Image: Is Nigel Farage Britain’s next prime minister? photo: By Owain.davies – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149683943

After suffering a crushing defeat in December 2019, the British Labour Party staged a remarkable comeback less than five years later. In July 2024 Labour won 412 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, a thumping majority of 174, the second largest in its history. Yet a year and a half later the government led by Sir Keir Starmer seems to be in crisis, with Labour scoring little more than 20 per cent in the polls, more than 10 per cent behind the radical right Reform Party led by Nigel Farage. It has been the steepest fall in a government’s standing in British democratic history, with Starmer himself facing dire personal ratings. Though it has a mere five MPs, Reform is now Britain’s most popular party and could even be on course to form the next government.

Truth be told, Labour’s triumph last year was a “loveless landslide,” with the party gaining its huge majority on only 33.7 per cent of the vote, half a million fewer votes than the much-reviled left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn secured in 2019 and three million fewer than Corbyn’s total in 2017. Research shows that voters were motivated less by any enthusiasm for Labour than by a determination to rid themselves of a Tory government. Moreover, some slippage in Labour’s support was inevitable given the scale of the problems it had to address: a stagnant economy hampered by low investment, poor productivity and high levels of debt; cash-starved and failing systems of health care, social care and criminal justice; huge housing shortages and rapidly rising levels of poverty and distress. There could be no avoiding taking unpalatable decisions.

Even so, the scale of the collapse in Labour’s support is striking. To a degree, the new government was the author of its own misfortunates. In opposition the Starmer leadership convinced itself that it could only gain public confidence in its capacity to manage the economy if it minimized its spending commitment, pledged not to raise taxes on the major sources of government revenue and bound itself to strict fiscal rules.¹ To win business over to its side, it explicitly promised to eschew any significant increases in taxes on the rich and the corporate sector.

But the combination of its tax pledges and its fiscal constraints drastically narrowed the new government’s room for manoeuvre. It soon struggled to revive public services while meeting its fiscal targets. Looking for easy targets for savings, it latched onto welfare spending. Buoyed up by focus group findings suggesting that slicing back benefits would be welcomed, it proposed means-testing winter fuel payments (an entitlement for all pensioners) in the winter of 2024 and cutting payments paid to the sick and the disabled the following spring. Both caused an uproar in the party and proved very unpopular with the voters, which forced the government to retreat. Yet its slide in the polls continued and even accelerated.

Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis was highlighted, and the government was widely – though not entirely fairly – seen as making little progress. But what began to alarm the party was the fact that Reform was the main beneficiary, overtaking Labour among working-class voters.

The U.K. Labour Party, we should note, was not alone. Almost everywhere in western Europe, social democratic parties were hemorrhaging support and being displaced by parties of the radical right as the favoured political home of the working class. Plainly the tectonic plates of electoral politics have been shifting.

The reconfiguration of class politics

Support for social democratic parties has, in fact, been fading for some time even in their heartlands such as Scandinavia and Germany, reflecting – it has been argued – the fading of class politics. The working class was shrinking, fragmenting and losing its political and ideological cohesion, and the association between class membership and political allegiance was crumbling.

This has been seen as reflecting weakening working-class identities and solidarity as a result of increasing social mobility, greater affluence, the blurring of class divisions and the spread of individualistic values. Here is where I beg to differ. Data compiled by the authoritative annual British Social Attitudes Survey in 2023 found that, compared to the 1980s, more respondents defined themselves as working-class than their status justified and more perceived society as heavily class-structured. That is, they believed people’s life chances and opportunities are heavily contingent on the class into which they were born. Working-class identities remained prevalent: people still saw others in class terms and continued to believe that class structured personal destinies.²

Other studies revealed mounting working-class disaffection with the status quo. The experience of many – the so-called “left behinds,” especially in economically declining areas in the North and Midlands – was of stagnant wages, lack of social mobility, rising living costs, shortages of affordable housing and acute problems of access to public services. Combined with steadily rising levels of anger, bitterness and resentment among lower-income groups was an all-enveloping loss of trust and respect for British political institutions, political parties and politicians.³

Yet despite these developments, there has been no resurgence of class politics, at least not of traditional class politics. There are a number of explanations for this, but we focus here on two underlying processes of class reformation, the culturalization and the ethnicization of class. Culturalization refers to the development and deepening of a new political divide cutting across the traditional left-right cleavage, distinguishing people on the basis of the location of their values on the authoritarian-liberal (or socially conservative–liberal) spectrum. Liberalism is associated with tolerance, inclusivity, human rights and an internationalist outlook; authoritarianism with a lack of tolerance, nationalism with an xenophobic inflection, order and discipline.⁴

This is a cultural conflict, but one closely associated with class since the principal determinant of one’s values and hence place on the spectrum is level of education. Although in the U.K. an authoritarian outlook is by no means confined to the working class – it is strongly embedded in the Conservative-voting middle class – the working class, by definition less well-educated, is disproportionately authoritarian. Class tensions were then reconstructed in cultural terms. It was not the wielders of economic power but the middle-class liberal “establishment” that became the class deemed to stand in opposition to (White) working-class values and preferences.

Class ethnicization is a process in which the subjective experience of class and the sense of common fate and solidarity arising from it is linked to ethnicity. Its emergence is reflected in the entry into the common political lexicon of the concept of the “White working class.” The concept is used less as a descriptive term – working-class people who happen to be White – than as a political construct in which one’s ethnicity is seen as an integral part of one’s class. Of course, the term White working class reflects the far more ethnically diverse nature of the British population produced by waves of immigration, but also the degree to which the interests of the native and nonnative working class are seen to diverge. Viewed through an ethnocultural lens, the White working class is defined in opposition to three separate but conflated groups: immigrants, asylum-seekers and ethnic minority citizens. The catch-all term is “immigrants,” who are seen as responsible for depriving British workers of jobs, driving down wages, being given preference in social housing and placing additional burdens on overstretched public services, all the while exploiting the U.K.’s (allegedly) generous welfare benefits.

In her qualitative research into “Red Wall” voters – working-class former Labour supporters in its traditional heartlands in the North and Midlands – Deborah Mattinson cites one observation which reflected common sentiment: “NHS overstretched? It’s because of immigrants coming here to access our 75free care – it’s the envy of the world. Schools underfunded? That’s because immigrants turn up with their kids who can’t speak English.”5 Equally typical was the belief that the U.K. was “being overrun by immigrants on the take, claiming benefits and sending them home,” with “ordinary working-class people apparently being ‘taken for fools.’”⁶ Such views generally bore little relationship to objective assessments, reflecting “a very poor understanding of the scale and nature of immigration,” but have been no less real in their political consequences.⁷

In short, for those who identify as White working-class, the outgroups who threatened their interests and ways of life were “immigrants” and condescending “liberal elites”– the groups with which they increasingly associate Labour. Research has shown that the more Labour is closely associated with minority representation, the less likely White working-class members are to support it.⁸ For many, Labour had become the party of the “politically correct” liberal establishment, a facilitator of mass immigration with disdain for “ordinary working people.” In this reworking of class and class conflicts, the “them” against “us” were no longer the rich, powerful and propertied, multinational corporations and financial institutions, but “immigrants” and liberal elites, the groups the Labour Party championed.⁹

Here, a key role has been played by “culture wars” fed by the obsession of elements of the left with identity politics, largely stoked, propagated and magnified by the right-wing media and political parties. Thus, identification with the White working class is closely correlated with an authoritarian mentality; in this sense the reimagining of class is an ethnocultural phenomenon.

The explosive issue of immigration

This ethnoculturalization of class was both crystallized and dramatically manifested in the 2016 referendum on continued membership in the European Union, which largely revolved around what had by then become the explosive issue of immigration. Research indicated a close correlation between location on the authoritarian end of the authoritarian-liberal spectrum, hostility toward immigration and voting Leave – and vice versa. A significant proportion of the Leave electorate consisted of Labour voters whose allegiance to the party was becoming increasingly shaky. It finally crumbled in 2019 with the loss of many from the “Red Wall.” Some returned to voting Labour in 2024, but now appear to be shifting en bloc to Reform.

The timing and scale of defections from Labour has depended on the salience of the immigration issue which, after waning somewhat after the referendum, was propelled back to the top of the political agenda by two events. The first was the unprecedented upsurge in legal migration between 2021 and 2023, estimated at more than 2.2 million, to a large degree due to temporary factors such as the special visa schemes for Ukraine and Hong Kong and the rapid growth in international students studying in U.K. universities.¹⁰ The second was the increasing number of “boat people” – people seeking asylum in the U.K. by crossing the channel in small boats, organized and operated by criminal gangs.¹¹ Although such irregular migrants comprised less than 10 per cent of total migration, they attracted (and still attract) a huge amount of media coverage, most of it very unfavourable.

A key role has been played by the U.K.’s predominantly right-wing press and like-minded outlets in broadcasting and social media, whose coverage has been unremittingly and often extremely hostile. Asylum-seekers have been depicted not as people fleeing repressive regimes but as bogus refugees, taking advantage of British generosity and goodwill.¹² Here are some typical recent headlines, selected at random:

• “The truth is that migrants come to Britain because they believe we are most generous country in Europe.” – Sun, October 22
• “‘They get free phones, school uniforms and houses. Why can’t we?’: Despairing parents in England’s poverty capital bemoan golden treatment of asylum seekers.” – Daily Mail, November 18
• “African migrant waiting for small boat to Europe laughs ‘United Kingdom, here we come.’” – Daily Express, November 12
• “Either thousands of migrants are claiming benefits, or millions more live here than we thought.” – Daily Telegraph, November 17

Such stories have been repeated over many years, leaving a profound stamp on public opinion. Public perceptions of such matters as the scale of irregular migration, the motivations of migrants, their responsibility for social problems and their contribution to British society correspond far more closely to depictions and portrayals of the right-wing media than to empirically ascertainable facts.

The effect of such portrayals has been twofold: rendering the issue of immigration highly salient to many people and bolstering and amplifying existing negative sentiments. By promoting “racialized and xenophobic white nationalist identities,” fertile territory for Reform to exploit has thereby been created.¹³ In short, we have seen less a decline than a revival of class politics, albeit in very different form. Class attachments and tensions persist but they have been redefined and reimagined. The class-party link has been so re-engineered that many have come to see Reform as the most authentic vehicle for (White) working-class representation. All this has created a huge problem for Labour.

Labour’s response: Accommodation

As a result, the Starmer Labour government has been under huge pressure to resist Reform’s advance by curbing illegal immigration, and the result is the most radical change in U.K. immigration policy in decades. Broadly speaking, social democratic parties have three ways of responding to the threat from the radical right: persuasion, deflection and accommodation. Persuasion involves challenging radical right framing, contesting common myths and misconceptions about immigration and expounding a more humane and compassionate approach toward asylum-seekers. Deflection refers to attempts to defuse the issue, reduce its salience and focus on different issues. Accommodation involves accepting much of the radical right framing and demonstrating that a party of the left can be equally tough on immigration.¹⁴

Initially the Labour government hedged, but as Reform rose in the polls it opted firmly for the accommodationist approach, promising a “crackdown” on immigration. In May 2025 the government published a White Paper titled Restoring Control over the Immigration System. In his foreword, the Prime Minister condemned what he somewhat disingenuously called the previous government’s “one-nation experiment in open borders” which, he alleged with little evidence, had caused “incalculable” damage, overstraining public services and access to housing and distorting the economy. In November the government proposed a series of reforms to the asylum system. The headline proposals included the following:

• Instead of being granted an initial period of asylum for five years and then allowed to apply for long-term residency rights, those granted refugee status would only be permitted to stay temporarily, with their continued stay reviewed every 30 months. Some could qualify for long-term residence more rapidly if they met certain conditions such as volunteering in the community.
• If the government judged their home country to be safe, asylum-seekers could be compelled to return.
• Many migrants would only become eligible for benefits and social housing after being granted British citizenship, which could take many years.
• Conditions governing the granting of refugee status would be tightened and rights to appeal restricted.
• The legal duty to provide asylum seekers with support, including housing and subsistence, would be limited to the destitute.
• The removal of families including children whose asylum claims have been refused would be accelerated.
• New legal routes to the U.K. would be established, but with an annual cap on numbers.

The broad substantive aim of these proposals was to deter future migration inflows, especially from asylum-seekers by (1) making the process more difficult to navigate, (2) restricting rights and (3) generally creating an environment more unpleasant for refugees and, to a degree, for immigrants generally. These proposals will probably be modified during the legislative process, and their precise effects will depend very much on the details.

More relevant for our present purposes, however, is the package’s performative purpose: the message it seeks to convey to the public. The issue of illegal migration, the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood (herself a second-generation immigrant) claimed, constituted a “crisis at our borders” and was “an existential issue for mainstream parties. If we don’t solve the crisis at our border, dark forces will follow”: harsh measures to deter asylum-seekers and to limit their rights were the only way to repel Reform.

The presumption underpinning these reforms was that the U.K. was a “soft touch” with a system “easy to game,” and far more lavish in the benefits it afforded asylum-seekers than any other country. The government knew that these presumptions were unfounded,¹⁵ and the proposals provoked much criticism both outside and inside the party. As the chief executive of the Refugee Council, Enver Solomon, put it, they “would risk trapping people who have fled war and persecution in three decades of instability and stress at the very moment they need certainty to rebuild their lives.” Furthermore, many commentators pointed out that treating asylum-seekers as temporary residents would complicate their efforts to integrate. The government probably welcomed such criticism since it reinforced the impression it wished to create, that it could be relied on to take a no-nonsense and robust approach to the problem of immigration.

But will it stem the loss of Labour voters or dent Reform’s growing popularity? There are several reasons to be doubtful. The most important is that by accepting much of Reform’s framing of the issue, Labour is legitimizing it. By not challenging commonly held misconceptions propagated by Reform and its media allies about the numbers of boat people and their motivation, Labour is in effect endorsing them. The consequence is likely to be the normalization of radical right discourse, as it has been elsewhere in western Europe. If more mainstream parties repeat the arguments of radical right politicians, they give these arguments added credibility. Policies which appeal to the emotions and prejudices of voters, but which they hesitate to express knowing that they are perceived as morally objectionable, become acceptable when more widely validated.

Furthermore, the accommodationist strategy will doubtless unleash a bidding war Labour cannot win, for it cannot match Reform’s stridency. Accepting its definition of the problem gives more plausibility to its solutions. If immigration and asylum-seeking are as destabilizing and disruptive as Labour appears to concede, can the party really be trusted to take the ruthless remedial action required? Or is it just offering diluted, wishy-washy and pallid alternatives to Reform? Triangulation of this sort merely drives the permissible bounds of discourse ever further in an authoritarian direction, and this can only benefit the radical right.

But there is another cost attached to Labour’s increasingly illiberal stance: alienation of its own supporters. Since its election victory, more of Labour’s vote has drained away to the Liberal Democrats and especially the Greens than to Reform. Under their dynamic new leader, Zack Polanski, the Greens are appealing strongly to the progressive middle class and, indeed, they have already overtaken Labour among younger voters.¹⁶ In short, Labour’s accommodationist strategy will affront some while failing to reassure others. As Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte and colleagues conclude after a detailed data-driven analysis, “There is no scenario where accommodating a more anti-immigration policy provides the Labour party with electoral benefits.”

The only workable strategy?

The Starmer government is addressing genuine and formidable problems. How can Labour reconnect with an increasingly estranged working class? How can anxieties about immigration be eased without alienating ethnic minorities and progressives? How indeed to grapple with the seismic shift in class politics occurring through much of the Western world? There are no easy answers to these questions.

The Starmer government is in fact implementing some policies designed to address the plight of the “left-behinds” – the marginalized segment of the working-class population, those on low income, often in precarious employment and with limited educational qualifications. Most notably, the Starmer government is in the process of enacting a major expansion of employment rights. This could have been part of a broader redistributionist program geared to benefiting the working class and those on modest incomes in general.

However, on the basis of an interconnected mix of economic and political considerations, the Starmer government is hesitant about adopting such a strategy. Economically the government’s hopes for higher economic growth, its overriding goal, depend on attracting global capital and hence securing the confidence of global financial institutions. Politically, a principal objective has been winning over the corporate sector and the City, whose interest, in any case, the present Labour leadership sees as converging with that of the nation as a whole. Big business has already responded in a truculent way to the government’s November 2024 decision to raise employer national insurance contributions, and Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, are very reluctant to take any steps that might further antagonize the corporate sector. This renders forging an alliance around a left-of-centre economic strategy difficult to achieve.

As a result, the government has adopted a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, pointing to the material gains accruing to the working class through its policies on employment and rebuilding the National Health Service and other public services; on the other, seeking to appease (White) working-class opinion on immigration. The Starmer leadership remains confident that its strategy is the only workable one. Time will tell, but the stakes cannot be higher: unless Labour recovers from its dismal poll ratings, the once unimaginable prospect of a radical right government in the U.K. will loom on the horizon.

Notes

¹ These were that current spending would be covered by tax receipts and that overall debt levels would be on a downward slope over a five-year period.

² Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley, The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 42.

³ Gerry Stoker, “Relating and Responding to the Politics of Resentment,” Political Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 1 (2019), pp. 144–45.

⁴ Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “Cleavage Theory Meets Europe’s Crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the Transnational Cleavage,” Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2018), pp. 109–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2017.1310279

⁵ Deborah Mattinson, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? (Hull, UK: Biteback Publishing, 2020), p. 59.

⁶ Ibid., p. 67.

⁷ Bobby Duffy, “Perceptions and Reality: Ten Things We Should Know About Attitudes to Immigration in the UK,” Political Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 3 (2014), pp. 260–61.

⁸ Zack Grant and Geoffrey Evans, “A New Dilemma of Social Democracy? The British Labour Party, the White Working Class and Ethnic Minority Representation,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 54, No. 3 (2024), p. 799.

⁹ Matthew J. Goodwin and Rob Ford, “Britain After Brexit: A Nation Divided,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2017), p. 20.

¹⁰ Jonathan Portes, Labour and Immigration: One Year On, UK in a Changing Europe Working Paper 06/2025, pp. 5–6.

¹¹ It should be noted that over the years legal entry for asylum-seekers has become increasingly difficult.

¹² Apurav Bhatiya and Shanta Kadam, Small Boats, Big Impacts: The Ripple Effects of Irregular Migration, CAGE Working Paper 757/2025 (Coventry, UK: University of Warwick, Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, 2025), pp. 6, 9, 2.

¹³ Rob Ford and Will Jennings, “The Changing Cleavage Politics of Western Europe,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 23 (2020), p. 305.

¹⁴ Tim Bale, “Putting it Right? The Labour Party’s Big Shift on Immigration Since 2010,” Political Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 3 (2014), p. 296.

¹⁵ For example, according to government statistics, in per capita terms compared to EU members the U.K. had the “seventeenth largest intake.”

¹⁶ And there is the threat of the new radical left party formed in November, with Jeremy Corbyn as one of its joint leaders.