Starmer Finds His Fighting Spirit: Labour’s Blueprint to Beat Back the Far Right

At Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, Keir Starmer finally found a political strategy to confront the rise of Britain’s far-right Reform party. With Reform soaring in the polls—at 27 per cent to Labour’s 17 per cent—Starmer took aim at Nigel Farage’s flagship policy, which is to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants who have “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR). He labelled it racist and immoral, and he was right on both counts.

Around 165,000 people were granted ILR last year: it does not confer full British citizenship but is usually a route to citizenship, and grants most of a citizen’s rights, including welfare benefits. Farage said he would abolish the status, replacing it with five-year visas, and remove access to benefits.

The effect would be to make the immigration status of hundreds of thousands of workers in Britain immediately precarious, and to throw many of them into destitution. As with all far-right populist policies, it is unworkable and intended to feed the revenge fantasies of racist voters.

Coming straight off the back of a horrifying, violent ultra-right demonstration, in which 100,000 people followed the convicted racist criminal Tommy Robinson into Whitehall, to hear Elon Musk call for the overthrow of the British government, the policy forced Starmer to do what he has largely failed to do in office: identify a domestic political enemy and mobilise progressive voters against them.

Whether the tactic works depends on three things. First, Labour government has to begin tangibly delivering short-term changes in the lives of working class people, who have seen their real wages eroded and their public services crumble and low-level lawlessness erode their quality of life. Second, it has to maintain fiscal stability: the case of Macron in France shows why. Third, and most importantly, it has to move out of its technocratic comfort zone and begin acting as if the whole of society and democracy is under asymmetric attack—because that is what’s really going on.

Farage’s rise has been driven not only the ravages of austerity under the Tory government, and not only by the anger over refugee arrivals in small boats. It is the product of far-right TV channels and content creators freely exploiting lax regulation and algorithmic amplification on platforms like TikTok and X.

Labour is losing support, essentially, because it is losing the narrative battle; Starmer’s own X account often churns out robotic pledges, in dead language, calling to mind the image of a politician from the 1990s in a suit caught amid a violent street fight between fascists, Islamists and the far left.

When Labour came to power last year, the party spent weeks telling people things were “worse than they thought”—which was true, but has sapped all hope and life out of the party’s storytelling in office.

So the decision to take the offensive, to repeat across all channels that the threat to deport not only failed asylum seekers but people who have made homes, families, paid taxes and become part of the community, was in truth the only option open to Starmer.

To have split the difference, assuaging Reform voters with a “lite” version of the thing they want, was not an option once Farage went down the route of potentially criminalising and deporting nurses, care workers and their family members who came here in good faith, through the legal routes.

But losing the votes of white, manual workers from small ex-industrial towns is only one of Starmer’s problems. The Green Party, which has elected a new, leftist leader in Zack Polanski, could form a powerful attractor for up to 12 per cent of the electorate. In the first past the post system, where the Greens stand no chance of winning a seat, Labour has traditionally been able to “squeeze” such voters to vote tactically.

Now, however, two factors have begun to undermine that: the rise of “values voting”, where Green voters simply do not care who is in government and use their votes as a signalling device; and the fact that many progressives, even in Labour itself, have become viscerally focused on the Gaza conflict, to the exclusion of all other issues.

So while Labour’s record on Net Zero is good, it gains Starmer no political capital against the Greens. Whether that situation would survive the threat of a Farage government, or a Farage/Tory coalition, will decide if Labour can survive in office after 2029.

Two dangers lie ahead for Starmer: the first is that the undercurrent of social tension between an enraged far-right minded minority and those repeatedly taking to the streets over Gaza risks creating an atmosphere of anger, fear and violence, in which even the best crafted narrative of a responsible government gets overwhelmed. With high-impact cyberattacks, arson against mosques and the first anti-Semitic terrorist murders in modern times coming one after the other, there is ample opportunity for Russia and Chinese hybrid operations to exacerbate the problems.

The second danger is fiscal. Labour has boxed itself into a pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, three of the big channels of taxation open to it. And its own borrowing rules have become prey to technical revisions by government statisticians who are set to mark down the level of productivity achieved over the past decade, requiring debt-to-GDP ratios to tighten.

It faces legitimate demands for increased defence spending, a rapidly rising welfare bill due to the long-term effects of Covid on mental health, and rising cost of medicines due to Trump’s tariff war. Like most analysts, I think it can only meet these demands through a mixture of higher borrowing and taxation.

And here’s where the ultimate danger lies: right now, Reform’s poll lead is notional. We are at four years away from a general election and Farage has just four MPs. But at some point between now and 2029, if Farage stays ahead, the global bond markets will begin to price in his programme, whose notional costs amount to an extra £125bn a year spending on top of the risks attendant on putting a totally untested party into power, whose long-term links to Russia are proven.

Some City analysts are predicting that the UK’s bond yields, currently 4.7 per cent, could soar to 8 per cent not just if Farage won but if he looked like winning. That would stoke massive fears among both centrist and progressive voters, but it would derail the whole growth plan on which Starmer’s government has been based.

This is a joint column with IPS Journal