themselves on a immigration preference scale (from reduce to increase) and where they perceive the policies of the different parties to be.
Every group of current Reform supporters wants immigration reduced by a lot. On a -5 to +5 scale, the highest (!!!) scores are -3.9 among both former Labour and former other-party voters.
Importantly, the differences between self-placement and party placement are tiny in every case. In political science, “spatial voting” means that people tend to support the party whose positions most closely match their own preferences on the issues. For immigration, Reform’s voters and Reform’s perceived policies are almost identical.
Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens are all seen as wanting to increase immigration, which is the exact opposite of what is wanted on the issue that matters most. The Conservatives are in a bad position too. They are still seen as somewhat anti-immigration, but nowhere near as tough as Reform.
The wider context is that immigration has become salient again. If we look at how current Reform voters have named immigration as their most important issue since 2014, they have always been more concerned about it than the average BESIP respondent.
Concern about immigration was very high in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum. It then dropped sharply, given the promise and expectation of post-Brexit lower numbers. From the end of lockdown onwards, though, concern has steadily risen again. Among our Reform groups, immigration is now back to being as salient as it was in 2016.
If we then look at vote intention among all respondents who name immigration as their top issue, we can see just how much things have changed. In the 2014 to 2016 period, when immigration was highly salient, people who prioritised it were split between UKIP and the Conservatives with each party getting around 35% of their votes, whilst around 20% backed Labour.
By 2025, with immigration back at the top of the agenda, this balance has vanished. Reform now dominate the vote among people who say immigration is their most important issue. They have 74% support in this group compared with only 16% for the Conservatives.
This is where the concept of “issue ownership” matters. Certain parties are seen as the most credible or trustworthy on particular issues. Therefore, a party that owns a high-salience issue can attract and hold support even if it is weaker on other fronts.
Immigration is now clearly an issue that Reform have ownership over. It is high salience again, which makes it a powerful mobilising tool. Crucially, they now own it alone. In the past the Conservatives shared the immigration vote with UKIP. Now Reform have monopolised it.
Brexit
Brexit and opposition to the EU have obviously been central to Farage’s past political success. The BESIP survey includes a scale where people place themselves from more pro-EU to more anti-EU, and they also place the main parties on the same scale.
All groups of current Reform voters see themselves as more anti-EU than pro. At the same time, all of them view Reform as more anti-EU than they are. In some cases the gap is large, particularly for former non-voters, former Labour voters and former other-party voters.
I don’t think this difference matters much, though, because Brexit and the EU are very low salience issues and have been for everyone since the 2019 election.
That means efforts to divide Reform’s coalition by pointing out that Farage is more hardline on Brexit than they are is unlikely to succeed. All of these voters still oppose the EU, even if not as strongly as Reform’s leadership. More importantly, they no longer care enough about the EU for it to be decisive. What unites these voters today is not their feelings about Brussels but their desire to see immigration reduced.
The Economy
Immigration might dominate, but the economy also came through as a significant concern for a minority of Reform voters in the “most important issue” question.
On a tax and spending preference scale, Reform groups sit roughly at the midpoint, which means they are not strongly in favour of either more state spending or lower taxes. They also place Reform in a very similar position, so they don’t see the party as out of step with their own beliefs. By contrast, Labour and the Lib Dems are viewed as much more in favour of tax and spend.
When asked how they think the UK’s overall economic condition has changed in the last 12 months (since Labour came to power), the vast majority across all Reform groups said things had got worse. Whether “a lot worse” or “a little worse”, the combined totals are overwhelming. These voters are deeply unhappy with the direction of the country’s economy.
The picture is a little softer when the question shifts to their own household finances. Here, more people say things have got “a little worse” than “a lot worse”. Even so, a clear majority are still on the “worse” side in every group.
Will Reform’s Success Last?
The BESIP asked people how likely they were to vote for each party on a 0 to 10 scale. The answers show that Reform voters are very happy with their choice and suggest people are not treating Reform as a temporary parking spot.
For most of these groups, no other party comes close. Former Labour voters in particular do not look like they are about to go back to the party, with Labour scoring just 3.2. The exception is the ex-Conservatives. They still give their old party a relatively high 6.5 and suggests some of them could drift back in the future.
If we look at the longer history, these groups have been open to Farage’s parties for a long time. Back in 2014 to 2016 and in the 2019 European elections, there was already an appetite to back UKIP or the Brexit Party, so today’s support is not coming out of nowhere.
What is striking is the scale of the shift from 2024 to 2025.
Among former Conservatives it jumped from 5.6 to 8.7.
Among former non-voters it rose from 4.0 to 8.1.
For ex-Labour voters it went from 3.6 to 7.9.
For ex-other-party voters it moved from 4.6 to 8.2.
That is a huge swing in just one year. Some might think that makes it easy come, easy go. But given that Reform are in opposition and do not have a record in government to defend, I doubt their numbers will collapse quickly.
Why are People Voting Reform?
Yeah, it’s immigration.
However, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to spend the rest of the article discussing the power of immigration as an electoral issue.
Just Start Oil
Imagine a hypothetical government who does the following:
Their rhetoric is that climate change is man-made and an existential threat to humanity, and they promise to do all they can for the environment.
Their outcomes in government are to oversee a massive expansion in the use of fossil fuels and a massive reduction in the use of renewable energy.
Would you consider this an environmentalist government?
Obviously not.
No one who cared about climate change would vote for them again. Their previous supporters wouldn’t be bothered by all the nice language, they would look at the actual outcomes and conclude that this isn’t the party for them. Who cares what a politician’s promises are, if they don’t then match reality?
Do Sonny and Cher Still Have That Stupid Show?
Imagine someone fell into a coma the day before the 2019 election and woke up the day after the 2024 election. Now imagine, for some reason, the first thing they said after waking up was, “Show me Britain’s immigration figures!” So, you tell them:
In 2023, net migration to the UK was almost one million
Small boats came over the channel and the government didn’t stop them
The only rational conclusion that our coma patient could draw was that Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election and appointed open-borders hippies to the Home Office. I mean, how could they believe anything else?
They would be absolutely flabbergasted to hear that the Conservatives won, given their 2019 manifesto promise that “overall numbers will come down” once the country introduces “a firmer and fairer Australian-style points-based immigration system.”
Accommodating Behaviour
In political science, one common explanation for the rise of right-wing populist parties is that centre-right and centre-left parties have “accommodated” their views on immigration.3
The idea is that when voters become worried about immigration, mainstream parties shift to look tougher. They do this in the hope of winning back those voters and cutting off the appeal of the populist party.
These academics’ research, though, suggests that this strategy can backfire. By talking more about immigration, the mainstream parties raise its salience and make it feel even more important to voters. That creates more space for the populist party rather than less, because the populists are seen as the most credible on the issue.
In other words, when the big parties try to copy parts of the populist message, they risk strengthening the very thing they are trying to weaken.
An issue with these articles comes when you see how they measure “accommodation” when analysing how changes in what mainstream parties support affects people’s willingness to vote for right-wing populism. These papers use what mainstream parties say, such as their public rhetoric or their manifesto pledges (such as the Conservatives in 2019 promising to reduce overall numbers). This approach partly makes sense, because it captures how parties present themselves in the competition for votes.
However, this way of quantifying accommodation would mean that our hypothetical oil-expanding “green” government would be considered an environmentalist party, because that was what their rhetoric/promises were. If a centre-left government did this and their voters then switched to a green party, the academic conclusion would be something like:
See, accommodation doesn’t work. This party started talking more about climate change and moved left on the issue, and all it did was lead voters to environmentalist parties.
But that misses the key point that the reality turned out to be the opposite of these promises, which would not be captured.
Caught in a Landslide, No Escape From Reality
I hope that the thought experiments helped you see things from the perspective of a Reform voter. It shows why they didn’t give the Conservatives credit for being “anti-immigration” just because Suella Braverman said mean things about asylum seekers. The rhetoric was meaningless given the reality went in the opposite direction. For Reform voters, the Conservatives didn’t “accommodate” their beliefs on immigration, they stuck two fingers up at them.
If you are on the liberal-left, you may not see this. If you think current immigration levels are fine or that it’s not something to worry about, then it’s easy to dismiss Reform voters as just being prejudiced.
But go back to the hypothetical climate change government. If you lived under a government that promised to fight climate change whilst drilling more oil and cutting renewables, would you consider your own views “accommodated” by this party? No, you’d despise them, not consider them environmentalist, and probably wouldn’t vote for them ever again.
You have to put yourself in other people’s shoes, or at least flip the issue to something you care about. When you do, you can see why Reform voters are furious. They hate the Conservatives not because of what was said, but because of what was done.
Obviously, Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech didn’t win Reform voters, but why would it? To think one (quickly forgotten by normal people) speech is going to override decades of record immigration and broken promises from politicians is pretty disrespectful to the intelligence of voters.
“Well, They Shouldn’t Have Made the Promise in the First Place”
A common response to this is that politicians shouldn’t have promised to reduce immigration in the first place. But voter demands don’t vanish just because mainstream parties decide to avoid the issue altogether. If there’s a groundswell of concern about reducing immigration (or doing something on climate change), refusing to supply a response doesn’t make it go away.
Demand persists, festers and eventually gets met by supply from somewhere else. In business terms, it’s like ignoring a market gap. If the big players won’t do it, a disruptive startup will swoop in, corner the market and leave the incumbents wondering where all their customers went.4
It’s true that raising expectations only to dash them is a recipe for voter fury, eroded trust and electoral oblivion. It’s like hyping up a new album as going to be the greatest of all time, only for it to turn out to be a bloated, cocaine-addled mess.
But, again, the point is not the hype, it’s the outcome.
Be Here Now wouldn’t be a byword for rock-and-roll excess if it had actually been a generation-defining masterpiece. The hype would have been justified. There was loads of hype for Avengers: Endgame in 2019, but that got a 94% critics score and a 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, so made $2.8 billion at the box office.
Kevin De Bruyne cost Manchester City £55m in 2015 and Ángel Di María cost Manchester United roughly the same amount a year earlier. People still talk about the Di María fee because he was touted as a saviour, flopped spectacularly and was sold just a year later. Nobody remembers or cares about De Bruyne’s fee, because he turned out to be one of the best players in Premier League history. At the time, some thought City had overpaid. In retrospect, they could have paid double what they did and it still would have been great value.
If you promise and deliver, you’re fine. Promise and fail, you’re doomed. If a party genuinely isn’t prepared to do what’s necessary to reduce immigration or stop the boats, it absolutely shouldn’t promise to.
But, if it does make the promise, it had better deliver.
To Paraphrase Something Sigmund Freud Didn’t Say…
To argue that immigration is important to voters, I’ve used the question about the “most important issue” facing the country as a whole. However, evidence shows people are more likely to say immigration is a big issue for the country than to say it matters for them personally.
This is what political scientists call a “sociotropic concern.” This means people worry about the state of the country as a whole, not just their own private situation or self-interest. For example, I think the UK economy is in a terrible state, even though I have a full-time job and am personally doing fine. I also think the NHS is in crisis, even though I’m a fit and healthy (touch wood) 30-year-old who hasn’t had to use the health service properly since 2017.
However, the “country vs. me” gap on immigration can be presented as if it proves voters are being irrational, manipulated, or worked up about something trivial. But look again at that graph. The very same gap (albeit smaller) shows up for the NHS, the economy, crime, education, housing, inequality and climate change. I don’t think anyone would argue it’s suspect to say one of these issues is important to you even if you’re not personally affected.
Imagine telling someone who’s worried about the NHS, “Well you’re unlikely to be personally ill anytime soon, so why are you complaining?” You wouldn’t dream of saying that, because we all accept that people can care about the collective whole, even if they’re not directly affected at that moment.
Immigration works the same way. People are capable of caring about what it means for the country in general without needing to have a personal grievance themselves.
You don’t have to pathologise it as if people have been duped by Rupert Murdoch, reduced to victims of late-stage capitalism, brainwashed by Facebook memes, hypnotised by Nigel Farage’s pint glass, tricked by “astroturfed” dark-money think tanks, or struck down by some false-consciousness syndrome that only PhD students can diagnose. Sometimes people just want immigration reduced. It’s a straightforward preference about the kind of country they want to live in.
A Better Model of Reality and Rhetoric
I think the model below better captures what’s really going on with regards to immigration, promises, credibility, outcomes and “accommodation” (with the caveat that it’s not empirical, but a sketch that I made quickly):
“There is an increase in immigration numbers.” This reality is the initial stimulus and triggers the process starting.
“This raises the salience of immigration.” When numbers rise, people pay more attention to immigration.
“Mainstream party talks more or moves right on immigration.” In response, mainstream parties ramp up their rhetoric or promise tougher policies.
“Mainstream party fails to reduce immigration.” But if outcomes don’t match the promises and numbers keep rising, voters see a credibility gap.
“Anti-immigration right-wing populist parties become more popular.” That gap creates the opening for populists. They position themselves as the only actors serious about reducing immigration.
Feedback loops. The arrows looping back are what matter: failed outcomes raise salience again, and growing populist popularity reinforces why immigration stays high on the agenda.
The key is that the process doesn’t move in a straight line from rhetoric to support. Instead, outcomes feed back in a non-linear manner into perceptions of credibility, salience and ultimately populist support. If mainstream parties keep failing, the cycle strengthens populist parties more and more over time.
So, yes, rhetorical/manifesto promise accommodation alone (as is measured in the academic literature) doesn’t work. But that shouldn’t be a conversation ender. You can’t also ignore the effect of reality (and its interaction with rhetoric).
Accommodation Works (If It Means Doing Things I Agree With)
A common argument from the liberal-left is that Keir Starmer should take on Nigel Farage directly by making the case for immigration. The thinking is that if Labour rhetorically defends immigration robustly, they can puncture Farage’s narrative and reassure voters who might otherwise be tempted by Reform.
But simply talking more about the issue could further raise its salience, as is predicted in the accommodation literature. When an issue becomes more salient, it tends to benefit the party seen as owning it. So raising the profile of immigration — even with the opposite stance — could end up playing into Farage’s hands.
And if you think a general election fought on immigration will be won by the pro-immigration side, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!
The second problem is credibility. Voters are not stupid. Starmer can make a lofty speech about the benefits of migration and perhaps it would persuade some. But if people look around them and feel that reality contradicts what he is saying then, at best, he won’t be believed. At worst, he’ll look like Comical Ali, insisting on a fantasyland Britain at odds with people’s lives.5
Labour is currently losing liberal-left voters to the Lib Dems and Greens. The standard response from the liberal-left is that Labour should move liberal-left to win them back.
But isn’t that also accommodation?
If you believe the accommodation thesis, then Labour talking more about the EU would raise its salience, but that would help the Lib Dems. Similarly, Labour talking more about climate change would only raise the salience of an issue owned by the Greens.
Why would this dynamic only apply to immigration but not apply to the liberal-left’s preferred issues?
If Labour wants to win back liberal-left voters, they need to deliver liberal-left outcomes. A big speech from Starmer about how much he loves the EU won’t work if it’s not followed by tangible action. If anything, it will raise expectations only to disappoint them, which would make voters even more likely to defect (as is what happened with immigration and the Conservatives).
Liberal-left voters and Reform voters are not a different species and what applies to you applies to other side too. Both groups want results, not words:
Reform supporters want immigration reduced
Liberal-left voters want Britain more progressive on social issues
Everybody wants a stronger economy
Neither will be swayed by speeches or slogans if the reality doesn’t line up.
So, finally, if there are any political party bigwigs reading this, let me end with one plea: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP HIRING HUMANITIES GRADUATES!!!
Words are not everything. The rise of Reform isn’t due to you not finding “the right message” on immigration yet. Rhetoric and speeches will get you nowhere if the outcomes never change.
What political parties desperately need are people who can actually do things. Hire project managers, engineers, paramedics, pub landlords, cat burglars, corner shop owners, Amazon delivery drivers, guys who break people’s legs if they don’t pay debts on time, wedding planners, milkmen, Etsy sellers – just anyone who’s spent their life making sure things actually happen in the real world and can demonstrate they can turn promises turn into results.
Please, before it’s too late!
The populism scale was not included in this wave of the BESIP, so I took people’s most answers to these questions from the most recent time they answered
Scores are created using graded response model separately on each survey scale.
Some examples include:
Christopher J. Williams and Sophia Hunger. “How Challenger Party Issue Entrepreneurship and Mainstream Party Strategies Drive Public Issue Salience: Evidence from Radical-Right Parties and the Issue of Immigration.” European Political Science Review 14, no. 4 (2022): 544-565.
Werner Krause, Denis Cohen, and Tarik Abou-Chadi. “Does Accommodation Work? Mainstream Party Strategies and the Success of Radical Right Parties.” Political Science Research and Methods 11, no. 1 (2023): 172-179.
Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, Jack Bailey, Daniel Devine, Zachary Dickson, Sara Hobolt, Will Jennings, Robert Johns, and Katharina Lawall. “Accommodating the Radical Right: The Electoral Costs for Social Democratic Parties.” (2025)
Catherine E. De Vries and Sara Hobolt. Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Tom McTague has a very interesting passage about Britain and the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony (which is revered so much by liberals) in his new book Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016. I’ll post it here without comment:
Forty-four years after Enoch Powell’s prophecies of national suicide, the British state had given its formal response. Enoch had not been right. Britain was not dead; it was thriving.
And yet, the vision of British modernity on display in 2012 was also, by necessity, fantastical – an echo of a promise that had already melted away by the time it reached its theatrical realization in Stratford. Only two weeks before Boyle’s ‘Isles of Wonder’ opening ceremony, the giant government contractor G4S had sparked panic at the top of government when it admitted it could not supply the number of staff required to provide security, prompting Cameron to order in the army.
For those of a more cynical persuasion, this was the real morality tale of the Games, exposing the threadbare nature of the British state, patched up after a last-minute act of crisis management, while actors playing nurses danced around a giant ‘NHS’ symbol and were beamed to the world.
In 2011, the year before the Games, London had been gripped by riots, revealing a face of Britain far more menacing than the harmonious vision of easy contentment displayed by Boyle. It was also the year the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal first came to light, offering a disturbing glimpse of the divisions that existed in the forgotten corners of provincial England.
Even as the Games opened, there was an uneasy sense of fragility that hung over the 2012 Olympics. One Conservative MP, Aidan Burley, found himself under attack – including from Number Ten itself – after condemning the opening ceremony as ‘multicultural crap’.
For those who would come to play prominent roles in the Brexit revolution to come, 2012 remains a symbolic moment on the road to the coming revolt. The Games, in their view, were not merely a colourful display of sporting prowess, but a metropolitan power play; a declaration of liberal ownership of modern Britain – We are the masters, now – which they resolved to challenge.
Underneath it all, the structural reality remained bleak: the British economy was still performing far below its pre-crisis levels; the deficit was proving much harder to reduce than Cameron and Osborne had hoped; Scotland was gearing up for a referendum which could result in the break-up of the United Kingdom; and the question of Europe remained. Cameron was facing something of an omnicrisis. The sense of disconnect between the Olympic fantasy and the governing reality was captured during the Paralympic Games, which opened on 29 August, when George Osborne was booed by the crowd as the face of the austerity.
The Games were a golden moment for the fading liberal consensus, but not a turning point, for the reasons popularly understood at the time.
You don’t have to go too far back to find another non-hypothetical example of a party being punished for doing the opposite of what they promised to do. The Lib Dem’s went into 2010 with the promise to scrap tuition fees, then whilst inside the Coalition government voted to increase them by 200% and saw their 50+ seats reduced to a rump of just 8.
“And if you think a general election fought on immigration will be won by the pro-immigration side, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!”
Yes, the present electorate is sceptical about or hostile to immigration. But one option that Labour’s got that you don’t discuss in this piece is the option of changing the electorate. What was a joke for Bertold Brecht is in fact now possible, although the four years between now and the next election may not be enough time to do it in.
Here is how Labour could do it:
1. Create a Starmerwave. Reverse the measures that Rishi Sunak took to slow down the pace of immigration. Lower the minimum salary for work visas. Tell care workers they can bring their families with them after all. Increase the number of years students can work after their Masters in Business Management from two years to four. Importantly, make sure that the immigrants come from Commonwealth countries.
2. Proclaim loudly that Labour is the party of immigration and diversity. Make sure immigrants understand that only Labour will guarantee their right to settle in the country long-term.
3. Citizens of Commonwealth countries can vote in the UK, but the problem for Labour is that most of them don’t know it. Labour is, however, planning to bring in automatic voter registration. They will need to make sure that this applies to Commonwealth citizens, including international students, and they will need to make sure that those Commonwealth citizens know that they have the right to vote.
I suspect something like the above strategy is how the immigration enthusiasts will eventually defeat the immigration restrictionists. The electorate is already changing, of course, because people of recent immigrant descent are generally younger than indigenous Brits, who are dying off. It will be interesting to see some analysis of how many immigrants Labour would need to import in order to really make a difference in their battle against Reform.