Are we living through the beginning of an English revolution? Rarely have we seen so many people so angry, in so many flag-decorated streets around the country. Rarely have we seen ministers scramble to change policy so quickly in response. Very rarely has an incoming government become so unpopular so quickly. Something, surely, has to give.
Let’s begin with a thought about proportion. The much-photographed crowds waving St George’s and Union flags are statistically tiny compared to the wider electorate who are quietly watching. And yet a single misstep, a death, a fire, could change the mood. The same “small crowd” point is true of the periodic public displays by Islamists. Though they are spectacles, and fuel for social media polemic, they are numerical molehills that tell us little about the reality of modern Britain.
The uprising this summer has been of the anti-migration, “London is dead, Britain is over” variety. Calmly observe the opportunistic political grifters in the middle of all this, monetising honest anxiety to make a buck and inflate their egos – the affable, content-creating hate-merchants. Remember, too, the influence of American tech titans, keen to use anti-foreigner feeling to deflect resentment away from… oh, I don’t know, global tech companies making massive profits that are largely untaxed.
Grifters, deflection, exploitation – these are old stories, not new. Don’t forget that declining to be panicked is an ingrained and useful British tradition. Yes, this government is doing badly. But revolution? Britain in 2025 is still miles away from the powdery imperial facades that collapsed in 1789 or 1917.
That is all the reassurance I can offer. Because if it fails to resolve the migration crisis, Labour will lose the next election to Reform, or some Reform-Tory combination. And for liberal Britain, that might feel like a revolution.
Migration – an issue in British politics since the 1950s, even before Enoch Powell – has this summer become an unprecedented symbol for mass dissatisfaction with the political class and the direction of the country. The flag-wavers on the streets may not be statistically numerous, but the shrivelling of authority and belief in the Labour state, visible in almost every piece of polling, is ominous.
“Stopping the boats” is not only a hard problem in itself but provokes loud questions about politics generally. Is the state competent? Does it have a grip? Who are we, in this national community? What do we want? What, in the end, is the good life?
To these questions, the right has insistent answers. It has, in my view, a grossly simplistic view of British history, which comes back too often to the roar of a Spitfire Merlin engine, half-remembered stories of Alfred the Great, and village-green nostalgia (to all of which, I am at times susceptible). But, by and large, conservatives know what they want to celebrate and preserve. On the far right, of course, there’s a belief in a Christian white nation, which excludes millions of our fellow citizens.
But on the centre left, on these larger questions, there is an unsettling silence. It has been a long time since George Orwell with his old maids on bicycles, communion and morning mist. When the left contemplates the nation and the good life, it flings back to 1945 and Nye Bevan; perhaps too to the memories, still fresh, of the early confidence of Blairite Britain, before all the wars and austerity. The joie de vivre and optimism of Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland have been mostly forgotten. There is a whiff of rationing nostalgia and damp Nissen huts in the progressive imagination, which the rest of the country loathes.
The Labour left would throw in the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, Sylvia Pankhurst and the CND. And yes, Britain has powerful traditions of protest and reform in its history. But the trouble is they don’t mean much to the Britons of today – and certainly not coming from a government prepared to proscribe Palestine Action.
Instead, on migration, we get bland claims about ancient British traditions of compassion – though there’s not much of that visible just now. We get slogans about smashing the gangs, which remain unsmashed. We hear muttering about a new law (which would be disastrous) on Islamophobia. None of this is good enough. Not remotely. None of it is about the good life or about national direction, or about the subject of the summer. For the simple fact is that migration is changing the country at a scale and velocity we’ve never seen before. A massive, propulsive force, it affects wildlife, housing, water supplies, community relations and the economics of growth.
At the opening of this piece, I mentioned an “English” revolution, which is because England is the part of the UK with by far the greatest population density and has this summer exhibited the most intense reaction to migration. But wherever you are in the UK, this debate is also about the future we want, or don’t want; the nations being built now. It’s about economics but also security, common ties, public services and the good life. So it should be at the centre of a modern Labour narrative.
Instead, there is embarrassed silence. Is this because of the left’s traditional pro-asylum instincts, or even because of a neo-Marxist belief in white privilege, and residual colonial guilt? I don’t think so. “Open borders” socialists are vanishingly uncommon in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and those who feel that way now have a new vehicle in the Corbyn-Sultana breakaway.
Is it electoral cowardice about militant radical Islam? Certainly our soggy, secular, post-Christian public culture finds it very hard to know how to deal with Islamists who are serious about dominating communities and countries. But such radicals are so hostile to Labour politicians already that there seems no need to hold back on their account.
Is it, rather, that a government in thrall to human rights law is squeamish about any language that could hurt minority communities? That’s more like it, although an “island of strangers” Prime Minister doesn’t seem excessively fastidious, however remorseful he might be about those remarks.
Perhaps, instead, it is the recognition that the policy weapons the government has to try to control migration are too weak and that, therefore, it is shrewd to shift political debate on to something – almost anything – else. This is what really worries me, because it won’t work. You can’t keep muttering assurances or blaming the Tories while announcing policies that aren’t big enough to change anything.
More than 25,000 people have arrived in the UK by small boats this year, which suggests a record total for 2025. The huge scale of legal migration, much of it driven by Boris Johnson post-Brexit, is unmistakable in many communities. Yes, the online hate-merchants are exploiting something – but the “something” is real. There are many decent people among the protesters, just as there are inside the migrant hotels.
And then there is the politics. If the government does not confront the issue of migration numbers, the behaviour of some migrants, and the overall demographic pressures on a crowded country, it will leave the field open to those who favour re-migration or, to put it more brutally, expulsion.
Nigel Farage’s “Operation Restoring Justice” plan to round up and deport 600,000 people in the first Reform parliament is an obvious example – although it also points to the dangers of the race towards ever-tougher measures. Farage quickly reverse-ferreted to exclude women and children in the first few years. He is a shrewd enough politician to imagine the headlines about sending women back to Taliban rule, to be killed or tortured.
Weirdly, the Tories’ Kemi Badenoch strode on to the ground Farage had vacated, saying that she would kick out women and children to avoid “loopholes”. In a country where most people, however worried about illegal migration, remain fundamentally fair-minded and decent, that is an extraordinary electoral risk to take. Deliberately sending people who had helped British forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere back to their deaths or torture would be a red line. In the hysteria of the moment, politicians should think about what voters will accept in the silence of the polling booth.
[See also: What is Zack Polanski’s next move?]
This conversation inevitably comes back to numbers. The Common Good Foundation has published a report on demographic changes in Britain, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, led by the moderate Tory peer Robin Hodgson. It argues that the UK population, which has increased by 9.2 million over the past 20 years, can be expected to grow by a further 6.6 million over the next decade, overwhelmingly because of immigration. The UK will become by far the most densely populated major European country, affecting almost every aspect of life. Hodgson says governments “should be expected to monitor and disclose the likely level of population change in the near term” and calls for a new Office for Demographic Change.
How should Labour respond? It’s vital that population density is not an issue owned by the right. Icons of liberal Britain such as David Attenborough have described the impact of population growth as an ecological Ponzi scheme. The Cambridge Marxist economist Bob Rowthorn argues that immigration as a form of population policy – as a counter to the falling birthrate – cannot be sustained. Unless the host country carries on importing ever-larger numbers of new migrants each year, the ageing demographic will revert.
Luke Daniel, of the Common Good Foundation, concludes that current immigration policy means that “we are importing a servant class made up of individuals who take the risk to come over to this country to see an improved life… Only by turning off the tap of an unlimited supply of cheap labour will we be able to redress the betrayal of workers’ dignity by capital.” It’s a crucial point for Labour, a party that should naturally side with working people, not big business.
Labour is struggling to straddle two different kinds of political obligation. There is an obligation to the wretched of the Earth, to a wider world affected by war, climate change and tyranny. There are few British people who, confronted with a drowning child, would not rescue them. A UK that said an absolute “no” to everybody who wanted to come here would not be a familiar country. It would be a colder, harder, narrower one, hard to be proud of.
But there is, for the government, a second obligation, which is to the sustainability and happiness of the people already here. That means having an overview of the number who can be fed, housed and educated sustainably, decade by decade, taking into account the reasonable and unselfish desires of the current population for space, air and security.
These obligations can conflict, and it is pious nonsense to pretend otherwise. How should we begin to think about them together? Modern Britain is not a white country, has never been entirely, and there is no civilised way back to supposed “purity”, even if we wanted it. Younger voters are more liberal about immigration and race than their elders; it is simply sad and reactionary to stand only with the oldest and most scared.
If you read proper history, what jumps out is the speed of change in any period: change in technology, warfare, class relations, disease and, yes, migration. British history is the history of turbulence – so fast, so roiling it drove many of our ancestors half-mad. The Britain that is coming, simply because of the mass migration that has already happened, will feel very different. But Labour has no alternative but to be on the side of change, actively shaping the new world, as it did in 1945 and 1997. A return to some mistily ethnically homogeneous nation, and deportation to achieve this, is the enemy.
Buttressing this, the centre-left story of British history needs to embrace the achievements of previous migratory waves, from the Huguenots to the Jews of the early-20th century. What is happening now is different in terms of scale and speed. But recalling previous positive experiences with skilled migrants, looking to integrate, is a reassurance in unsettling times. We should challenge the purists to imagine a Britain without Burton or Marks & Spencer, without Lucian Freud or Yehudi Menuhin, Georg Solti or Nikolaus Pevsner, and remind them of 90-year-old headlines about Britain becoming a “dump” for refugees fleeing the Nazi regime.
All this sits alongside what you could call the David Olusoga or Sathnam Sanghera version of British history, which foregrounds the struggles and achievements of Asian and black Britons. We are immeasurably richer and more interesting because of immigrant contributions, and that’s a message that can never be undersold or underplayed. It’s fundamental. To repeat: there is, anyway, no going back.
[See also: How Labour learned to love the flag]
But there is a harder side to this. Not all migrants are equal. Ambitious, hard-working, law-abiding people, keen to integrate and speak good English, are valuable to the rest of us. The sexual predators identified among recent migrants don’t represent the whole, but they aren’t wanted here.
What about Muslim Britain? I’m beginning to think that in politics the word “Islam” has been so misused as to be useless. Is there any meaningful political connection between Islamists who want to bully and persecute their way around Europe until other faiths and atheists are vanquished on the spiritual battlefield, and the average, peaceable, community-minded Muslim getting on with her life?
This summer has been marked by the toxic fusion of the terms “asylum seeker” and “Muslim sex offender“, which is not something decent British people will look back on with much pride. There are many Muslim, Hindu and African communities with patriarchal, archaic and nasty attitudes to women. And Britain has, in a spirit of blithe unconcern, imported some of that (to sit beside its home-grown varieties of misogyny). But remember, true as that is, that some of the most powerful and impressive feminist groups in the world hail from Bangladesh; that both Afghanistan and Iran had educated, outspoken female populations before their obscurantist clerics took over; and that the fiercest campaigners against female genital mutilation have been African women.
Let us not fall into simplistic, toxic tropes about foreign cultures. We don’t want predatory men here, but most asylum seekers aren’t predatory men. And as the right throws around phrases such as “medieval attitudes to women”, is there any attitude more medieval than, “They’re coming for our women and children”? That battle cry was probably ringing around early Europe when the first groups of hominids began competing for hunting grounds.
The New Statesman reported late last year that polling consistently showed most British Muslims wish to integrate, support the police and dislike Islamist radicalism. John Lloyd wrote: “On one side are the majority who wish to integrate into a pluralistic British society, who support a Palestinian state, and see a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. On the other side are those who are less likely to observe such a distinction, and who view integration with suspicion, even revulsion.”
If you are repulsed by integration, you shouldn’t be living here. But given that Islam is Britain’s second-largest religion, with almost four million adherents, this is not an argument we can quietly duck out of. Secular politicians have no problem criticising the odd archbishop who says or does something they disagree with; similarly, there must be no compromise with the messages of anti-integration Islamism.
In any centre-left vision of a better Britain, old-fashioned words such as respect and moderation will prove, perhaps unexpectedly, to be close to the heart of the matter. We can’t leave the streets clear for a burn-it-down fight between the angriest white nationalists and the angriest Islamists. This is what the rhetoric of social media, in a sense, seems to want: an all-out fight between caricatures. If you were selling tickets, you’d want it too.
Stopping the division of England into mutually hostile communities is the existential challenge now facing Starmer. This, not traditional “revolution”, is the real threat. I am somewhat pessimistic.
I can imagine a future, a few years ahead, in which the government, perhaps by using the deterrent effect of quick asylum returns and ID cards for all workers, and copying tactics used by the Danes and the Swedes among others, begins to win the battle on migration. Such efforts would inevitably start a conversation about sustainable population levels. Ministers would talk with clarity and honesty about the need to avoid separation between communities; about the need for everyone to be fluent in English, for everyone to contribute. They would be bold enough to call out Islamist bigots and white racists both, reminding voters of our long traditions of tolerance.
The government I’m imagining would reverse past mistakes. Even though much public hostility to lifting the two-child cap is based on the idea that immigrant families have more children and would therefore be getting more from the state than they put back, it would go ahead with abandoning that cap – because, in the end, child destitution matters more. And because no government can be effective without authority, and because the proscription of Palestine Action is making this one look silly, it would abandon that as well. “Don’t look ridiculous” isn’t a bad political motto.
This would be a government talking about the really big changes around us – the huge migratory and the demographic shifts we are all aware of – in a confident and reasonable way. Ministers would be pointing to a vision of the good life that wasn’t racially exclusive, besieged or impossible. They would remind us that for centuries we have faced threats that seemed at the time insurmountable, and yet have come through stronger; and that this troubled decade is therefore both different, and business as usual.
This is all still possible. Pat McFadden’s recent enthusiasm for digital ID cards is a crucial moment: without such a system, no government has a real grip on any of this. In No 10, they concede that the worst strategy would be to try to mimic Farage rhetorically, while failing to stop the boats in practice. But does Starmer really get it? This touches almost every aspect of his premiership. As long as voters focus on what’s spent on migrant hotels, for instance, they won’t accept tax rises more generally.
Very little in politics is inevitable. I’ve mentioned problems ahead for the brutal anti-migrant auction. Keir Starmer may yet find his clearer voice. But a Labour government that does not grasp the migration crisis or talk candidly about population density is doomed. And it would be to blame if, having failed, something far darker and angrier comes slouching towards Westminster.
[See also: How the small boats crisis convulsed Britain]
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This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation