Labour’s Policy of Right-Wing Appeasement Will Empower Reform, Not Defeat it.

This month’s local elections heralded a realignment in British politics, with the far-right Reform UK making significant gains at the expense of the traditional mainstream parties. Reform, led by Nigel Farage, won 677 council seats out of 1,641 – that’s 41% of seats that were being contested. On average, Reform’s total vote share was around 31%, far outstripping the Conservatives (23%) and Labour (14%). Reform also toppled Labour in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election with a 17% swing to Reform, giving them their fifth Member of Parliament. Farage’s unprecedented victory promoted many to argue that the government’s unpopular policies – especially its significant cuts to the welfare budget – have been an electoral boon to Reform, which was able to capitalise on the widespread frustration with economic stagnation, the cost of living crisis and declining living standards.

Unfortunately, rather than condemning Reform’s record of fear-mongering around immigrants and minority communities, and rather than reasserting that Britain’s rich multicultural society is a strength and not a weakness, the government has chosen to try and undercut Reform’s support base by adjusting a number of  its policies to appeal to right-leaning voters. Nothing highlights this more clearly than Mr Starmer’s speech on immigration delivered on May 12 to mark the release of a new government white paper in the issue. During the announcement, the Prime Minister warned that Britain is at “risk of becoming an island of strangers,” using incendiary language that was immediately met with widespread condemnation – including from some of his own MPs – for echoing Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 “rivers of blood” speech. Alf Dubs, a Labour peer who came to Britain as a child after fleeing Nazi persecution, noted with alarm that “we have senior politicians who [are] using language which is reminiscent of Powell.”

Indeed, even before Labour’s losses on May 1, the party was trying to, as Keir Starmer’s own former campaigns and elections advisor put it, “out-Reform Reform” by calling for a hotels housing asylum seekers to be shut down. Previously, a group of Labour MPs calling themselves the Red Wall Group has demanded “stronger” controls on immigration. At  the same time, some Labour MPs have shamelessly bragged about how there has been an increase in deportations since taking over government from the Conservatives. There is a great danger that by adopting Reform’s talking points and policies in a misguided attempt to undermine Farage from the right, the government will simply end up internalising racism and xenophobia within Labour’s ranks – taking it even further away from its origins rooted in anti-racism – while further normalising Reform and its divisive rhetoric in the public space.

This appears to speak to a broader problem within this Labour government, which is that, strangely, the Prime Minister and his team appear to believe that doubling down on the same policies that made voters feel alienated from Labour in the first place is the way to defeat Reform. Opinion polling in the months leading up to the election consistency showed that the public’s trust in Mr Starmer’s leadership was collapsing, largely because of his deeply unpopular winter fuel cuts, which will affect around 10 million pensioners, and the billions of pounds he plans to slash from the welfare budget, specifically targeting disabled people. Other polls showed Reform consistently sitting neck and neck with Labour and the Tories in multiple parts of the country. Yet, rather than accepting the reality that its draconian policies have helped to create the fertile conditions for Reform to flourish, Starmer doubled down on them following Reform’s local election success this May by claiming that Labour would go “further and faster” with its plans.

In what some have described as a “watershed moment” for the future of Labour, Starmer’s right-wing posturing has only continued to provoke criticism from Labour’s traditional base, particularly Black and Asian communities. The Prime Minister’s comments describing “uncontrolled” migration as having dealt “incalculable” damage to Britain, along with his slashing of the international aid budget to 0.3% of GDP from 0.5%, has all been heavily condemned by anti-racist activists and grassroots organisations. At the same tine, the Labour government continues to be dogged by allegations of complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide, namely because of its ongoing material support for Tel Aviv in the form of weapons sales, F35 parts and the passing of targeting intelligence to Israel by British forces at their RAF base in Cyprus. This has had a significantly negative impact on support for the party, especially among Muslims – traditionally largely a Labour-voting constituency. Indeed, Muslims have continued to turn away from Labour since Keir Starmer’s outrageous claim in October 2023 that Israel had the right to withhold water and power from Gaza. Labour initially paid for this in the May 2024 local elections, where its vote share fell by approximately by around 21% in council areas where more than 20% of residents are Muslim. Other analyses showed that Labour lost 33% of the vote in Muslim-majority council zones. In zones like Oldham, Leeds and Kirklees, Muslims elected candidates standing as independents or for smaller parties like the Greens, often toppling incumbent Labour councillors. While some Labour officials tried to play down the significance of Muslim voters, their losses only grew in the July general election, where they lost 5 assumed-to-be safe seats to independent candidates – 4 of whom were Muslims – running  on pro-Gaza tickets. There are signs that this trend is continued into the May 2025 local elections, with independent Muslim candidates running on pro-Gaza platforms winning council seats in places like Lancashire and Redbridge and Ilford. I was unable to find any hard data on this, but have mentioned a few examples of pro-Gaza candidates winning.

By pledging massive cuts to welfare and adopting some of the deeply divisive rhetoric used by Reform around immigration, Labour is moving away from its roots on two key issues: poverty alleviation and anti-racism. Multiple speeches given by government officials since the local elections give little reason to believe that Mr Starmer is going to change his stance on these issues any time soon, if at all. In fact, all signs indicate that he intends to continue marching down the path toward further right-wing appeasement. This is a policy that is bound to lead to a self-defeating failure, as voters sympathetic to Reform’s message are more likely to vote for the real thing than the ‘Reform-lite’ option on offer by Labour. The only hope that we have for forcing the government to roll back on its regressive policy pledges is genuine bottom-up pressure. Those who wish to live in a more equitable and compassionate society must find common cause and engage in serious coalition-building efforts that are able to reach across communities and constituencies to bring together diverse sectors of British society – Muslim activists, Black activist groups, the progressive Labour grassroots, environmentalists and sympathetic politicians.

Such a coalition must go beyond an ad-hoc arrangement established for the purpose of holding protests; it must be organised around a clear long-term strategic vision, namely applying enough pressure from the left to force Labour to at best return to a position of compassion and common sense on immigration and poverty alleviation, or at the very least, to somewhat moderate its current positions which appear to be tailored to right-wing voters. Activists need to be aware at the same time that there is every chance that Labour cannot be saved, and that it will continue its rightward shift out of fear of Reform. It is for this reason that activists need to be thinking as boldly as possible by viewing coalition-building efforts as not only being geared toward bringing like-minded progressives together, but as a strategically game-changing political project aimed at disrupting Britain’s political space on the left, introducing to the landscape a new movement that is able to challenge Reform, the Conservatives, and indeed Labour, from the left. The electoral successes of Reform are an omen of the dark direction in which our country is heading. For those who believe in justice, equality, anti-racism, combating Islamophobia and poverty reduction, there is little time to waste. We must begin organising.