Why does Labour think bashing migrants is the way to defeat Reform? Look abroad: the tactic never works | Owen Jones

A Labour government with no coherent strategy, with calamitous polling figures, suddenly has a plan. Finally, a disillusioned electorate cry: after all, two-thirds of UK voters believe Labour feels like “more of the same” compared with the previous disastrous Tory government, including nearly half of Labour voters. Perhaps the plan includes radical proposals to deal with Britain’s unprecedented cost of living crisis – not least given that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation projects real disposable incomes will fall under Labour rule? Perhaps there’s a recognition that Britain’s crumbling public realm can never be fixed without meaningful tax hikes on the thriving well-to-do?

Alas, no: the plan is “kick migrants more, just harder”. Labour has decided to lift the policies and approach of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. It will plough up to £392m into deporting undocumented migrants, enough money to train more than 10,000 new nurses. The Home Office is offering migrant-bashing porn, by publishing footage of migrants being deported, and has issued guidance all but forbidding refugees who have taken a “dangerous route” from ever getting British citizenship, in violation of the UN refugee convention. Rhetoric is being toughened up.

All of this is a panicked response to Reform UK surging in the polls. Park the moral bankruptcy of exploiting the basest prejudice of voters for political expediency. Labour is adopting a strategy that has repeatedly been proven to be disastrously counterproductive. Remember what seems like a distant universe, the coalition era? David Cameron relentlessly pilloried immigration, stating “for too long, immigration has been too high”, blaming the failure of migrants to integrate for causing “discomfort and disjointedness” in communities.

The then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, made repeated tortured speeches about tackling immigration, rather than offering a compelling, coherent vision of how Labour would fix the country’s problems. Both succeeded in pushing up the salience of immigration, boosting Ukip, which in turn convinced Cameron of the necessity of a referendum on EU membership. That entire plebiscite revolved almost entirely around immigration, and years of poison about foreign arrivals from politicians laid the foundations for the triumph of leave. The destruction of Cameron and Miliband’s political careers had much to do with their posturing on migration rebounding.

Note, too, how Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” campaign inevitably failed, but helped frame the national political conversation on Farage’s terms. Rather than burst the Reform UK bubble, it helped deliver that party more than 4m votes in the general election.

Look across the continent. In France, “centrist” president Emmanuel Macron thought he could bring Marine Le Pen’s far right to heel by raiding her policies and rhetoric. Refugees’ tents were torn down, to the condemnation of human rights organisations. His interior minister suggested Le Pen was in fact “too soft on immigration”. But when Macron’s prime minister suggested the French felt “submerged” by immigration, that was correctly described by Le Pen’s movement as evidence it had “won the ideological battle”. Le Pen and her acolytes are closer than ever to forming France’s first far-right government since Marshal Pétain.

Austria’s traditional conservative People’s party became a hardline anti-migrant party, introducing aggressive preventive detention measures for asylum seekers – along with its Green coalition partners – and then making pledges to tighten asylum laws and clamp down on undocumented migrants the centrepiece of its election campaign last year. The result? The far-right Freedom party – more extreme than ever – came top, with 30% of the vote, and is now set to head the government. In Germany, the shift of both government and opposition parties to embrace xenophobia culminated in the centre-right conservatives joining forces with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland to back a motion advocating anti-migrant policies. The AfD is now second in the polls. The same story can be found in, say, the Netherlands, where the far right leads a governing coalition.

Indeed, which mainstream party has actually succeeded in seeing off its radical-right challengers with this approach? The reasons for its failure are straightforward. Pursuing this strategy pushes political discourse on exactly the terms desired by the hard right. Its rhetoric and policies are legitimised, but the rightwing insurgents can always outbid the mainstream and seem more authentic. Because this approach is a substitute for dealing with many of the grievances that trigger anti-migrant scapegoating – such as stagnating living standards or failing public services – the electorate is left without an inspiring alternative. If voters march to polling stations thinking about, say, immigration, rather than policies that might actually improve their lot, the anti-migrant right prospers.

Data analysis has found that anti-migrant sentiment correlates most strongly not with increasing numbers of arrivals, but tabloid coverage that is negative about immigration. That coverage, of course, is in turn fed by politicians’ statements and actions. Labour’s advisers have already illustrated their penchant for self-defeating strategies. Witness how – after Labour’s election win – Keir Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, resorted to speeches promoting doom and gloom about the economy. They thought this would buy public acquiescence for cuts, like the winter fuel payment, itself an example of catastrophic political rebounding.

Instead, it helped suck business and consumer confidence out of the economy, helping to plunge the government into crisis. Put simply, given the absence of any clear vision for the country, Labour is floundering, its advisers offering no evidence that they know what they are doing. Bashing migrants might seem terribly clever to them, but it merely offers Farage vindication. The electorate can smell the panic, and the stench will only grow.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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