There was a time when fascists and the far-right were generally regarded as morally abhorrent forces on the fringes of British society, when historical memories of Nazism, the Holocaust and World War II were still recent enough to invoke condemnation whenever these groups appeared, and overt expressions of racism within mainstream politics were seen as something shameful and contemptible.

This is not to say that racism didn’t exist in the UK, or that the far-right has not been a persistent threat to communities in this country. The post-war history of immigration is filled with examples to the contrary, from racist riots in the 1950s, to the rise of the the National Front in the 1970s, and the long struggles of first and second generation immigrants against street and state level racism. Nor was racism absent from the political mainstream. British politicians - both Labour and Conservative - have a long tradition of making coded statements or enacting legislation based on racist premises, that did not mention race overtly.

But there was a reason why Enoch Powell was sacked by Heath for his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, and why, beyond the open racism of the likes of John Tyndall, Nick Griffin and Colin Jordan, it was once considered unacceptable in any respectable platform to openly express racist views in an openly racist way. The publication of the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a watershed moment, not just because of its findings of ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police, but its 70 recommendations intended to ensure ‘zero tolerance’ to racism in society were broadly accepted.

For some years now, that wall of shame has been steadily collapsing, and ideas and attitudes that were once confined to the margins have moved steadily towards the centre. In an article for Al Jazeera in July this year, the writer and former Asian Youth Movement activist Tariq Mehmood warned that Britain was on its way to becoming a ‘racist dystopia’, and recalled the Bradford of his youth in the 70s and 80s:

Knife attacks and fire bombings were not uncommon, nor were the demands by far-right groups, such as the National Front and the British National Party, for the repatriation of Black (ie, non-white) immigrants’. Attending school sometimes meant running through a gauntlet of racist kids. In the playground, sometimes they swarmed around, chanting racist songs.

A former member of the ‘Bradford 12’ is not someone you would expect to idealise the Britain of his youth. Nevertheless, Mehmood noted a qualitative distinction between the present and the past:

The overt, street-level violence of those years was terrifying, but it came from the margins of society. The ruling political class, though complicit, avoided openly aligning with these groups.

Today, that distance has disappeared. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other prominent members of Labour regularly echo far-right rhetoric, promising to ‘crack down’ on those seeking sanctuary here. His Conservative predecessor, Rishi Sunak, and his ministers were not different. His Home Minister Suella Braverman falsely claimed grooming gangs had a ‘predominance’ of ‘British Pakistani males, who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values’.

The closing of this distance has been going on for decades, as a result of the toxic ‘debate’ about immigration and asylum that has steadily poisoned British politics and society, to the point when there is almost no difference in the rhetoric of ‘respectable’ Conservative politicians like Robert Jenrick, and the Farageist ‘insurgents’ and your average Katie Hopkins tweet.

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Ideas that might once have been considered shameful are now paraded as expressions of patriotism and pride. Even Labour politicians now attempt to out-compete Reform in boasting how many refugees they can deport or detain, how patriotic they are, how much they love flags, and how many draconian new policies they can introduce to make life harder for immigrants.

All this is carefully coded to avoid suggestions of racism or xenophobia. All you have to do is express concerns about immigration and any concern becomes valid. Are brown men with ‘medieval attitudes’ a threat to white women and children? Check. Is it true that asylum seekers - most of whom are brown men - are not ‘genuine refugee’, but parasites and usurpers looking to steal ‘our’ jobs or access benefits? Check. Is it racist or xenophobic to want to put ‘our people’ first, or demand that people speak English in ‘our’ public places? Check, check.

Ideas like this have become so commonplace, that hardly any politician dares challenge them. As a result, immigration has effectively become the Trojan horse, through which the far right has infiltrated once-fringe ideas about ‘remigration’, ‘great replacements’ etc closer to the political centre. Without this toxic ‘debate’ we would not have had Brexit. And now, the UK is poised for something far worse. Polls now suggest that Reform could win an outright majority. Two weeks ago, the violent felon Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and his cohorts were able to mobilize more than 100,000 people in the largest far-right demonstration in British history.

As a result, the UK is facing a uniquely dire situatio: On the one hand a mass political party that routinely propagates the most vicious lies about immigrants is on course to form the next government, with a Trump-like mass deportation program as its flagship policy. At the same time, a far-right street movement, backed by the richest man on the planet, is mobilising unprecedented numbers around a flag-waving pseudo-patriotism in order to ‘unite the kingdom.’

To understand how this is likely to play out in the future, consider what has been going on for the last few years. In 2011/12, according to government figures, there were 35, 845 police recorded racial hate crimes in England and Wales. In 2023/24 there 98, 799. With one or two exceptions, the numbers have shown continual growth ever since, particularly since 2016/17. In Northern Ireland, there were 2,049 racist incidents and 1,329 race hate crimes in the year ending June 2025 - a year that Amnesty International called ‘a year of hate and fear.’

In August this year, a 42-year-old Filipino nurse named Apple Moorhouse was racially abused in a Halifax park while walking with her daughter and elderly relatives A video taken by Moorhouse shows a white woman jeering at her father that he ‘can’t even speak English.’ When Moorhouse tells the couple that she is an NHS worker, the woman snarls, pushes her, attempts to grab her phone and calls her a ‘slave.’ At one point, the man makes a Nazis salute, asks ‘Have you got a rubber boat’ while mimicking someone rowing, and then begins calmly throwing water at Moorhouse.

The most striking thing about this assault, apart from the primitive rage and hatred on display, is how brazen and out in the open it is. The couple clearly don’t care that their actions are being filmed. They believe they have right on their side, and that they are entitled to abuse a random stranger who happens to look like a ‘migrant.’

That same month, two elderly Sikh men were assaulted and kicked to the ground by three teenagers outside a railway station in Wolverhampton. Earlier this month a Sikh woman was raped in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, by two white males, who shouted at her that ‘You don’t belong in this country, get out.’ On 2 September a nine-year-old girl in Bristol was shot three times in the face with an airgun by two white males on scooters who subjected her to racial slurs. On 12 September, a gang of pissed masked youths subjected an Indonesian woman and a group of female relatives in the centre of Glasgow to racial abuse, making stabbing motions, using racial slurs and threatening to put her in a body bag.

These assaults took place at the end of a summer in which anti-migrant ‘protesters’ have demonstrated outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and one asylum hotel has been set on fire. Not all the participants in the protests are members of far-right groups, but their ‘concerns’ have been echoed, fomented and exploited by the far-right, both on the streets and also in its more mainstream iterations in Reform and a dying Conservative Party.

Don’t expect the likes of Farage, Jenrick and Yaxley-Lennon to accept the claim by Somerset’s Police and Crime Commissioner, that these marches were ‘emboldening other people to commit verbal and physical attacks on people.’ But this emboldenment - already evident during and after the Brexit referendum - has become clearer with every passing year.

It was clear in 2024, when vigilante mobs dragged people of colour from their cars to check if they were ‘immigrants’. It was clear during this month’s ‘unite the kingdom’ march, when groups of ‘coked-up, drunk’ white men intimidated black and brown people on the London underground.

If Farage’s party forms a government, the attacks and protests we have seen this summer will morph into levels of street violence unlike anything this country has ever seen. Expect to find MEGA ‘patriot’ mobs and vigilantes looking to finally take their country back. Expect levels of terror and intimidation directed at communities across the country and against anyone who looks and sounds like a migrant. All this will take place alongside a militarised deportation and detention machinery modelled on what Trump, Miller & Co have been doing in the US.

We’ll see how ‘patriotic’ the flag wavers are then.

In effect, we are facing a looming political and social emergency, yet far, there has not been any coherent national response to this threat, and no leadership whatsoever from the Labour government. Last week, Keir Starmer belatedly recognized the danger that the country is in, and called on his party to fight ‘the fight of our lives’. This development can only be welcomed - up to a point. But it should also be acknowledged that Starmer and his team have so far proved themselves painfully incapable of fighting anyone or anything - unless you count Palestine Action.

And even when Starmer tries to sound tough and forthright, he inevitably undermines. Take Laura Kuenssberg’s show on Sunday, when Starmer rightly condemned Farage’s plan to abolish indefinite leave to remain as ‘a racist policy. I do think it is immoral. It needs to be called out for what it is.’ Like everything Labour does, this apparent boldness was immediately qualified. Asked if Reform was trying to appeal to racists, Starmer replied: ‘No, I think there are plenty of people who either vote Reform or are thinking of voting Reform who are frustrated.’

Millions of people in this country are frustrated, but they don’t necessarily want to vote for a party whose only serious policy is that it intends to deport 600,000 people. And as for trying to appeal to racists - of course that’s what Farage is doing and what he has always done. It’s what he did during the Brexit referendum. It’s what he did last year, when he legitimized the Southport racist riots by ‘asking questions’ about ‘two-tier Britain.’

But Starmer cannot bring himself to say this, for fear of emulating Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ comment and alienating Reform voters who already loathe him, and so he added this little gem:

It is one thing to say we’re going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here. I’m up for that.

It won’t warm many Reform voters’ hearts to know that Starmer is ‘up for that’. Nor are these voters likely to be impressed by Starmer’s condemnation of attacks on ‘people who are lawfully here…They are our neighbours. They’re people who work in our economy. They are part of who we are. It will rip this country apart.’

Farage and Tice won’t be losing much sleep about that possibility. And immigrants were not part of who we are, in Starmer’s dreadful ‘island of strangers’ speech in May this year, when he described immigration as a ‘squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country’ and a ‘one nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control.’

Starmer has said since that he regrets making that speech, but he has not explained why he made it, or what he regrets about it. And his belated change in tone sounds as hollow and inauthentic as his previous embrace of far-right nostrums.

Last Thursday, Starmer urged progressive politicians to confront the ‘lies’ and ‘industrialised infrastructure of grievance’ of the right-wing populists. Fine. But at no point has Starmer or his party ever confronted or even acknowledged these lies. Again and again, he has echoed them or given credence to them.

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That same day, Starmer announced his plan to introduce ID cards in…(drum roll) the Telegraph, in an op ed that claimed that

left-wing parties, including my own, did shy from people’s concerns around illegal immigration. It has been too easy for people to enter the country, work in the shadow economy and remain illegally.

The simple slogans offered by Reform will not do anything to resolve the problem. There is no silver bullet, but we must enforce every possible measure to deter migrants from entering British waters.

He then went on to argue:

Equally, the belief that uncontrolled legal migration was nothing but good news for an economy should never have been accepted on the Left. It is not compassionate Left-wing politics to rely on labour that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages.

And then came the warning:

At its heart – its most poisonous belief, on full display at the protests in London two weeks ago – is that there is a coming struggle, a defining struggle, a violent struggle, for the nation. You don’t need to be a historian to know where that kind of poison can lead. You can just feel it.

To counter it, we must make and win the case for patriotic national renewal, based on enduring British values. Our country is still the proud, tolerant, diverse island it has always been, full of fierce and fair-minded Britons.

There is so much wrong with this awful piece, it’s difficult to know where to start. Whatever you think about ID cards, it is not at all clear how they can help stop ‘illegal working’, or why Starmer felt the need, yet again, to introduce this policy by presenting migrants as job thieves, in the most crazed of all Tory newspapers.

We could also ask when ‘the Left’ - or at least any section of it with power and influence - had ever argued that ‘uncontrolled legal migration was nothing but good news’. Or what a ‘patriotic national renewal’ consists of, apart from a cluster of three words. Or why Starmer is promising to ‘enforce every measure to deter migrants from entering British waters’, when successive governments, including his, have been doing just that for years, without success. Or why he use the word ‘migrants’ to describe people crossing the channel who are technically refugees until proved otherwise.

As for the concern about exploiting migrant workers, does Starmer think that the Telegraph is Tribune? Because this is a newspaper that could care less. And if Starmer thinks he is playing to the Labour base, there is abundant evidence to suggest that harsh immigration enforcement actually facilitates the exploitation of migrant workers instead of preventing it, by creating what a study at the University of Birmingham calls ‘a compliant workforce at the state’s margins.’

The study found that, since March 2025, the Labour government’s crackdown on ‘illegal working’ in the gig economy has created an array of ID checks that have made working conditions harsher and ‘effectively embedded the “hostile environment” into the architecture of [delivery] platform work.’

If Labour knows this, it doesn’t seem too bothered. A recent Home Office video actually outdoes the Theresa May ‘hostile environment’ rhetoric, with its footage of migrant workers being arrested by immigration officers, accompanied by the caption ‘The British people work hard every day to better their lives and pay into a system that delivers for them.’

Migrant workers work hard too, and they also try to better their lives, and a Labour government seriously committed to prevent exploitation in the workplace would not recycle hardworking Brits versus undeserving foreigners rhetoric of the type that Reform engages in.

A government that wanted to confront Reform’s ‘infrastructure of lies’ would challenge Reform’s unreliable claims that there are 1.2 million illegal immigrants in the UK. It would refute manipulated statistics suggesting that refugees are more likely to be sexual predators than British nationals. It would call out lies about Eastern Europeans eating swans.

Labour has done none of this. And as for migrants stealing British jobs; in March this year, the AIM group, which specialises in providing training, employment and apprenticeship opportunities for the government, reported that 13.3 % of businesses are experiencing Labour shortages. AIM also reported that there are currently 300,000 labour shortages, particularly in construction, health and social care, and hospitality and tourism - shortages that it attributed not immigrants undercutting British workers, but to Brexit, skill gaps and early retirement.

Any serious debate about immigration ought to include points like this, but Labour never makes them. Unable to bring about the social and economic renewal that this country so badly needs, this government has preferred, like its predecessors, to pander to the ‘concerns’ that are now leading the country towards another self-inflicted calamity.

But Starmer remains right on one thing: the political battle against Reform and the resurgent far-right is ultimately a battle for the soul and character of a country that can no longer fall back on the comforting cliché that ‘this is not who we are.’ The coming years will define who we are, and what kind of country we want to be.

Labour must be part of that struggle, and this is a real pity, because as things stand, the government is tragically ill-equipped to lead it. Yesterday, an open letter from 100 charities warned the new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood that:

Targeting refugees will do nothing to tackle these structural issues or improve people’s lives. It only serves as a dangerous smokescreen to scapegoat the most vulnerable and distract from the very real dangers to our society.

A Labour government should not need to be told that. And the fact that such a letter was written is another testimony to the tin-eared inadequacy of an administration that must now fight a battle for the country’s soul, even though it seems to have no soul of its own.

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