Fabio ManganielloMigration to the UK is down 48% from last year and 82% from 2021.
Small boat arrivals and the asylum backlog are also down, while 70,000 people were returned or deported.
Yet, anti-immigration rhetoric has only intensified.
Liberals cannot win the immigration battle. By courting the xenophobic votes they harm their own nation, alienate their own voters, and play a pointless game to win the worst slice of the population - the despicable “I’m not racist but…” uncle who would anyway always be unhappy with anyone who doesn’t look and think like him/her, and for sure would never vote for a progressive party anyway.
Labour delivered what the public wanted: a huge fall in net migration to 171,000 in 2025 from 331,000 in 2024 – the lowest in over a decade. Yet online reactions show that parts of the public and the political class are so radicalised that no reduction will ever suffice.
Pipers like Farage, Salvini, Wilders or Trump will always run political agendas rooted in fear and prejudice, even if there was only a single migrant left in the country.
And, even if there was no migrant left, they’d just leverage new fracture lines (North vs South, urban vs rural, cis vs LGBTQ…).
Because, without creating a permanent sense of emergency that constantly turns natural differences in a society into collective irrational fears, their whole political careers would be irrelevant.
Nibor4000 🇬🇧 Ⓥ
