Gambling has been described as “the surest way of getting nothing for something”. It’s a line, however, that also aptly summarises a looming political risk for Britain’s two dominant political parties.
Locked in an escalating battle of one-upmanship, Labour and the Conservatives are wagering that an increasingly hardline stance on both legal and illegal migration will stem the insurgent rise of Reform UK, which recently surpassed both for the first time in a major UK poll.
Most prominently has been the Labour government’s public – and some have argued performative – campaign this week, replete with the release of videos depicting border enforcement raids and migrants being led onto deportation planes.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper was expected to join one of these raids, which followLabour social media adverts touting the government’s five-year high deportation record as a visible demonstration of strength on the issue. Strikingly, the posts were absent of the traditional Labour red and splashed instead with teal branding conspicuously reminiscent of Reform’s colour scheme.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has also aimed to go further to suppress legal migration by recently pressuring the government on a series of proposals that would, among other things, make it more difficult for legal foreign workers to obtain permanent settlement and, ultimately, citizenship.
It’s true that both parties face dire situations – electorally for Labour, existentially for the Tories – as Nigel Farage’s once fringe political movement finds itself with leverage over the waning popularity of the political mainstream.
Public attitudes on immigration in the UK remain polarised with a sizeable portion generally in favour in some form of controls. But depending on what questions are being asked, the public’s views are sometimes more nuanced than they’re given credit for and can be fairly malleable over time. It’s clear people want something done – but exactly what isn’t always so cut and dry.
Putting aside moral and economic arguments of the immigration debate, recent evidence from elsewhere in Europe also suggests there may be political shortsightedness in abandoning the centre ground on such a complex issue.
Take Germany, which is in the midst of a polarising campaign ahead of next week’s elections.
Friedrich Merz, who leads the country’s centre-right party and is favoured to be the next chancellor, ventured that a bold move to push through toughened border measures could shore up his party’s immigration creds against the rising Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Late last month, he put his plan to a vote in the Bundestag with the AfD’s support, breaking the German post-war firewall against legitimising the populist right.
Merz’s immigration gamble ultimately failed though, taking with it a marginal hit to his party’s polling position and allowing the AfD to point to his party’s weakness in being unable to deliver what they themselves could do if given power. Whichever government emerges in the coming parliament, it will likely have to contend with an increasingly effective AfD that will capitalise on interparty fragmentation as Germany’s economic woes exacerbate.
In France, president Emmanual Macron knows this story all too well after his own parliamentary election gamble last summer, months after his government passed a hardline immigration bill to brandish its strength against the growing threat of Marine Le Pen’s populist right movement. But far from keeping Le Pen at bay, her Rassemblement National party gained its largest ever share of MPs, giving it new leverage to force repeated concessions on issues like immigration in the country’s perpetually delayed budget.
Macron’s party has looked increasingly enfeebled and unable to satisfy either side.
Does some version of this lie ahead as Britain’s two major parties pursue their own increasingly hardline immigration stances?
Starmer and Badenoch may be in a fight for political survival and there’s no doubt their political headwinds are significant. But no matter how much they may try to dress up their narrative in teal colours, voters can spot a copycat from the original, and appealing so translucently to Reform-sympathetic voters runs the risk of Farage simply taking all credit and leveraging more concessions.
In the case of the government – still early in its parliamentary term – it has the chance to carve out a clearer narrative and dispel the perception that its decisions are driven by fear of the opposition or Reform. Rather than feigning strength on immigration for a short-term polling bump, there’s still a broader information gap that Labour’s communications strategy should fill to define how it will consistently commit to a more holistic economic roadmap in the long term.
Data won’t do it alone – it needs to also tell a compelling story, which is admittedly a tough ask.
But until such a time, instead of improving their respective electoral positions and instilling public confidence, both Labour and Tories appear on an early course to get “nothing for something” as their immigration gamble runs the risk of them being subsumed.