The York Politics Review

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore CC 2.0, Chris McAndrew CC 3.0. The work has been adapted.

By Jack Yeomans

The recent surge in support for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has had a clear and stark impact on the policies of Keir Starmer and the current Labour government. This impact has not only been seen in economic and foreign policy but more obviously on the Labour Party’s attitudes towards immigration, both regular and irregular. As I will outline in this article, this has had a negative effect on the Labour Party and British politics in general, creating a more hateful and dangerous political climate. 

To explain my point, I will begin by looking at recent events in the USA that relate to this topic. With Trump’s second stint in the White House just reaching its one-year anniversary, it’s important to note that his aggressive, anti-immigration policy has clearly had an effect on British politics. 

President Trump has, in recent months, increased his use of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to detain and deport so-called “illegal aliens” from the USA in the hopes that this will make his nation a safer place to live for those who are natural citizens. It seems to be the belief of the president that any of those who were not lucky enough to be born into the United States but rather immigrated into the nation are inherently more likely to commit or facilitate crime and so the removal of these people should make the streets safer for all. 

However, as is easy to see from the recent murders of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and legal citizen of the United States, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and similarly a legal citizen of the United States, these ICE agents don’t appear to be doing their job of making America safer at all. The deaths of these two innocent people came from the fact that they were protesting against the use of ICE agents and the raids they have been carrying out across the country in recent months. This includes raiding homes and schools, taking children from their parents or taking parents from their children all with the aim to take ‘dangerous people’ off the streets. Detaining a 5-year-old child outside of his school to use him as bait to arrest his parents is something that is very likely to stir up anger and lead to protests against federal agents. The deaths of these two individuals could have been completely avoided with the shutting down of ICE raids across America.

Nigel Farage has, for some time now, been known to follow in President Trump’s shadow, often crafting much of his Reform Party’s policies on the same basis as Trump, occasionally acting as a vessel for Trump to meddle in UK politics. Never has this become more obvious than with Reform’s increase in anti-immigrant and, at times, racist language, evidenced by Sarah Pochin’s recent comments about her distaste at TV adverts being “full of Black people” and “full of Asian people” in October of 2025 in a TalkTV phone-in. With more and more MPs defecting to Reform in recent months, many of these being former members of the Conservative Party who at one point in time opposed Farage, it is unlikely that this rhetoric will stagnate in its growth anytime soon. 

To further emphasise Farage’s intent to turn the UK into something akin to Trump’s America, Green Party leader Zach Polanski pointed out in an interview that Farage has pledged to create the UK Deportation Command. An organisation that would essentially mirror ICE in the UK, setting up an Illegal Migrant Identification Centre and using agents to track down these migrants and deport them from the country. The danger in this plan has been evident since 2016 when Farage took his Brexit campaign to such radical levels targeting both regular and irregular migrants, demonstrating that his Deportation Command is unlikely to stop at just deporting irregular migrants but also legal migrants or born citizens of the UK who are the descendants of immigrants. 

Seeing as Starmer has already faced a large amount of criticism in his year and a half in office it is only logical for a struggling Labour government to look at the rise of Reform and attempt to copy their strategy and take their once socialist party even further to the right. The logical progression, therefore, for the Labour Party is to create a stricter, more radical immigration policy that they hope will appeal to the populace in a similar way to Farage. It seems that the way the government plan to take this next step is using increasingly alarming language when talking about irregular migration, such as Starmer in a press conference in May of 2025 who noted how he feels that the UK “risks becoming an island of strangers”. This language is so worrying because, as many people pointed out at the time, it echoes the words of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech where he argued that multi-culturalism would one day cause white British people to become unrecognisable in their own country due to increases in the number of people from different ethnicities coming to live in the UK. 

More evidence of Labour pandering to the far-right is their recent use of TikTok creating an ICE style edit of law enforcement arresting migrant criminals. Donald Trump has already used this tactic several times in the US creating short videos of ICE agents carrying out their raids in the homes of illegal migrants. Starmer mirroring the behaviour of Trump is a large concern because America has slipped further and further down the path to an authoritarian state with a government that feels it can do whatever it likes including arresting anyone who they think could potentially be an illegal migrant without issuing any sort of warrant for these people. The fact that Labour have made such a sudden shift to copy these types of tactics, as well as the rhetoric of the Reform Party, is incredibly worrying and is a dangerous path for our nation to be looking down because it will only further facilitate the rise of racist ideologies and far-right, authoritarian parties in the UK. Personally, I do not want to live in a United Kingdom that will refuse entry to those who may be fleeing from a war-torn country or seeking a better future in our nation that could potentially make a difference in rescuing our steadily declining economy. 

It is difficult to understand why this racist ideology has seen major support from the general public in recent years. Even the most ‘trustworthy’ of news outlets, such as the BBC, constantly report of the numbers of ‘illegal’ migrants crossing the channel in small boats, stoking the flames of this already fiery issue and bringing more people to Farage’s side. Unfortunately, it is clear that this kind of rhetoric clearly pleases the general public which is likely to be what is leading this Labour government to imitate the language and behaviours of politicians who have more radical views on the subject of immigration. 

If the Labour Party continues on this path of creating an increasingly radical immigration policy, then soon enough we may have a government who are completely shutting our borders and refusing to help those who need it the most or welcome those who want to make this country a more prosperous place. Seeing as it currently looks like Labour will not gain a majority in the next general election, introducing more radical policy into law allows for a future, potentially Reform government, to get away with stricter and stricter restrictions on our borders. 

Much of the attraction of this country comes from the fact that the British Empire over 100 years ago travelled the globe, murdering and thieving in more than 100 different recognised nations. This spread British culture and language to all corners of the globe meaning it is only logical for the descendants of those who lived during the time of the empire to want to come and live in Britain because they will share history and culture with us and most likely speak the language to a relatively good standard. It is incredibly hypocritical for the British people to complain about larger numbers of immigrants moving to our country when for hundreds of years we invaded their homelands and enforced our culture on them. The constant complaining from the far right that Muslim nations are pressing their culture on us is ironic when you look at history and the atrocities that we committed.

Keir Starmer is not a racist man, he is a desperate Prime Minister who knows his party is losing support from the people every day and so he has come to the logical conclusion that he must try his hardest to appeal to the highest number of voters he can. Starmer has looked at the rise of Reform and the fact that irregular migration is such a big news story every week and felt that the only way he can bring back support for his party is to pander to the right, using increasingly radical language and taking radical action in a last-ditch attempt to get people back on his side. 
However, the danger of this increase in radical action is that this will only validate these kinds of behaviours and make voters more used to the language and rhetoric being used both here and in the US. This could lead us down a path of increased radicalisation where leaders are not voted in for their politics as a whole but more for their stance on these ‘newsworthy’ issues like immigration. This direction for our country would mean our politics spirals even further downward than it already has in recent years, degenerating into some kind of competition over who is brave enough to create the most radical policies.