Nigel Farage and the British Battle over Immigration

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

It seems that Nigel Farage has again become the man of the hour in British politics. The politician behind the 2016 Brexit referendum that saw the United Kingdom leave the European Union is back. His Reform UK Party is surging in the polls as the crisis over immigration and refugees has reached a boiling point in the country. For them, immigration isn’t just one policy among many. It is an existential question.

At the party’s annual conference in Birmingham this month Farage announced that he would be launching a new “Department of Preparing for Government.” He told members to “be ready” for a possible early general election in 2027.

So what’s going on? Reform UK has now been ahead in the polls for almost half a year. It marks the longest time that a party outside Labour or the Conservatives has led in the polls this long. Reform UK has consistently been averaging 30 to 31per cent, enough to put it well ahead of all its rivals. If an election were held now, it would be the largest party by far, albeit probably short of an overall majority.

Dissatisfaction with the state of the country certainly underpins support for Farage. Among those whose current party preference is Reform UK, a remarkable 89 per cent, according to Ipsos, are pessimistic about the prospects for the economy.

But it really comes down to immigration. According to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 81 per cent of those who voted Reform UK in last year’s general election believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country’s culture and 73 per cent feel that migrants have been bad for the country’s economy.

Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system made the 2024 election the least proportional general election in British history. Labour won a landslide 411 seats and a 174-seat majority with just 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest of any majority party on record. While Reform UK won just five seats, it gained 14.3 per cent of the vote, the third-highest vote share, ahead of the Liberal Democrats and Greens. As well, 900 Reform UK councillors won seats in this May’s local elections.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government still sees the nation as an artifice that stands in the way of “international cooperation.” Only very reluctantly will they turn off the tap on the flow of migrants. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, under their new leader, Kemi Badenoch, seem to be ideologically incoherent, while scared silly by Farage’s momentum.  They are fighting for their electoral lives for the support of anti-immigration, socially conservative British voters, who are now moving towards Farage.

That’s because after Brexit, the UK government of then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson opened the door to the rest of the world. In total, 4.5 million people arrived in Britain between 2021 and 2024, primarily from India, Nigeria and China. One in every 25 people living in Britain today came during that four-year window.  

And they coincided with a spike in illegal migration, as tens of thousands of asylum seekers also entered Britain every year, many sailing from France on flimsy dinghies. Legal immigration is still running at a pace of just under half a million a year, nearly twice the pre-Brexit average. Illegal boat crossings are also on a record pace so far this year.

While Britain left the EU, it remains a member of the European Convention on Human Rights. Farage has vowed to leave the ECHR if elected, which he says would allow Britain to deport migrants deemed to be in the country illegally. Reform UK says it would freeze most migration and deport those who arrive illegally.

William Galston, Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, reminds us in “Liberalism Without Illusions,” published in the summer 2025 issue of the journal Democracy, that liberals “often suffer from the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.”

But this is a major error, he contends. Today’s populists know better. They battle their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture. They oppose most immigration, not only on economic grounds, but also because immigrants can challenge, and over time change, long-established cultural traditions and norms.

Liberals consider national boundaries and loyalties as forms of irrationality. But most people in democracies still value attachments to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family, and compatriots. “This does not mean that we can ignore the suffering of refugees, but the responses required of us may be limited,” Galston maintains. Disregarding such attachments “is inapplicable to the real world of politics.” His views certainly apply to today’s slow-motion political earthquake in Great Britain.

Just a few weeks before last year’s general election, Farage made a surprising decision to run for office. Other than Brexit, he had a long track record of political near misses. He had lost seven previous tries to get a seat in the House of Commons. This time he was elected. That battle was about laying down a marker for next time, he remarked. This spring, Starmer admitted Reform UK is the “real opposition.” For Farage, the situation seems like manna from heaven.