More Reform voters arriving by rubber dinghy WTF!?
The driving force in UK politics is immigration. This is what destroyed the Tory Party; this is what makes Labour sit up and pay attention to the small degree it is capable.
The core of this big, existential issue is the phenomenon of small boats illegally crossing the English (and French) Channel with so-called "asylum seekers."
While immigration is generally unpopular, few Brits feel comfortable making the case against it. Perhaps they intuit somehow that a nation with sub-replacement-level fertility is going to have it anyway otherwise they might run out of Premier League football players and NHS nurses.
So, the main animus against the general problem of immigration has been successfully "corralled" and "ghettoised" by British society into the lesser but still quite important issue of Channel-crossing asylum seekers.
So, the main animus against the general problem of immigration has been successfully "corralled" and "ghettoised" by British society into the lesser but still quite important issue of Channel-crossing asylum seekers.
When the UK was in the EU, such interlopers could be repatriated to the first EU country where they had claimed asylum. This was thanks to the Dublin Regulation. In short, the EU served as Britain's "Rwanda" and the Conservative Party's post-Brexit Rwanda scheme was a ramshackle attempt to recreate that convenience.
Yes, cross-Channel illegal migration is, in fact, a direct consequence of Brexit and the efforts of UKIP and Nigel Farage. But the voters are too stupid to realise that. While Brexit took away UKIP's reason to exist, it also created the reason for its successor party, Reform UK, to exist -- namely the Brexit-inspired crossing since 2018 of approximately 195,000 asylum seekers. Of these, around 5,563 (mainly Albanians) have been returned to their home country. This leaves us with around 190,000.
It is, of course, not clear what Reform would or could do about this if elected, but this issue is definitely powering their rise. In fact, it would be quite reasonable to say that the number of boat-crossing asylum seekers is directly proportional to their level of support among the UK voting public.
If a UK general election were held today, approximately 8.35 million people could be expected to vote for Reform, based on the latest opinion polls, which point to around 29% of the vote, and an expected turnout of around 28.8 million voters. This would make them the biggest party!
Based on these numbers and the roughly 190,000 small boats asylum seekers still here, we can make a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation that one illegal asylum seeker is worth about 44 Reform votes.
This would mean that if, on a given day, another 1000 migrants cross in boats to be put up in the usual hotels and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation), then that would be another 44,000 votes you could chalk up to Reform.
This would mean that if, on a given day, another 1000 migrants cross in boats to be put up in the usual hotels and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation), then that would be another 44,000 votes you could chalk up to Reform.
As you can probably imagine from this, Channel crossings are a sure-fire election winner for Reform, as there seems little likelihood of the Labour government getting on top of this problem before the next election. Reform don't even need much of a coherent and costed political program. They have won the branding war by being against "the bad thing," while the Tories and Labour have lost it.
So, is there any way to derail the Reform juggernaut? Of course, if Starmer could crush boat crossings that would help, but even if the new pilot scheme to disincentivize Channel crossers were expanded, this outcome looks somewhat unlikely. Also, there would still be the problem of probably well over 200,o00 illegal Channel crossers still washing around in the system.
However, just stopping the boats would be a major plus factor for Starmer as it would greatly decrease the visibility of the illegal Channel crossers. Due to the stupidity of the electorate, visibility is the key here. The true equation is as follows:
(number of Channel crossers) X (visibility) = (number of Reform voters)
Right now this is:
190,000 X (visibility) = 8.35 million
Visibility can thus be quantified as a factor of 44. If this could be reduced, the vote for Reform would be reduced accordingly. For example, halving visibility would have a similar effect on the final figure of Reform voters.
So, how could this be achieved?
The most obvious ways would be to "lower" the optics of actual boat crossings and migrant hotels, either by stopping the boats and deporting the migrants (difficult) or by hiding the phenomenon as much as possible (difficult but possibly easier).
However, rather than "lowering" the optics, in recent days, we have seen moves to increase the visibility of asylum seekers by the demonstrations in Epping and similar attempts elsewhere.
Muh Epping
It is not entirely clear who is behind these demos, and that is a subject for further consideration, but raising visibility in this way can only increase the Reform vote.
So, what is the path of least resistance for the Starmer government, and thus the most likely course of events?
Firstly, it is essential for the Starmer government to nip these demos in the bud. This will be done with the stick of cracking down on the hardcore of the demonstrators (especially the mobile element of professional agitators, shills, and grifters) combined with the carrot of removing asylum seekers from contested areas. There may also be attempts to keep the asylum seekers under stricter surveillance and management (which could, in certain circumstances, backfire).
The government is unlikely to build large holding facilities, as these would soon become high-visibility hotbeds of unrest and centres of dysfunction, so instead expect to see refinements in its migrant hotels whack-a-mole strategy, combined with filtering the most suitable migrants out into the community as "low visibility" individuals in HMOs.
Secondly, there may be some attempt at media and online suppression. For example, moves could be made to take GB News off the airwaves, based on their long record of Ofcom violations and dubious dark money funding. Already, we are seeing attempts to starve the Reform ecosystem by striking at the foreign money that appears to be funding it.
Also, from 25th July, under the Online Safety Act, a new piece of legislation that covers the likes of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google, websites and apps will be required to "protect children" by filtering out harmful content and verifying ages. Similar measures could be extended to other groups or simply used as leverage against the social media companies to muffle the accounts and narratives the UK government sees as the problem.
Then there is the strategy of distraction. If the next election can be fought on an issue that crowds out immigration, then this will weaken the visibility of asylum seekers, but it hard to imagine what such an issue could be or how it could work positively for Labour, as the only thing that could distract from this would be outright economic collapse.
Then there is the strategy of distraction. If the next election can be fought on an issue that crowds out immigration, then this will weaken the visibility of asylum seekers, but it hard to imagine what such an issue could be or how it could work positively for Labour, as the only thing that could distract from this would be outright economic collapse.
Due to the its lack of an effective Deep State and its dependence on the EU to cooperate in solving it cross-Channel problem, the UK government has very few other options beyond these to deal with this problem.
So, is Starmer's Labour government doomed to being crushed at the next election?
Not necessarily, as there is still a lot that could happen before then to change things. For example, it is not impossible for the Conservative Party to come back from the grave and reposition itself as a "hard-line" anti-migrant party.
UK voters are not too bright, and after a suitable cooling off period, it might not be possible to fool them again with a repackaged Tory party, possibly fronted by a repackaged Boris Johnson, falsely claiming to be genuinely hard-line on migrants "this time." If successful, the effect of this would be to split the right-wing vote, allowing Labour to win again, despite its unpopularity, as it did in 2024.
Not necessarily, as there is still a lot that could happen before then to change things. For example, it is not impossible for the Conservative Party to come back from the grave and reposition itself as a "hard-line" anti-migrant party.
UK voters are not too bright, and after a suitable cooling off period, it might not be possible to fool them again with a repackaged Tory party, possibly fronted by a repackaged Boris Johnson, falsely claiming to be genuinely hard-line on migrants "this time." If successful, the effect of this would be to split the right-wing vote, allowing Labour to win again, despite its unpopularity, as it did in 2024.
Whatever happens in the next few year, asylum seekers and how they are dealt with (or not dealt with), looks like being the main political football in the UK.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.
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