In Britain, everyone in politics, civic life, and business spent the summer performatively expressing worry that Nigel Farage, head of the Reform UK party, will become prime minister. By and large, everyone else did not—which is what has the elites so worried in the first place.
How can Farage—the former City of London commodities trader who engineered Brexit nearly a decade ago and is seen by Serious People as the British Trump—be only a few points behind Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labour Party won in a landslide just a year ago? How can Farage have a better favorability rating than both Starmer and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch?
The answer to these questions is obvious to everyone but the people in charge: Starmer has spent the past 13 months screwing up to an almost comically unimaginable degree. He’s a British Joe Biden, without the excuse of cognitive decline or an uncooperative legislature. The resignation of his deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, last Friday, as it emerged that she had failed to pay full taxes on a seaside second-home purchase, won’t fix Starmer’s problems, nor will the ensuing shuffling of his Cabinet members, because the problem is the tone set at the top: almost no tone at all.
British politics is down to Starmer v. Farage because the Tories screwed up so badly themselves in their 14 years in office that voters have purposely forgotten that they exist. David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister who ousted Labour in 2010 after its 13-year rule, arrogantly scheduled the Brexit vote for 2016, thinking he would easily convince people to vote to keep the U.K. in the European Union, thus extinguishing Farage’s signature issue. Like Democrats and many pre-Trump Republicans, Cameron didn’t grasp the fact that voters frustrated by both major parties’ barely distinguishable takes on immigration and the economy saw voting for dramatic change—in this case, Brexit—as their only way to be heard. The 2016 Brexit vote and Cameron’s ensuing resignation ushered in a series of bumbling prime ministers who mishandled everything from Brexit negotiations to Covid-19, culminating in the Labour landslide last July.
What are British voters most upset about? First, migration—particularly the “small boats.” Just as, during the Biden administration, people around the world began to view the U.S. southern border as a slight bureaucratic inconvenience and not a firm sovereign line, migrants from Africa and the Middle East, over the past half-decade, have begun to view the waters separating Britain and France not as a barrier but as, well, a channel for moving deeper into the West. Migrants, mostly young men, clamber out of the boats in full view of tourists at beaches and then immediately apply for asylum, securing U.K.-paid hotel accommodation as they wait months or years for a hearing. More than 180,000 people have come to the U.K. this way since the phenomenon began around 2018.
Starmer, 63, a human rights lawyer, won last year in part because his Tory opponent, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak, had promised and failed to stop the boats; the Labour candidate pledged to do better. But the 50,000 arrivals since Starmer took office represent a record, as every British newspaper and news outlet regularly reminds its readers or viewers. Starmer has been comprehensively ineffectual. His supposed breakthrough on the issue was a deal with France in early July called “one in, one out,” under which Britain will accept a migrant who has qualified for asylum in France in exchange for France taking back a small-boat migrant from Britain. On the very day Starmer announced the agreement, the BBC told readers, “more than 250 migrants took advantage of calm seas to arrive in Dover.”
Starmer’s “one in, one out” agreement makes no sense. It means that small-boat migrants, not the U.K. government, will continue to determine how many asylum claimants Britain accepts annually. If, say, 60,000 migrants arrive on boats next year, Britain would have to exchange them for 60,000 migrants living in France. It does nothing to address the emotionally difficult reality of global migration—something centrist voters and supposed fringe candidates like Farage have grasped before elected officials have. The post-World War II asylum system does not work in a world where tens of millions of people, perhaps even hundreds of millions, have some credible claim for protection against a non-democratic government, war, civil strife, or gangs. Western countries should accept some number of asylum claimants each year, as they always have done, but they—not migrants themselves—must be the ones to decide who and how many. Tolerating a system of self-selection, in which young, healthy males willing to boat to Europe, walk across the continent, and then take another risky boat ride is unfair to the women, children, and older men in refugee camps who might not only have superior claims but also be more easily integrated into British society.
This slapdash asylum system also creates massive public backlash. All summer, British headlines not referring to the small boats were concerned with the asylum hotels and protesters massed outside them. Just as New York City began doing in 2022, when the Biden administration lost control of the U.S. border, the U.K. government has taken on the burden of housing asylum seekers in what were once tourist and business hotels. The U.K. is paying nearly £5 billion annually ($6.7 billion) to house 32,000 claimants.
This warehousing of teens and young men in middle-class residential towns has sparked predictable anxiety and anger. There is never any excuse for violence or threats, whatever the ideology, and Britain has rightly prosecuted lawbreakers. But the government also ignores the concerns of people who aren’t rioting or peacefully protesting but are nevertheless worried about the influx of single young men into their neighborhoods, amid allegations of crimes and harassment against girls and women.
The government actually does worse than ignore these concerns—it actively denigrates and dismisses them. In August, the district council of Epping Forest, a conservative area about an hour outside London, won a court case against the national government over a flagship migrant hotel, the Bell, arguing that using the hotel as a long-term asylum shelter and not a real hotel for paying customers violated planning and zoning laws. The Starmer government could have benefited from this victory, using it to say that, though it would like to continue to house migrants, the ruling would force it to shutter this hotel and others immediately. Instead, the government appealed (and won), explicitly arguing that the global human rights of migrants, enshrined in U.K. law, override local residents’ right to plan their own communities.
Yes, it’s difficult to deter people from arriving in Britain via small boat; if it were easy, Sunak or one of his predecessors would have done it. But difficult is not impossible, as Donald Trump has proven with his re-securing of the U.S. southern border. Starmer may find Trump’s solutions unpalatable, but he should have learned at least this: if you don’t do something that achieves results, voters will elect someone who will. Indeed, in mid-August, Farage gleefully held a press conference at a British airport, complete with a mock-up flight-departure board, pledging to use Trump-style tactics to deport 600,000 irregular migrants over a half-decade.
British voters’ second major concern is the economy: jobs, taxes, and spending. Here, Starmer has performed even worse than he has on migrants. As with the small boats, Starmer inherited a problem, or rather, several: just before last year’s elections, the U.K. hadn’t fully recovered private-sector jobs lost during the Covid lockdown era, with exactly zero job growth relative to 2019. This stagnation mirrored the sluggish economic recovery after the 2008 financial crisis. (In 2024, the U.S. had 5.5 percent more jobs than it had in 2019.)
Moreover, net debt, as a percentage of GDP, had tripled to nearly 100 percent of GDP since the turn of the millennium, and spending, at 45 percent of GDP, was at “its highest sustained level since the mid-1970s,” the independent Office of Budget Responsibility reported last year.
But Britain didn’t face an immediate fiscal catastrophe. The deficit was just below 5 percent of GDP during the election year—not optimal, but hardly unmanageable for the moment. So Starmer’s party said during the campaign that it would not raise any of Britain’s three major taxes: VAT, income, or National Insurance (similar to Social Security), and he did not run on a pledge to make draconian spending cuts.
With no inherited acute crisis, though, the Starmer government bizarrely set out to create one. Last year, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the minister in charge of public finances, accused the previous government of having “covered up” a £22 billion “black hole” in the £1.3 trillion annual budget. This tack might have had a constructive purpose besides further embarrassing the Tories, if, say, Starmer and Reeves had been secretly concocting a long-term plan to cut spending. Instead, the pair raised public-sector salaries without demanding productivity improvements.
Further, the government claimed that this hidden deficit necessitated not just emergency spending cuts—including to elderly residents’ winter-fuel subsidies—but also required a spring tax hike on National Insurance, increasing the employers’ contribution of 13.8 percent of workers’ pay to 15 percent. The government also boosted a tax to buy a second home, applied taxes to inherited pensions, and restricted long-term foreign residents’ ability to shelter some of their worldwide income from taxes.
One of these ideas was politically dumb; the other was economically catastrophic. True, subsidizing middle-class and even wealthier people’s winter-fuel payments just because they’re old doesn’t make economic sense, but the cut would have saved a mere £1.3 billion annually. And it was politically maladroit, as it affected people who reliably vote. If Starmer had been willing to withstand the political consequences of this cut to show that he was taking a stand against any universal benefit for the elderly, that at least would have indicated some sort of strategy. But he quickly backtracked, reversing part of the cut, demonstrating only incoherence.
The government didn’t retreat, however, on its National Insurance tax hike, which has been devasting to the retail and hospitality sectors, still suffering disproportionately from the aftereffects of Covid-19 lockdowns and higher costs overall. The hospitality industry has lost 89,000 jobs in the past year.
The National Insurance tax hike didn’t even solve the purported fiscal crisis, as Reeves promised it would. As Britain’s borrowing costs rise, the newspapers have floated idea after idea, purportedly under consideration by the Treasury, for new tax hikes, including a new tax on banks and a national property tax on homes worth more than £500,000. Starmer or Reeves could have put a stop to the aura of economic and budget chaos by making a statement that the government will not raise taxes this year, period, and release a firm plan for long-term, gradual spending cuts. Instead, they have remained quiet.
Finally, voters who don’t follow the details of migration or budget policy had something far juicier to pore over as they returned from their summer trips: a scandal. Starmer’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner—having spent much of her tenure in office lecturing about the need for Britain to build more homes—recently purchased an £800,000 seaside second home (or third home, if one counts the government-subsidized London flat that comes with her office). The Daily Mail published a photo of her vaping in an inflatable boat nearby.
Worse, the papers reported that Rayner had categorized this purchase to tax authorities as her primary home to avoid the higher tax on second homes that her government had just enacted. Rayner sympathizers justified this accounting maneuver by saying that she had just secretly signed over her first home to her ex-husband; it turned out that she had purchased the new home through a trust arrangement, and, despite being Britain’s second-highest ranking official, had failed to seek tax advice, as one counselor warned her to do.
The issue wasn’t just the tax-avoidance hypocrisy—it was that the show of carefree opulence (vaping in a rubber boat is considered opulent in Britain) was contrary to Rayner’s carefully cultivated public image as a once-struggling young single mother and representative of the struggling working class. The Daily Mail took to calling her “three pads Rayner” and accused her of building a “property empire.” Rayner quit her office, but she will remain in Parliament and now represents a threat from Starmer’s left, likely forcing further convolutions in policy proposals.
Starmer’s performance after just one year in office has been so inept that the prime minister has accomplished what once seemed impossible: resurrecting Farage as a serious political force. If Farage wins a general election—in 2029 as scheduled, or perhaps earlier, if Parliament’s confidence in Starmer fails—then the elites will set about gasping at every outrageous thing he says or does, just as they do about Trump. But it was and remains their outrageously incompetent governance that continues to push voters toward someone—anyone—else.
Photos: Jack Taylor – WPA Pool/Getty Images (left) / OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images (right)
