Labour Takes on Farage With Reform Party-Branding Boasts of Deportations in Big to Claw Back Defectors

Labour faces split over how to take on Nigel Farage, with internal factions calling for a harder line on border control to muscle in on his territory, while others say party has already gone too far in trying to appeal to would-be Reform voters.

The newspaper of record of the British left, The Guardian, notes a brewing row inside Britain’s party of government over how to neuter Nigel Farage, who is rapidly emerging as the de facto face of opposition, handily displacing the Conservatives in polling this year. The disquiet comes over the recent emergence of Labour-funded campaigns intended to reach out to would-be Reform voters — particularly previous Labour voters now considering jumping ship to the Farage faction, a definite and growing group — which critics say risks “raising… community tensions”.

Cited in the report is a political advert paid for by a Labour association which features no Labour branding, and which is formatted in the familiar teal-and-white colours of the Reform UK party. Published in January, it referred to then-recent government statistics showing the state had deported 16,400 illegal migrants since Labour took power.

It boasted: “Labour Hits 5 Year High in Migrant removals… The Labour government a record 16,400 illegal migrants since taking power including 2,580 foreign criminals”.

Reform party Member of Parliament and emerging thought leader Rupert Lowe dismissed the importance of this claim when confronted with it by a Labour MP as an attempted ‘gotcha’ on Thursday this week, saying even of this number only a minority were actual expulsions. He responded: “Of that already pathetic number, just 4,390 were ‘enforced’. The majority wanted to leave… Multiply it by ten, and then we can start talking”.

Indeed, Labour’s boast that it is deporting at five-year-highs, while absolutely technically correct, is judged by such a woefully low bar it is essentially meaningless. While the previous Conservative government betrayed its own voters and election-time promises by throwing open the nation’s borders and welcoming millions of new arrivals, there was a double betrayal in the sense that there was functionally no deportation regime, either.

Of the 45,000 illegal boat migrants who crossed the English Channel to force their way into the United Kingdom in 2022, for instance, just 215 were deported, or 0.47 per cent. More broadly in 2023, the number of enforced removals of foreign nationals was judged to have fallen by over half compared to 2019, the final full year before the Coronavirus pandemic, further buttressing the impression the last government was simply uninterested in enforcing border rules at all.

As previously noted, a group of Labour MPs are said to be appealing to the party leadership to go harder on the migration issue to head off Farage’s Reform UK before it can pick up too much steam. “Dozens” of Labour MPs most threatened by rising Labour polling are said to have lobbied the government to “do more on illegal migration especially” because this is seen as the most potent issue for Farage to leverage.

Yet The Guardian notes now there is no unanimity of mind on this issue, and the Labour party is simultaneously being pulled in the opposite direction by activists who fear trying to disarm Farage would betray left-wing principles and make asylum seekers feel sad.

Cited was Labour MP Rachael Maskell, who is reported to have said: “I would caution the party against raising such community tensions when we know there are so many asylum seekers who have experienced persecution in their lives. I represent England’s only human rights city, where we uphold the dignity of all.”

Also quoted was a senior spokesman for Amnesty International, who struck similar tones: “It is seriously worrying that the government seems set on repeating the mistakes of the past… For anyone wishing to see that every person’s human dignity is properly respected, and that we have a fair and efficient immigration and asylum system in the UK, public communication strategies such as this only make the situation worse.”

New polling this week underlines the growing threat Reform UK poses to Labour. Farage’s faction was leading the pack in a major pollster’s findings for the first time, and breakdowns of that support revealed how Reform picking up voters from other parties is powering its growth. As reported then:

The demographic breakdown of the YouGov figures published Monday evening also appeared to buttress trends already identified elsewhere, namely that Reform’s onward march in the polls is due to a combination of retaining an impressive level of loyalty among its own voters while also recruiting a good number of defectors from elsewhere.

A solid nine in ten Britons who voted for Reform in the 2024 general election said they would do so again next time. Yet 24 per cent of 2024 Conservative voters said they would now back Reform, equivalent to 1.6 million Tories defecting to Reform out of an active electorate of 29 million.

Despite that Reform are doggedly portrayed as right-wing extremists in much of the UK press, an impressive eight per cent of 2024 Labour voters now say they would back Farage’s faction, something like three-quarters of a million Labour defectors to the Reform camp. This may vindicate Farage’s plan to go after Labour’s historic working-class voter base, who may have backed the party tribally in the past but are poorly represented by its modern metropolitan-liberal leadership.