It was pure coincidence that two events, shocking in very different ways, happened within hours of each other, on 29th July 2024. But together, they became the triggers for what has since been a dramatic rise in ethnic hostility in Britain, much of it expressed as antagonism to immigrants, along with a surge in support for the 'far-right' in Britain.

Less than a month into Keir Starmer's term as prime minister of the UK, his finance minister, Rachel Reeves, made the announcement (presumably to impress the City of London and the money markets) that the universal Winter Fuel Payment for pensioners would be abolished. Thus, the government signalled the continuation of austerity and dashed any hopes that the new Labour administration would prioritise reversing the downward path of living standards and public services. Prospects for any serious challenge to the direction of the newly elected government from within the Labour Party had already been diminished with the help of the use of disciplinary powers against party members and MPs on the left (and more such measures were to follow).

On the same day as that announcement, in the town of Southport in the North West of England, three very young girls were murdered and others seriously injured by a behaviourally disturbed 17 year-old. Fuelled by rumours and online claims about the perpetrator, hotels where asylum seekers were being accommodated were besieged by riots and violent protests, and there was an arson attack on a mosque.

It later transpired that the young man who had carried out the frenzied attack on the children is a UK citizen who was born in Wales, and is from a Christian family. His parents had emigrated to the UK from Rwanda in 2002. But the scene had been set for much of the inevitable public frustration with the recently installed Labour government to take the form of hostile discourse around the 'immigration issue', in which immigrants (and their descendants) have been portrayed as embodying fearful threats of criminality, sexual harm, and cultural takeover. And, in addition, for the political benefit of this to be accrued by Nigel Farage's Reform UK party as well as the open racists and anti-Muslim activists around the figure of Tommy Robinson.

The policy response of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his advisors, in accepting much of the framework of this discourse and even attempting to take the lead in demonising immigrants, created a competitive spiral which has strengthened, rather than deflected, this poisonous narrative. The PM issued statement after statement focussing on "foreign criminals exploiting our immigration system", "closing the book on a squalid chapter [of immigration]", and Britain becoming "an island of strangers". This went along with tweeting out lurid images encouraging fear of immigrants, changing the regulations around the skilled worker visa scheme in a way that threatens hundreds of railway workers and civil service staff with deportation, and using the issue of immigration as a pretext to bring in a compulsory ID card system.

For their part, Reform UK merely upped the ante by proposing more and more extreme anti-immigrant measures, until the point came where, with Farage's proposal for the deportation of 600,000 people with settled UK status, Starmer was unable to follow and had to pivot to accusing Reform UK of being a racist threat to the rule of law and our way of life. But the damage had been done.

The issue of demonisation is crucial. The worst aspect by far of this public anti-immigration campaign is not that it might result in a reduction in the levels of inward migration to the UK (which, for good or ill, have varied widely over the years). It is that it encourages and whips up hostility to and promotes fear of immigrants, as well as putting them at risk.

Immigration and immigrants are not the same thing. The former is a process and a phenomenon, taking place mainly according to global inequalities and the capitalist labour market, induced also by conflicts or social disruptions caused by global capitalism, and influenced or regulated by the actions and policies of the world’s richer countries. The immigrants, on the other hand, are the people, the human beings, who, following from that process, are now living in (for example) Britain, rather than in the land of their birth, or of their parents’ birth. They are not just living in Britain, but, those of working age, are mostly working in Britain (whether legally allowed to or otherwise), and working for employers based in Britain or conducting operations in Britain.

They are part of our country’s economic and social structure, and, irrespective of citizenship or other legal status, the place of the vast majority of immigrants in this economic and social structure is that of being part of the British working class.

Of course, the current hostile discourse on immigration does not target all immigrants, and even the most extreme of its proponents do not set themselves against foreigners as such, or even against foreign political influence in Britain. The big-name speaker at the September 2025 ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demonstration in London, depicting immigrants as posing a violent, existential threat and inveighing on the crowd to ‘fight back or die’, was a man who is not only a foreigner to the UK, but an economic migrant to the country where he lives. But it is such apparent contradictions that often reveal the true nature of things. Elon Musk, after all, is white and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, has a close (albeit turbulent) relationship with the ruling faction in the overwhelmingly most powerful country on the planet, and he is one of the two richest men in the world. The other major known ultra rich backer of Tommy Robinson is the American businessman Robert Shillman, a board member of Friends of the IDF, and a major donor to pro-Israel and anti-Islam campaigns.

Regarding Elon Musk, it is notable that he not only built his business empire using cheap migrant labour, much of it by hiring undocumented workers, but he used his influence on the Trump presidency to ensure the continuation of the H-1B visa scheme, which, as Senator Bernie Sanders has highlighted, allows employers to undercut established US workers by bringing in people from abroad on lower rates of pay and without basic rights. Senator Sanders added, “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”

In this way, Musk can be seen to encapsulate the nature of the ‘immigration issue’. It is a double game in which the wealthy in the rich countries derive financial benefits from immigration. At the ‘higher skill’ levels, they profit from the work of better salaried specialists whose education and training were resourced by, or took place in, poorer countries. in addition, they profit not merely from the cheaper labour of lower paid foreign workers, but also from the impact of labour migration in pulling down the wages of more established migrants, as well as those of the ‘indigenous’ workers.

An example from an article in The Conversation (May 2023) illustrates the dire impacts at the lower end of the UK labour market, where workers are unprotected by trade unions or compliance with regulation: “[A]t hand car washes, undocumented labour from Albania, sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq, and Kurdistan now competes with documented workers from eastern Europe. This has pushed day wage rates down to subsistence levels, with workers in some cases forgoing wages in favour of food and shelter.”

Such is par for the course under capitalism, which - nationally and globally - is an exploitative and competitive system which pits individuals and groups of people against each other, not only in relation to employment but in access to resources such as housing and healthcare. When wages are stagnating or falling and the social infrastructure is decaying, anti-immigrant rhetoric and imagery are bound to find fertile ground.

The corroding of these fundamental material conditions is inextricably connected also with the readiness among sections of the public to imbibe the ‘cultural’ critique of immigration and immigrants (and, especially, hostility to Muslims). Decaying economic and social conditions rooted in the vagaries of the capitalist system (often accompanied by the unavailability of social housing and house prices in urban areas rising beyond the reach of most people) become associated in people’s perceptions with changes in the look and feel of an area after people with different religions or cultural traditions have moved in. This becomes the resentful counterweight to the palette of vibrant cosmopolitanism which can be enjoyed most by those with the least pressing material concerns.

Paradoxically, net migration to the UK was already falling very substantially when the current wave of anti-migrant sentiment began, with estimated numbers of 430,000 in 2024, compared with approximately 800,000 in 2023 and similar numbers in 2022. The level of inward migration (the vast majority of it legal and encouraged) had previously risen substantially due to policy changes under Boris Johnson's premiership, with workers from outside the EU being brought in, many of them to work in the health and care sectors. This was alongside a campaign to increase the numbers of foreign students (whose fees subsidise the British further and higher education systems). The subsequent Conservative prime ministers had already drastically reduced immigration levels before Keir Starmer took office.

Since July 2024, public politics in Britain on the ‘immigration issue’ has focused on two much smaller groups of people: those arriving across the Channel from France in small boats, and those who are residing in ‘migrant hotels’ while awaiting appeals in the asylum process. Although a small minority of the people moving to the UK, both these groups have been made highly visible, and used to promote the perception of chaos, lack of control on the part of the authorities, and threats allegedly posed by the migrants themselves.

There are other, connected, reasons why these groups are highlighted. Barred from working officially, so able to take up only the most meagrely paid and insecure employment, these ‘asylum seekers’ are provided with accommodation by the state, but no money. All they receive is a pitiful allowance on a payment card (currently £49.18 weekly for a single person, or £9.95 where meals are provided by the accommodation), an amount which, even supplemented by whatever miserable wages can be obtained by illicit employment, do not allow the person to take part in social and community life, to mix and develop a bond with people living nearby.

Thus, the widely believed rumours and tropes (eg, that the authorities give each new asylum seeker an iPhone and / or an iPad, and the existential threat motif in which male asylum seekers are described as ‘men of fighting age’) are not dispelled by social contact. As distinct from commercially sponsored and legally encouraged economic migrants, where at least an argument is put (however well or badly it may be received) that they are making a contribution by increasing this country’s GDP, or filling vacancies, eg in the care sector, in the case of these asylum seekers there is no such positive case put publicly in their favour. Even in respectable mainstream discourse, they are presented effectively as receiving something for worse than nothing, as they have managed to frustrate the UK authorities’ various attempts to deny them entry to Britain, and in return are rewarded with access to a legally defined procedure, as well as accommodation and subsistence (however inadequate these may be in reality).

So the perceived unfairness by participants in demonstrations outside ‘migrant hotels’ is that any legal or international obligations to the residents they are besieging are being disbursed at their expense. Both the failure of the government to challenge this view, and the efforts of this group of migrants to find work, and thus to be in some position to pay their own way, are used as a further reason to condemn and disparage them.

Here it must be acknowledged that some of the arguments used by well-meaning people, in the face of increasing prejudice, can miss the point, particularly when they take the form of defences of immigration, rather than defence of, and solidarity with, the immigrants themselves (which is not to say that persuading people on the latter basis is an easy task). The assertion that immigration increases GDP, while absolutely true, has limited relevance given that the beneficiaries of rising GDP under capitalism are, in the main, the very rich rather than the working class majority.

A week after the large anti-immigrant demonstration in London in September 2025, the Financial Times published an analysis by its associate editor Stephen Bush, which rooted the issue in a demographic trend. Entitled The truth about immigration, the article presented a dilemma:

“Across the rich world, almost every state faces a version of the same problem: their people are living longer and having fewer children. Every year, tens of thousands of citizens will hit state pension age or retire, and fewer of us are having enough children to maintain our care-dependency ratio (the number of working people supporting those who are too young, too old or too sick to work themselves)…Immigration is how states have filled the gap. Immigration has filled vacancies in the country’s care and construction sectors…Most wealthy states now have more immigrants than ever before.”

Carefully avoiding mention of the profits made by care sector and construction companies, the article went on, “But politicians have a problem: immigration is the subject of fierce political opposition…In the UK, France and Germany, a party of the nativist right has been leading in polls, in part because of opposition to immigration.” (3)

As could be expected, the FT article also avoided consideration of the economic system in these rich world countries, or the changes towards more aggressive forms of capitalism in recent decades; and it gave an impression of mainstream policymakers as honest managers of society's overall interests, merely trying to find balance in a perplexing situation. But the article did suggest a way forward, which Stephen Bush entitled the 'high immigration, high cruelty' approach. Comforted somewhat by the statement of a Reform UK leader who acknowledged immigration to be the 'lifeblood of Britain', the FT associate editor referenced what he sees as the positive experience of Italy:

"Georgia Meloni, the prime minister, has kept immigration high but she has held on to political support and an opinion poll lead by sharply limiting paths to citizenship…and to family reunion. She has in part been able to do this because her party is trusted on immigration..."

As Stephen Bush's appellation suggests, this approach works politically by encouraging resentment against immigrants and assuaging that resentment by punitive measures against immigrants rather than by reducing immigration. On the economic side, making citizenship harder to achieve renders immigrants more vulnerable to exploitation and this boosts profits. Preventing family reunion ensures that resources which might have been needed for schooling or care of the elderly can be retained and inevitably find their way (along with many other resources) into the increasing incomes and wealth of the ultra-rich.

There have been aspects of this type of approach also in UK policy, eg the surge in economic migration from Eastern Europe which was facilitated by the Blair government, accompanied by measures to reduce the rights of asylum seekers to legal employment; and the major rise in non-EU labour migration under Boris Johnson (who was ‘trusted on immigration’ because he had delivered on Brexit). It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, however, that a potential Reform UK government, in the context of a further spiral of even more extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric (perhaps in the future involving competition for support between Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson) might be driven to go much further than would serve the economic interests of capitalist business, and actually try to deliver on promises of mass deportations, internment of hundreds of thousands of people, etc.

But in terms of policy, what could be proposed by people who are not merely well meaning, but aim to move towards changing society in the interests of the working class majority? The slogan of 'no borders' is simply unfeasible given the very steep international inequality under current global capitalism. State involvement in management of migration will continue to be a necessity in the near and medium term.

And even without government participation in anti-migrant discourse, the competitive nature of capitalism and the race to the bottom that it generates make it hard to conceive of a beneficial stand-alone policy. But that surely strengthens the arguments for major overall changes in the direction of socialism. Internationally, the changes that would best help to overcome that global inequality would be an end to direct and indirect UK military intervention and Western political interference in other countries; and promotion, rather than restriction, of technology transfer, to allow the currently less developed countries to catch up with Western levels of GDP.

As part of a wider transformation, elements of a socialist immigration policy would need to involve channelling the economic benefits of inward migration, alongside economic planning to ensure full, decently paid and productive employment, and deployment of resources including in housing, investment in infrastructure, and regional and local development.