Keir Starmer is starting the week with a full-frontal assault on the party he considers to be his gravest threat and on the issue that defines its menace: it’s Labour versus Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in a totemic tussle over immigration.
The Home Office launched a publicity blitz this morning, as Labour seeks to persuade voters that Starmer is not the soft touch on border control his critics allege. New figures reveal more than 600 immigration arrests were made last month after authorities carried out 828 raids. The government notes this was a 73 per cent increase compared to January last year — when the Conservatives were in power.
In total, Labour says that more than 16,400 people have been deported since the election — a figure insiders claim will rise later on Monday when new data is published. These deportations have included more than 800 people being off-shored aboard four chartered flights.
This afternoon, the House of Commons will consider the government’s new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill for the first time. The proposed legislation aims to introduce a raft of new offences and counter terror-style powers to crack down on people smugglers bringing migrants across the English Channel.
Among the plans, individuals selling and handling boat parts suspected of being used in Channel crossings could face up to 14 years in prison, while anyone at sea during the dangerous journeys who endangers another life could face a five-year jail term. Labour, the party’s thinking runs, has a strong story to tell on border control. But its own internal polling and focus group work suggest the public has not noticed.
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This perception-reality gap is the context for Labour’s communications blitz today. Home secretary Yvette Cooper, in this vein, is expected to join an early morning raid this week targeting illegal working — while the government will broadcast footage of deportations, a number of them involving foreign criminals, from detention to removal centres and on to waiting planes.
In recent weeks, Labour has also run Reform-style Facebook adverts boasting the party has achieved a “five year high in migrant removals”. A new account called UK Migration Updates, awash with Reform-esque turquoise, has been set up to share “updates about the UK government’s action on migration”.
This is the manner of aggressive communication we can get used to from Labour in the coming months — with the 1 May local elections looming. Indeed, it is these such tactics Keir Starmer evoked when, at a marathon six-hour cabinet “away-day” last week, he urged his ministers to “be the disruptors, if you don’t want to be disrupted”.
This language was drawn from a recent report by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), which advises “progressive and mainstream parties” on how to counter the rise of populist forces, particularly those of the right. The institute called for “a complete deconstruction and reconstruction” of the way mainstream parties conduct their politics.
If Starmer is to outswim the rising Reform tide, the report suggests he must embrace an agenda of “disruptive delivery”. It concludes: “The message from our research to progressive and mainstream parties is stark: disrupt or be disrupted. Permanently.”
It’s a strategy lifted straight from the Donald Trump playbook: be noisy, be relentless, be energetic, be controversial. That, in the current media-political environment, is the form of “delivery” that cuts through.
The TBI report reflected on international contexts and the concurrent rise of “insurgent right” forces across Western democracies. The United Kingdom is not due for a general election until 2029 — but already commentators are questioning whether the centre, guarded by a besieged gatekeeper, can hold. Polls point to a sustained and intensifying Reform insurgency. Ceilings are being smashed. The hype — and the threat — is real.
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The most recent UK voting intention poll, conducted by Opinium for the Observer, put Labour on 27 per cent, Reform UK on 26 per cent and the Conservatives on 22 per cent. This is currently the most common formulation: Labour and Reform are competing within the margin of error, while the Conservatives languish in a distant third place. Under Kemi Badenoch, the Tories are retreating into obscurity. Reform has risen from the scorched party’s ashes. But the Faragist fire now turns on Labour.
“Journalists talk about the rivalry between me and Kemi Bandenoch”, Farage told LBC this morning, “the truth is, it’s the Labour vote we’re after”. It echoes the Reform leader’s warning upon being elected as the MP for Clacton last July: “We are coming for Labour”.
Not if we come for you first, flows the Labour retort.
Last week, a selection of Labour MPs — drawn from the cohort of constituencies in which Reform finished second last July — set up an informal pressure group to help shape the government’s messaging on issues that resonate with Reform-minded voters. This caucus of MPs on the frontline of Farage’s electoral assault reportedly maintains close contact with No 10.
The aforementioned Opinium poll, which will have focused Labour minds, found that among “Reform considerers” (voters thinking about backing the party), about 72 per cent said they were doing so because of its immigration and borders policies. Many of these will be voters who backed Labour at the last election — a proposition reflected in data provided by More in Common. The pollster notes that Labour has lost support most among more socially conservative but economically statist voters, whom it terms “Loyal Nationalists”. These are the kind of voters that powered Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election victory and the “hero” electors that Labour targeted above all in 2024.
As ever, the fundamental feature of this government is the increasingly frayed electoral tapestry Starmer weaved last year. Under siege from Reform, the government is seeking to shore up support among its “hero” voters, who are especially conspicuous in the kind of seat Reform plans to capture in 2029.
Starmer is, once more, governing against the grain of expectations voters generally hold of a Labour administration. He is testing the limits of what is ideologically acceptable — and is sure to make some of his MPs, and progressive voices in civil society, feel queasy. But such squeamishness has always been a feature of Starmer’s strategic approach, masterminded by his now-No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. From 2020-2024, it was on these terms that Starmer often appeared most comfortable — and most obviously in the ascendant.
But sustaining an electoral coalition in government is different to constructing one in opposition. Labour’s alienation of “Progressive Activist” voters from 2020-2024, to again borrow More in Common’s terminology, was based on a ruthless strategic calculation about how much support — and where — Labour could afford to lose.
Labour won 67 per cent of Progressive Activists at the 2019 general election under Jeremy Corbyn (voters locked away in safe seats); and only 49 per cent under Starmer in 2024. Labour made up ground elsewhere in target constituencies, and especially among Loyal Nationalist voters. That, in essence, is how McSweeney conjured a 174-seat majority from a 34 per cent vote share.
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Since the election however, Labour’s support has been eroded across all of More In Common’s voter segments. The Greens, for instance, have gained among Progressive Activists, at Labour’s expense. At the same time, Reform has gained among Loyal Nationalists, at Labour’s expense.
(The SNP is not included in More in Common’s data, but its recovery is largely explicable in these terms too).
Ultimately, Starmer’s blitz on immigration today could alienate more of these progressive voters, without — crucially — a proportional increase in support among socially conservative Loyal Nationalists. And as Robert Ford warned in a piece for the Guardian over the weekend: “Wooing back Reform voters with red meat on Farage’s favourite issues is a strategy with low prospects of success and high risks.”
The Conservative Party from 2010-2024 is, as ever, a case study in strategic failure. Last parliament in particular, Nigel Farage — a populist pied piper — marched the Conservative Party to and from issues and, eventually, off an electoral cliff edge. The desperate spiral of Conservative placation, replication and validation of Reform-style politics only hastened its demise — or stored up trouble for later. In an attempt to stem the flow of support to Reform, Starmer risks expanding the political space that only someone like Farage can dominate.
The Greens, and to a lesser extent the SNP, have struggled to cut through this parliament — with Westminster focused on the battles between Reform, the Conservatives and Labour. But Ford warns: “A populist Labour campaign for Reform votes may be the last straw for many in this socially liberal, viscerally anti-Farage group, putting at risk hundreds of marginal seats where Reform is out of the running, but where Labour needs a united progressive front to prevail next time.”
In 2024, the Green Party of England and Wales showed it could make gains without the kind of national coverage afforded to Reform. The party won crucial breakthroughs, winning four MPs with over 1,800,000 votes. But still today, the Greens are not nearly on the cusp of their own insurgency.
The risk for Starmer is that he gives progressive voters another reason to exit Labour’s fragile electoral coalition — while failing to thwart, or even exacerbating, Reform’s rise. Under siege from a rising menace, Labour may well conclude that inaction invites worse problems — but the danger is still altogether plain.
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