U.K.’s Labour Government and Tories Are Both Abandoning Liberal Pluralism in the Wake of Nigel Farage’s Victory
Instead of fighting right-wing populism and nativism, they are surrendering to it
Recent national elections in Canada and Australia saw those countries’ major center-left parties ride a wave of enthusiasm to strong—and, in Canada’s case, surprising—victories. Those results were at least partly attributable to anti-Trump sentiment. Local elections in the United Kingdom, however, have been less encouraging: On May 1, Britain’s far-right populist party, Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, captured nearly 700 of the 1,641 seats that were up for grabs and two of the six mayoral seats that were contested. The Liberal Democrats—traditionally Britain’s third biggest party behind the Labour-Conservative duopoly—also made gains, picking up over 100 new council seats. Labour lost over 150 seats, while the Conservatives suffered a thrashing and lost more than 600 council seats.
Voters fled Labour and the Conservatives, though not entirely in the direction of Reform. But Reform’s successes are real and undeniable, and though the next general election is years away, Farage’s party now consistently comes out ahead of its rivals, Labour included, in polling that tracks voting intentions. Even worse, Reform’s rise has provoked both of Britain’s major parties to imitate it in key respects in order to stem the political bleeding. But in trying to pattern their policies after Reform’s far-right populism, Labour and the Conservatives are jeopardizing their own political identities.
For Labour, this entails blunting the moral and political contrasts that exist between it and Reform—and, indeed, sacrificing them for an electoral boost. Since far-right populism is intrinsically hostile to liberal values, for Labour to gravitate toward the party that in the U.K. most reliably embodies that ideology would be to surrender its fundamental commitments. Labour is free to trample on its own principles in the hopes of edging out Reform candidates in the post-industrial Red Wall, but it is not free to do so and pretend it remains committed to an open and pluralistic society. It’s one or the other.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, are trying to fend off a pincer movement based on the position they occupy within British politics. The Liberal Democrats are seizing the affluent, moderate communities that were once Tory strongholds, while Reform is proving more compelling to populist and anti-immigrant hardliners. But if the Tories continue to shift right to copy Reform, they risk a future where Reform either joins an empty husk of a Conservative Party or simply overtakes it from the right.
There are plenty of pieces in both the British and American press attempting to read the tea leaves about the election results, so I want to make a more global and philosophical point: Whatever short-term electoral gains parties might bring about by copying the far right, they will come at the cost of their principles and will require forfeiting whatever commitment they had to a morally responsible politics.
Lose Yourself
Since the election, some Labour ministers have urged a move to the right—and have framed it not as an abandonment of their principles but rather as a course correction. Labour MP Jonathan Hinder has called the immigration issue “an existential threat” for the party, reflecting the concern within Labour’s ranks that Reform could undermine it in key working-class areas. As Hinder put it, “Our drift away from our working-class base has been decades in the making, and goes far deeper than the tenure of any one leader.” For figures like Hinder, getting tough on immigration is presented as being true to Labour’s working-class commitments. Jonathan Brash, MP for Hartlepool, another Labour heartland constituency, said after the elections that, “We want the Government to adopt policies that put our working-class communities, our post-industrial heartlands first, ... that has to recognise the concerns that those voters have that are very clear.”
Labour was already leaning into this posture heading into the elections. A month ago, the party put out a leaflet, available in its online store, boasting about its deportations. The leaflet advertised that Labour has “delivered the four biggest deportation flights in U.K. history” and highlighted the Labour government achieving “an increase of almost 25% on the last year of Conservative Government.” The message from so-called Red Wall MPs like Hinder and Brash is that the party simply didn’t go far enough before.
But Labour’s increasing antagonism toward immigration is in fact a departure from its commitments. There is a difference between fighting for working-class interests and using concern for the working class to shed its respect for multiculturalism just because that’s the politically expedient thing to do right now. The Labour elements applauding a shift toward Reform’s politics are cynically using the party’s historic regard for the working class to erode its commitment to a pro-immigration, open society.
Labour leader and Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a human rights lawyer who ascended to the top of his party on a pro-immigration vision, said back then:
We need to make a wider case on immigration. We welcome migrants, not scapegoat them. Low wages, poor housing, and poor public services are not the fault of migrants or people who have come here. They are a political failure. So we have to make the case for the benefits of migration, for the benefits of free movement.
Last week, however, Labour released a new white paper on immigration that unquestionably represents a rightward lurch that will: forbid the recruitment of new care workers from overseas, double the time to obtain citizenship from five to 10 years, and deny visas to applicants from countries with high overstay rates.
The policies are proving controversial among Britain’s progressives but Starmer has thrown his full rhetorical weight behind the shift. In his speech justifying the white paper, he warned of the danger of Britain becoming “an island of strangers.” Starmer called the period of high net migration under the latter years of the previous Tory government a “squalid chapter.”
Many rightly see this as an attempt to mimic the style of Farage or the hardliners on the Tory right.
But some, including key members of his own party, have also compared the language to that of Enoch Powell, one of the most prominent and infamously racist anti-immigrant politicians in modern British history. Although a representative of Starmer’s said that the prime minister would “reject in its entirety the previous speeches made by that individual,” Starmer’s “island of strangers” comment was seen by some as reminiscent of Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in which he lamented that the white British population had “found themselves made strangers in their own country.” Labour Peer Lord Alf Dubs, himself a former child refugee on the Kindertransport in 1939, said, “I’m unhappy senior politicians are using language reminiscent of Powell and I’m sorry Starmer used some of those phrases.” This is a stark warning from one of Labour’s moral pillars.
The shift is not just on immigration. On culture war issues, the party has abandoned any pretense of supporting the dignity of trans people in the U.K. The Supreme Court ruled in April that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act of 2010 is based on biological sex, excluding trans women and allowing for them to be barred from single-sex spaces for women. Starmer, who only a few years ago was a strong defender of trans rights and a supporter of respecting the self-identification of trans and non-binary people, called the ruling “a welcome step forward.” Trans groups have responded by calling for Starmer and Labour to be excluded from upcoming pride celebrations. For his part, Farage called the court’s ruling an “outbreak of common sense.”
What does a center-left party in a modern liberal democracy even stand for if it is determined to strike such a right-wing posture?
Certainly, winning elections is a critical part of politics, and the British public has made it clear that it is currently fairly hostile to immigration—both legal and illegal. But politics is also a matter of principles and values, of persuasion and winning over the public with workable and imaginative solutions that reflect and respect those principles and values. A party that mortgages its basic ideological commitments to manage an electoral threat has ceased to uphold the values that made it what it was. Such a party is no longer concerned with enlivening democracy, stirring debate and civic reflection, or provoking political thought—but only with staying in office. Acquiring power for power’s sake.
If Labour and center-left parties around the West are to remain an alternative to the populist right, they can’t do a wholesale surrender to it. Contrary to Starmer’s newfangled anti-immigration rhetoric, they have to keep making the moral argument even as they inevitably work within a political arena that requires some degree of compromise. They can’t give up on striving to make their position popular again.
But Labour and Starmer are completely avoiding this task in their panic over the election results.
Worse, Labour’s overture toward populist politics is not even an electoral sure shot. Voters for whom immigration restrictionism is of great importance may never regard Labour to be as reliable as Farage and Reform—while traditional Labour voters would feel betrayed, not to mention immigrant communities themselves.
Tory Troubles
The Tories are in even graver danger of being eaten away by Reform from the inside, as I wrote last year. At that time, I was not concerned about Reform gaining a significant number of seats at Westminster. But now that it has, there are two plausible scenarios for Conservatives, both grim: They could fully give in to the populist transformation underway in the party since Brexit or they could also be beaten outright from the fringe by Reform.
The current signals from the Conservative Party are not encouraging, notwithstanding Conservative Member of Parliament Kemi Badenoch’s statement in the aftermath of the local elections noting that we “will not chase Farage to the right.” The trouble is that the party has spent much of the last decade doing just that. At this point, Badenoch’s fellow Tories and the broader Tory base might be inclined to chart a different course whether she likes it or not.
To be sure, Badenoch, the first Black leader of a U.K.-wide political party, defeated a more overtly Faragist figure in Robert Jenrick for the Tory leadership in 2024. Jenrick’s bid was nakedly nativist and heavy on culture war belligerence. Jenrick cheered on Trump last fall, making his alignment explicitly clear. He called for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, decrying it as an unjust restriction on the U.K.’s capacity to deal with crime and immigration. He claimed that staying in the ECHR is “subjecting our people to dangerous criminals on our streets” and described the race between Badenoch and himself as “a choice between leave or remain in the ECHR.”
Jenrick’s election would have certainly signaled a full move to the populist far right at the time. But that doesn’t mean that can’t happen now. Indeed, after the disaster of local elections, rumors of a mutiny to oust Badenoch and replace her with Jenrick have emerged. One anonymous Tory MP told The Independent, “She just does not have it. We have a choice of replacing her with Robert or a lot of us switching to Reform.” Badenoch has struggled in leadership—including uninspiring performances at Prime Minister’s Questions, which are regular parliamentary events in which MPs ask questions of the prime minister—but the threat from Reform is a crisis point.
Recent voting intention polls for the 2029 general election continue to show Reform approaching 30%, with the Conservatives struggling to hit 20%. That would be disastrous in a multi-party, first-past-the-post system. There is a very real chance that Reform could become the main right-wing party, which would be a huge blow to the long-term health of liberal democracy in England; no liberal democracy can persist without buy-in from the right, as Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s work has shown.
As I previously argued in The UnPopulist, the Tories confront a situation similar to the one faced by many center-right-to-right parties in other countries over the last decade: In America, when Trump emerged on the scene, the GOP got entirely consumed by MAGA. In France, Le Pen’s National Rally has fully displaced the old Gaullist establishment as the party of the right. To dance with the far right is to court spiritual ruin. The potential for modest or short-term electoral gains comes accompanied with a guarantee of long-term political ruin. Despite all that, the Tories appear ready to give Farage a whirl.
The Far-Right Populist Wave Has Not Receded
Since 2016, every time after an election result like in Canada or Australia, commentators have pronounced that the end of the populist moment is near. But this is at best premature, even in the countries where the populist right has experienced a defeat.
As Janet Bufton recently observed in The UnPopulist after Canada’s populist leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his own seat:
The unfortunate reality is that illiberal right-wing politics are not failing and will not simply fade away. Canadian liberalism did not secure a victory, but merely a reminder that illiberalism is not inevitable. What Liberals won is time to do something to keep illiberal populist currents at bay.
We need to accept that we are in a long-term struggle against menacing forces of illiberal populism. The challenge for mainstream parties is to stand for something rather than attempting to offer watered-down versions of the far-right populist agenda.
The Labour and Conservative parties have between now and 2029 to figure out whether they will give the British public tangible, workable alternatives to the Faragist project. Let’s hope that their conduct after the recent elections is a panicked response and not a signal that the country’s two most important parties since the 1920s are giving up on the business of defending some of the most foundational tenets of liberal democracy.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Very well written, detailed, and thoughtful piece.
Although, occasionally, this piece misses the mark. For example: "Acquiring power for power’s sake." Given Labour's bold legislative programme (workers' rights, house building, decarbonization etc), suggesting Labour's measures on immigration are not calculated for the purpose of securing electoral air cover for delivering these manifesto commitments, but instead simply to retain power is just hyperbole. Labour are signalling on immigration for, in their view, good reason. Namely their desire to secure more than one term in office, and deliver meaningful and enduring change.