A thuggish consensus at the top of British politics says migrants are the cause of our national malaise. For Keir Starmer, the Tories were too “liberal” on migration, turning the UK into an “island of strangers”. Suella Braverman, former home secretary, describes immigration as an “invasion”. The Telegraph warns of a brewing “civil war”. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has implemented a draconian overhaul of migration. Not enough for Reform, which demands mass deportations and Ice-style raids. Too liberal for Tommy Robinson and his confederates, who want full “remigration” – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. While racists escalate and mobs riot, politicians and pundits simper about “legitimate concerns”. Amid governing drift and incoherence, the far right gains the most.
How did that happen? It is, says Daniel Trilling in this short, sharp intervention, an expression of a deep crisis of governance. It is also the thin end of a concerted attack on our freedom, led by the far right with complicity from official quarters. There is a real danger that Reform could ride the wave of racist resentment to power and start dismantling our rights and colonising institutions with its stooges – not exactly fascism, but something with its grammar: humiliation, victimhood and a rousing call to “purify your community”.
Few are better placed than Trilling to make this case. As a journalist, he has been reporting on migration and racist backlash for almost two decades. Trilling tells the tale through a shady cast of characters who have brought us to this impasse. There are far-right “fanatics” and their “jester” outriders flogging their ideas from “handsomely paid berths within established media”; Tory “opportunists” trying and failing to co-opt the energies of rightist radicalisation for a pro-business agenda; and “cowards” in the progressive establishment, especially Labour and its elite auxiliaries, patronising the “working class” with sops to racism in a vain effort to keep control.
What went wrong? Almost everything. The neoliberal reformation of the British state shattered community life and trust, inflaming “toxic”, resentful passions ripe for far-right mobilisation. Here, Trilling draws on my concept of “disaster nationalism”, which treats incipient fascism as an expression of pervasive resentment, paranoia and feelings of loss and decline. He rightly caveats, though, that racism is not an inevitable response. We can also “respond to a lack of community by trying to find more of it”.
He shows that today’s far right is both a symptom of and a response to social decay. For example, a Reform spokesperson complains Britain is becoming “just an economic zone, a shopping mall with a flag waiting to be exploited”. The solution? Banning Muslims from setting up mosques in former churches. If neoliberalism reduces liberty to a nihilistic freedom to accumulate, the far right’s alternative is ethnic revenge.
The far right thrives on breakdown. When the neoliberal settlement began to fall apart with the credit crunch, Trilling shows, there followed a cascade of institutional pathologies: austerity trashing the economy, elite scandals implicating the press, police and politicians, the rupture of Brexit, the panicked establishment effort to frame Jeremy Corbyn as a traitor, the implosion of Boris Johnson’s administration, the auto-immolation of Liz Truss, the captivity of a failing Tory government to the party’s far right, and Keir Starmer’s loveless landslide bringing to office a party which lashes out at the left while emulating the right.
To exploit this implosion, Trilling shows, the far right had to change. First, the British National Party (BNP) rebranded, disavowed its fascism and made big electoral gains. When the BNP disintegrated, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (Ukip) marched out of the Tory suburbs and into the working-class redoubts in which the BNP had grown, while Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League (EDL) organised squads of football casuals to march on Muslim areas. Both then pivoted to more celebrity-based operations. Farage, a notorious control freak, abandoned Ukip’s confining democratic structures for a new corporate entity under his control: the Brexit Party, now rebranded as Reform UK. Robinson turned his national profile into grift after the EDL imploded amid infighting, styling himself a “citizen journalist”, agitating against Muslims and raising cash through crowdfunding. The new far right has grown by jettisoning the overt symbols of fascism while preserving some of its key features.
Strangely, most far-right growth “took place during a period when the Conservatives enjoyed almost untrammelled power in parliament”. Why? Because by taking a hatchet to the public sector David Cameron abandoned the wan social liberalism on which he was elected. He began race-baiting with a bad-faith promise to cut net migration to “tens of thousands” a year and followed up with “symbolic crackdowns on certain types of immigration”. Hence the cruelty and chaos of the “hostile environment” overseen by Theresa May. Hence also the lashing out at “small boats” amid the so-called “Boriswave” of migration after the Covid pandemic. Every effort to indulge racism while evading the realities of migration handed the far right a weapon and catalysed Tory radicalisation, preparing the ground for Reform.
Why was the progressive wing of the establishment so hopeless at resisting this? Because it responds to demands for equality with performative gestures while tightening its grip on power. It neutralises class by patronising workers as “a single, monocultural group that holds reactionary views”, says Trilling. Thus, the BBC, according to a senior journalist, weighs up news coverage by asking, “What would Derek from Birmingham think about this?” Thus, Labour leans in to “legitimate concerns” around asylum hotels while genuflecting to Trump. It doesn’t work. Those who want what they’re selling prefer to get it from Reform. But then why does the centre left persistently cleave right on immigration if it’s a losing strategy?
A real strength of this book is how it guides the reader through a chaotic, politically invigilated migration system while outlining what a workable policy might look like. What won’t work is “net zero” migration, which would “knock 3.7 per cent off the UK’s annual income by 2040”. Drawing on the work of Alan Manning, former head of the migration advisory committee, Trilling points to two possibilities. One is the “European social democracy” model, with immigrants enjoying the same rights as the native population and having a path to citizenship. The other, the “Dubai model”, involves exploiting migrants with few rights and no chance of citizenship. By implication, Reform would objectively prefer the latter.
However, migration is not mainly a growth issue for them. It was initially an agitating tool. When some Ukippers warned against linking Europe to immigration, Farage reportedly fumed: “Fucking hell, I’ve spent ten years trying to do that.” Now, it’s the sharp end of a plan to “liberate the British people from the constraints of international human rights agreements, equality laws, perhaps even the welfare state as we know it”.
So what is to be done? Strategically, Trilling notes, Reform and the wider far right is a mess of contradictions. They condescend to workers, but their funders are rentiers who make their wad from finance and property, and their heroes are Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph. They want to liberate us from the state, but massively expand executive power. They want free speech, but not for their enemies. They want tax cuts and deregulation, but at the same time demand more control over our private lives: the Reform MP Danny Kruger decries a “totally unregulated sexual economy”. So, they want regulation between the sheets and deregulation in the streets. They are nationalists who think Britain should kowtow to Trump.
For a stopgap, Trilling argues for tactical voting and broad coalitions. But who is the “tactical” vote in such a volatile situation? Why not strategic voting, with an eye to future electoral cycles? Broad coalitions can block the far right, as has happened in Poland and Hungary. But they also reinstate failed centrism. Trilling is clear that a stopgap isn’t enough: we also need a politics that reverses the deep social damage of neoliberalism.
There is a long job of reconstruction ahead of us, and Trilling’s short book, packed with ideas, is the best roadmap for that task we have.
Richard Seymour is the author of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation (Verso)
If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable
Daniel Trilling
Picador, 208pp, £14.99
[Further reading: Nelio Biedermann is no wunderkind]
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This article appears in the 20 May 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Definitely, maybe
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