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Luke Tryl is the Executive Director of More in Common UK, where he leads the organization’s work on public opinion.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Luke Tryl discuss where Keir Starmer has gone wrong, the reasons behind the rise of Reform UK, and whether time’s up for the Conservative Party.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Note: This conversation was recorded on June 6, 2025.
Yascha Mounk: You are a very knowledgeable observer of British politics. We had the Conservative Party in power for a very long stretch, and it had clearly run out of energy by the end of its government. Keir Starmer, a moderate leader of the Labour Party, was able to come in with a huge, historic parliamentary majority—and yet, less than a year into his time in office, he has become quite deeply unpopular, and his government seems to be flailing. What is going wrong for the Labour government?
Luke Tryl: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think it’s important to actually look back a little bit when thinking about why Labour is struggling. What you’ve seen in British politics since 2016—when we had the referendum on Brexit, on whether or not to remain in the European Union—is that the British public have been saying repeatedly: we are not happy with the status quo. Things in Britain feel too hard, too expensive. Things aren’t working as well as they should. So in 2016, you have that vote, which is essentially people saying they want change. They’re not happy with the current model—particularly people outside London and the Southeast. Then you have a series of what I call “change elections.”
2016: Brexit is a vote for change.
2017: Theresa May calls a snap election, expecting to win easily. But there’s a surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn, a quite left-wing leader of the Labour Party. May ends up with a minority government. That’s another vote for change.
2019: Boris Johnson sweeps to power with a large majority, winning former Labour seats in the north of England—former mining towns and the like—again on a promise of change. He pledged to focus on areas that felt neglected and left behind. But during that parliament, for many reasons, change didn’t materialize, and the Conservatives became very unpopular.
2024: Yet another vote for change—this time for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which literally ran on the slogan “Change.” It was the central message of their campaign.
What’s happened since, though, is that people don’t think they’ve got the change they voted for. I think that’s the fundamental driver of the discontent with Labour. Now, you might argue: well, he’s been in office for less than a year—isn’t it a bit unrealistic to expect big changes already? But I think they made some early missteps. One of them was framing. They came in and essentially said, look, there are going to be tough choices. We have to balance the books. We need to clean up the mess left by the Conservatives. To which the public responded: we’ve been hearing about tough choices since the 2008 financial crash. We thought we were finally getting off that treadmill. They voted Labour to improve public services and make life a bit easier. So I think that framing didn’t work.
The second thing is they made one particularly bad policy decision: announcing that they were taking away what’s known as the winter fuel allowance. This is a payment that goes to pensioners every winter. It used to go to everyone, and Labour said they’d means-test it so that only the poorest pensioners would receive it. Their argument was: why are we subsidising millionaires? But the problem is, as listeners will know, that left a huge number of people in between—neither millionaires nor the poorest—who would now lose out. The decision was really unpopular, not just with pensioners, but with the public. Worse still, they announced it into a vacuum, before they’d had their first budget or made other policy announcements. I’ve sometimes called that winter fuel decision Labour’s original sin in government, because it came to define their approach from the outset. They now say they’ll U-turn on it and make more pensioners eligible.
The third factor, which is somewhat beyond their control, is just how exhausting the geopolitical situation has been. One of the frustrations for Brits since Brexit has been that politics has felt relentless: Brexit and the fights over it, the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine, partygate—it’s been one long drama. People haven’t seen that stop.
So I think it’s a combination of factors—some within Labour’s control, some not—that has led the public to think, this isn’t what we voted for. Now, as I’m sure we’ll come to, they’re starting to look elsewhere for someone, or some party, to finally deliver that change.
Mounk: I wonder if part of what happened here is that Starmer won the election last year by addressing some of the most salient negatives about his political party. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party had become very unpopular with large segments of the population. It was far to the left of British public opinion, and people didn’t trust Corbyn to be a competent prime minister. Keir Starmer won the leadership race in the Labour Party somewhat surprisingly, since he had been a relatively loyal member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and didn’t initially say that he would change the party’s direction all that much. But then, somewhat surprisingly, he was actually quite ruthless in moving the Labour Party to the political centre, expelling some of the most recalcitrant allies of Jeremy Corbyn from the party—partly for making various antisemitic remarks. All of that did help address the significant political weakness the Labour Party had suffered from in recent years. That was one of the things that had allowed the Conservatives—despite being in some amount of disarray themselves—to stay in power for so long.
But it turns out that addressing your negatives is a good way of becoming a government-in-waiting. It’s not, however, a good way of preparing for government. So when the Conservatives finally ran out of road—after years of internal fights and a series of dysfunctional governments—Starmer looked like a very plausible alternative. He had convinced the British public that he wasn’t extreme, that he was a competent public servant who had held important roles before. People thought, yeah, we can imagine him doing better than the chaos we’ve been seeing over the past few years. But of course, the moment you’re in government, you’re no longer assessed by whether you are a plausible alternative to the current government. You’re assessed on whether or not you have a proactive political vision. That’s something parts of the Tory party had with Brexit. It wasn’t necessarily a coherent vision, and we can debate whether it delivered what it promised, but it certainly was promising change. Jeremy Corbyn offered that in his own way—not a popular vision, but again, clearly a vision of change. Actually, if you go back to the moderate government of New Labour under Tony Blair, they also offered that. It was a clear contrast to the governments of John Major and Margaret Thatcher—especially in the cultural realm. It was built on a substantive cultural and economic vision, even if not a particularly radical one. It wasn’t far left or far right, but it was a coherent philosophy of its own.
Starmer seems to lack that. Perhaps there’s this superficial similarity to the New Labour government: a Labour leader who paid real political costs to move the party to the centre, who looked decisive, and who seemed to set the party up for government. But there’s also an important disanalogy: he lacks the vision for what his government is actually trying to achieve—what it means in cultural or other terms—that New Labour clearly had when it came to power in 1997.
Tryl: I think that’s really fair. If you look at Starmer’s Labour Party, it is essentially being defined by what it’s not. The first definition of what it was not was Jeremy Corbyn. I don’t think you should underestimate the achievement Starmer made in detoxifying the Labour brand. When Starmer took over, Labour had just had a major report published on antisemitism in the party. The party wasn’t trusted on the economy, or on defense. He did take steps to detoxify it on those fronts. He also defined himself against the Boris Johnson era in particular—Boris Johnson having parties in Downing Street during the pandemic, which really turned the public mood. Then you had Liz Truss, who came in with her mini-budget that led to economic turmoil. Starmer was the safe, responsible, ethical pair of hands—defined against all of that.
But you’re entirely right that, coming into government, they ran what was often described as a “Ming vase” strategy. That is: can you get from one end of the room to the other carrying a Ming vase, without doing anything that might upset the balance? In some ways, that boxed them in quite a lot. They ruled out lots of different revenue-raising opportunities, saying they wouldn’t reverse Tory tax cuts. That contributed, I think, to the difficult choices they’re facing now. It also meant—and if you talk to people in and around government, they’ll say this—that there was an expectation of more of a plan when Labour came into office. That hasn’t really been there. They seem to be getting there now, but it’s taken almost a year. As we know, in public opinion terms, that first year is really important in defining a government. When you talk to people—as I do, day in and day out in focus groups—they say something similar. They don’t understand what the point of this government is, if that makes sense. They say things like, I don’t know what they’re trying to do. When we’ve asked people what the Labour Party is for—what it does when it’s at its best—they say three things: it looks after the working class, it improves public services, and it tackles poverty. Yet, a lot of the rhetoric the government has used hasn’t matched that. Nor has the policy prescription. As I say, it’s been a lot about “tough choices” and a lot about technocracy.
Mounk: And again, that is actually an interesting contrast to New Labour, which on the left is often criticized for being neoliberal. You know, there’s that famous line that Margaret Thatcher supposedly said about Tony Blair being her greatest political victory—because he embraced elements of the market economy and continued many of the reforms she had introduced.
But when you look both at the rhetoric of the New Labour government and at a lot of what they actually did, there was a relentless emphasis on investing in education, on cutting waiting times for the National Health Service—which is always a big political issue in Britain—on improving public services, and on cutting child poverty, and so on.
And it’s interesting that even though Starmer has, in certain ways, modeled his government on the moderation of New Labour, there isn’t the same rhetorical emphasis on those priorities. Partly that’s because of Britain’s more dire financial state in 2025 compared to 1997. He doesn’t seem to believe that there’s much financial playroom to actually invest in those things.
Tryl: No, not at all. Exactly as you say, people confuse New Labour’s moderation with a lack of vision. In fact, Tony Blair was a crusading prime minister. If you look at, as you say, public services, but also the focus on child poverty that that government had, the work that they did around things like devolution was massive in changing how the country is governed.
Mounk: Devolution—to a non-British audience—was giving a lot of power to national parliaments in Scotland and Wales.
Tryl: Exactly—establishing the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and reforming the House of Lords, which is our second chamber. It’s kind of extraordinary that we still have a few hereditary peers (that is, people who inherited their seat) in the House of Lords. Blair took out most of the hereditary peers which was a big constitutional reform. He did big public service reform too, some of it in areas like education that the Tories actually carried forward: giving schools more freedom, having more knowledge-rich, robust curricula—that sort of thing.
And yet, you don’t get that same sense of mission from this government. I think—and you’re right—the financial circumstances are tighter than they were. There are lots of problems and lots of fires that need extinguishing. But I do think part of it comes back to Starmer personally. Starmer is a very senior lawyer. He was Director of Public Prosecutions. He’s someone who believes you do what the evidence says, and you work off the back of that. You prosecute your case from the facts, rather than starting with a guaranteed endpoint. There are some people who say that Keir Starmer was never meant to be prime minister. He was meant to stabilize the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn, and the Tories would get one more term because they had such a big majority and Labour was so far behind. So in some ways, because of the Tories’ messes—the mini-budget, Partygate, all of that—he’s sort of an accidental prime minister. I think it’s taken him a while to warm up to the job as well.
I’d add one more thing. As we know, in politics people often fight the last war. I think the Labour Party has been very scarred by the experience of the 2015 general election, when Ed Miliband lost to David Cameron. Their analysis has always been that the Tories came in in 2010 and set the terms of debate. They talked about the mess Labour had left behind. They were making difficult decisions in the national interest. You’ve seen Labour try to replay that rhetoric. The difference is, 15 years on, people are tired of it. Again, the thing I’ll often hear is: why do they keep talking about the Tories? We got rid of them for a reason. We want to know what you’re going to do instead.
Mounk: In the 1980s, there was a very left-wing and very detailed manifesto that the Labour Party wrote while in opposition. That was famously called the longest suicide note in British history. Then, I believe, in the election in which Ed Miliband was the leader of the Labour Party, in the last days of the campaign, he somehow engraved ten promises on some weird stone—and somebody called it the largest tombstone in British history or something like that, which is always the the most memorable part of that campaign to me.
Britain has a majoritarian political system, which is to say that elections to the House of Commons work broadly in the same way as elections to the House of Representatives in the United States. You can have multiple candidates run in a particular constituency, but the one who’s elected is the one who gets a simple majority. It doesn’t have to be a majority of all votes—it can be a plurality. This generally encourages the formation of a two-party system. It generally makes it hard for lots of small parties to arise, because voters fear they’re wasting their vote if they vote for those candidates. So you would expect, in Britain, that if the Labour Party is floundering and the prime minister is unpopular, those votes would go back to the other major political party—which, in this case, is the Conservatives, the Tory party, who have a young, reasonably charismatic, quite interesting leader: Kemi Badenoch. She was born in Britain, then raised mostly in Nigeria, came back to Britain at the age of 16, and is outspokenly conservative on many cultural issues—while also embodying a more modern Britain in key ways, including simply the fact of her ethnicity and her origin.
Yet, that is not what seems to be happening. Instead, what we’re seeing is a kind of three-way dead heat in the polls between Labour, the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch, and finally, the Reform Party led by Nigel Farage. Tell us a little bit about Nigel Farage, about the Reform Party, and about why it is that he seems to be the big winner of this political moment.
Tryl: Nigel Farage is not a new figure in the UK political scene. I think that there’s actually an argument to be made that he is perhaps the most influential person in British politics in the last quarter of a century. He was previously the leader of a party called the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
Mounk: Its goal was to win independence for Britain from the European Union, which—for better or worse—it did.
Tryl: Their rise spooked David Cameron into calling the referendum in order to keep the Conservative coalition together. In 2016, against the odds, they won the referendum to take Britain out of the European Union. In 2019, Farage came back onto the political scene with the Brexit Party, which was basically formed to campaign against Theresa May’s soft Brexit deal—he thought it was keeping too many ties with the European Union. That leads to the defenestration of Theresa May and Boris Johnson coming in, and Farage agrees to stand down Brexit Party candidates in some seats. Then, during the last parliament, there was growing frustration on the right of politics that the Tories weren’t doing what they were elected to do—particularly on immigration. A big part of the Brexit campaign wasn’t really about Europe; it was about lowering levels of immigration. Under Boris Johnson, net migration rose to almost a million a year. That’s net, not total—so a very significant level of migration.
Nigel Farage is now part of this new party called Reform UK. It’s interesting—until the very last minute, literally until about this time last year, Farage wouldn’t commit to whether he was actually going to run for election for Reform UK. Then, sensing Conservative weakness, he decides during the campaign to get in, takes over as leader, and the party wins five seats in Parliament. That’s not many—there are 650 seats in the UK Parliament—but they get 15% of the vote. That’s a really significant vote share for a third party, almost exclusively at the expense of the Conservatives. The reason the Conservatives had their worst result in history is because of Reform UK taking their votes. They’re losing votes on the right to Reform UK, and on the left to Labour and the Liberal Democrats as well.
What’s happened since the election? Well, this is the really interesting thing. Normally, you’d expect the new government to get a bit of a honeymoon—that the Conservative opposition would go away, lick their wounds, figure out who they are and who their new demographic is. That’s the usual pattern. Instead, the political cycle has gone into overdrive. As we’ve talked about, Labour has become unpopular very quickly. That hasn’t given the Conservatives a chance to recover. Reform UK, as the new party—untainted by government—has been the big beneficiary. They’ve gone up in our polling from 15% in the general election to around 28–29%, and are now actually leading in the polls—not just with us, but with other pollsters as well. In the local elections, which were last month, they had huge success. They won some councils outright—this is at the level of government below Westminster. They took control of them. They had outright wins in elected mayoralties as well. A really significant performance.
Mounk: Perhaps one important thing to note here is that there’s no real equivalent of states and governors in the United Kingdom unless you count Wales and Scotland. When you hear that a party has taken control of a council, it might sound to an American like, okay, so they took control of some city councils. But councils are actually very powerful political organizations. Being the leader of a local council is somewhere between being the mayor of a geographic area and being something like the governor of a geographic area.
Tryl: Exactly that. On some of these councils, they won 50 seats from nowhere, taking almost all the seats on the council. It was a truly unprecedented result in British politics, and the first time in our history that neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party topped the popular vote in a domestic election. That sometimes happens in European elections—UKIP or the Brexit Party have done very well—but this was the first time it’s happened in a domestic contest. So it’s a really seismic moment in politics. There were some of us who thought, how real is this Reform wave? Are people actually going to vote for them? It turns out that it is very real, at least for the moment.
To describe Reform UK, I’d say they are basically a party of the populist right. But I’d distinguish them from more radical right parties in Europe. They are not the UK equivalent of the AfD. Nigel Farage is still broadly, fundamentally committed to democratic norms. I’d say, if you look at Reform’s supporter base, about a fifth say they’re ashamed that Britain is a multi-ethnic democracy—but four-fifths don’t think that. They’re more moderate than that. They’re very culturally conservative, and immigration is the big driver of support for Reform UK. If you ask people, why are you voting for Reform UK?, around seven in ten say, because of immigration. That’s way higher than any other issue. The second highest reason is, I’m just disillusioned with the two main parties. Beyond that, the rest doesn’t really show up. So Reform is largely motivated by immigration. In the last election, they took a lot of their vote from former Conservatives who’d voted for Boris Johnson.
What’s interesting is that now, if you look at Reform UK, their voter profile is changing. That jump from a 15% party to a 28–30% party means their newer voters are coming from elsewhere—including Labour. They’re now taking around 12% of Labour’s vote from the last election. These new voters are more moderate in their outlook on lots of issues. They tend to be more motivated by disillusionment. What I often hear in focus groups is, well, I’m not sure about Reform, but the Conservatives had 14 years and messed it up. I’m not that happy with Labour either, so I may as well roll the dice. That “roll the dice” mentality comes up a lot in focus groups. Reform is now attracting many more women. In fact, the group that has moved to Reform most significantly since the general election is Gen X women—women around retirement age—who are also the most likely to say Britain is on the wrong track. So Reform is building a much broader support base, capitalizing on that sense of disillusionment, that the status quo isn’t working. They’re winning lots of those voters that Boris Johnson won for the first time in 2019 for the Tories—voters in the north of England, in former industrial towns, who feel neglected by the system.
It’s worth saying as well that Nigel Farage personally is a big draw for them. He’s seen as more authentic, more relatable than a lot of politicians. People think he “says it like it is”, and that drives a lot of their support. Reform has now pushed the Conservatives into a clear third place in most of the polling. In fact, there’s a risk that the Conservatives go the same way as the Republicans in France or other center-right parties—that they essentially fade into irrelevance. At the moment, Reform is leading Labour.
Mounk: How likely do you think it really is that, when the next parliamentary elections come—which in Britain always depends somewhat on what the prime minister chooses, though it’s unlikely that Starmer is going to call an election anytime soon, given how poorly he’s doing in the polls—Reform is going to eclipse the Conservative Party and possibly form a new government? The last time we saw one of the two dominant parties eclipsed by a newcomer was, of course, when the duopoly of the Conservative Party—which has been a major force in British politics for a very long time—and the Liberal Party gave way to Labour’s rise in the early 20th century. That shift inspired the title of one famous book: The Strange Death of Liberal England. These are once-in-a-century events. We’ve been in other political moments where it felt as though this kind of change might be around the corner. But usually—like third-party bids in the United States—that turns out not to happen. So, at this point, let’s put it this way: what percentage chance would you give the Reform ending up as either the largest or the second-largest parliamentary party after the next elections?
Tryl: Well, I’m not going to be drawn on percentages. What I would say is that the volatility of the electorate at the moment means that if we have this chat again in 2029—the latest possible date for a general election—and Nigel Farage were prime minister, I would not be surprised. If we had this conversation and he had beaten the Conservatives quite considerably, I would not be surprised. Equally, if Reform faded away—a bit like the SDP did in the 1980s—I wouldn’t be surprised either. Just to be clear, not the SPD in Germany. The Social Democratic Party in Britain was polling at 50% at one point and then ended up winning only around 30 seats in the 1983 general election. So I genuinely think anything could happen again.
The one thing I would say, though, is that I think the Conservatives are in real trouble. If you look at their age profile now, the only group they’re winning with is the over-75s. They’re struggling because they have a lack of purpose. If Nigel Farage has not only proven that Reform UK can hold hard-line stances on immigration, crime, and other cultural issues—but also proven in local elections that he can win—then that breaks the last mental block for many Conservative voters. We know one of the things that had held Conservative voters back from switching to Reform was the sense that it would be a wasted vote. In fact, someone said to me in a focus group: look, I’d like to vote for Reform, but it’s a bit like cars in this country. We have Ford and we have Volkswagen. Why would I go for something else, a third party? We have Labour and the Conservatives. But by proving he can disrupt that duopoly, Farage sets himself up really well.
Now, is there an opportunity for the Conservatives? Perhaps. But I think one of the mistakes people make is assuming that Reform voters are simply more extreme Conservatives. That’s not quite true. On cultural issues, Conservatives and Reform voters are very similar. On immigration, gender identity debates and criminal justice, they’re basically aligned. But on economic issues, Reform voters are actually much more left-leaning. They’re far more supportive of nationalisation, state intervention in the economy, and redistribution.
Mounk: One way of understanding this, perhaps, is as a tension between a culturally right-leaning milieu that is, in economic terms, actually quite distinct from each other. I think you see that in the United States with the Republican Party. So in a sense, you can think of a lot of the people who vote for the Conservative Party as the old-style Republicans who have stuck with the Republican Party rather than moving to the Democrats. That is, the idea of a country club Republican. In the English case, this would be a voter who probably lives in the Home Counties or some relatively affluent part of the country, who probably has a detached home that they value very greatly, who has gone to university or perhaps has a very good job as a skilled labourer, and who has a real sense of being a member of the middle—and probably the upper middle—class. Someone who would be considered posh, perhaps, who’s likely to send their children to private schools, and so on.
And then you have this rising right-wing electorate—everywhere in the Western world—which is the working class that used to vote for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, for Labour in Britain, for the Democrats in the United States. It was a straightforwardly proletarian, working-class electorate, but one that has now come to feel so culturally alienated from the ruling parties of the political left that they’ve moved to the right. But they often do want policies that benefit them, the working people. They don’t want tax cuts for the richest people in the country. They don’t want policies that mostly help big corporations. They want to see some benefit for themselves. In America, since these two electorates are still united in the same two political parties, the compromise seems to be that Trump emphasizes economic policies that appeal to those working-class voters, but—as in his pending budget bill—still basically rules in favour of those more affluent voters. But in Britain, those two groups have started to come apart. I think that’s why you see Reform voters moving further to the left on economic issues. Is that broadly right, Luke?
Tryl: That’s entirely right. In 2019, Boris Johnson actually managed to bring together the traditional Conservatives with the more left-leaning-on-the-economy, socially conservative former Labour voters. We call them Red Wall voters, because of the types of seats they won in the North of England that were traditionally Labour. That coalition has now splintered, and Reform is picking up that socially conservative but economically left-leaning vote—and Farage is leaning into that. Traditionally, his parties have been more libertarian in outlook. UKIP—the UK Independence Party—was all about cutting government spending, lowering taxes, reducing welfare. Reform is not that. Just last week Farage announced he would extend child benefits to third and fourth children—something even Labour haven’t done yet, although they’re facing pressure to do so. The Conservatives, then, are being left with an economically right, socially right rump. But the challenge for them—and we haven’t talked about this yet—is that not only are they losing socially conservative voters to Reform, the Liberal Democrats, who are our third party, have taken a lot of their fiscally responsible voters. This has been especially evident in places like the South of England—in Oxfordshire, Hampshire and the Home Counties. In the last election, the Liberal Democrats actually won 72 MPs. It was a historic result for them. They basically picked up the kind of Conservatives who used to vote Tory because they broadly wanted lower taxes, a stable economy, and competent governance. And of course, the mini-budget under Liz Truss blew that reputation apart. So the Tories lost those voters too. What you’re left with now is quite a narrow core—having lost voters at both ends. It’s hard to see, at least right now—and again, politics is very volatile—what their USP is. If you’re socially liberal but economically right-leaning, you vote Liberal Democrat. If you want Reform-style social conservatism with more state interventionism, you vote Reform.
The interesting thing I often say is, when I do focus groups with Reform voters and we’re not talking about immigration, they could just as easily be Corbynites in the way they talk about big business, the rigged system, the unfairness of capitalism—they really echo that language. Reform is really owning that space. But of course, that’s causing tensions within their own party. We’ve seen this kind of split before—obviously in the U.S., with the fallout between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, which is something of a microcosm of the fractures in the broader right-wing coalition. We had a smaller example of that in the UK just yesterday, when Reform’s chairman—a guy called Zia Yusuf, who’s an entrepreneur, very much in that tech bro mold, and who had modernized the party a lot—announced he was quitting. He said the party was no longer worth his time investing in. In part, that seems to have been triggered by a row over whether Reform UK should adopt a policy of banning the burqa. So it’s interesting—we’re seeing that internal split within Reform UK play out almost in real time, just like we’re seeing it in the United States. (Note: Zia Yusuf reversed his decision two days later.)
Mounk: You’ve mentioned immigration a number of times. What is the public concern about immigration? When you speak to voters in focus groups, what is the median voter saying? I’m sure there are some voters who are welcoming of any amount of immigration and effectively want very few limits. I’m sure there are others who, as you said earlier, reject the idea of Britain as a multi-ethnic society completely. But that doesn’t seem to me to be where the center of gravity in British public opinion lies. How does the middle-of-the-road, average voter—someone who perhaps has never voted for Reform but is now starting to think about it—describe how immigration has changed the country, and what are they actually concerned about?
Tryl: I think it’s fair to say that the median voter—and actually this includes voters for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and parties more on the left—thinks that overall levels of immigration are too high in the UK at the moment. They reached, as I said, almost a million under Boris Johnson, and have now dropped to about half a million in net migration. But still, people think that’s too high. What people tend to talk about is a mix of pressure on services—difficulty getting doctor’s appointments, housing in particular—and also failures of integration. Britain has not been very good at having an integration policy, right down to things like English language requirements. So that’s one chunk of concern.
But interestingly, for most people, when they’re thinking and talking about immigration, the bigger concern is Channel crossings—that is, illegal immigration; people coming across in small boats or dinghies from France and claiming asylum in the UK. When you ask people, what should the government’s bigger priority be—reducing legal migration or tackling illegal migration?—74% say illegal migration. I think there are lots of reasons for that. One is the sense that we’re not controlling our borders, which obviously echoes debates in the United States. The Channel also plays quite an important symbolic role in the national imagination. It was what we defended during the Second World War; it’s seen as the natural boundary of the country. There’s also a strong sense of fairness. In Britain, we like to queue, and this is seen as a form of queue-jumping. People aren’t opposed to asylum itself. If you look at support for taking in Ukrainians, people from Hong Kong, or interpreters who worked with us in Afghanistan, it’s very high. But the way people are coming is what feels wrong. Successive governments, including this one and the last, have compounded that with what I think was the worst possible policy for social cohesion: housing asylum seekers in hotels while their claims are being processed. Often these were local heritage hotels, in towns—largely in poorer areas—because that was cheaper. And people say in focus groups, I used to go to that hotel once or twice a year for a wedding—now I can’t go at all. It tends to be young men, in town centres, and it has created a lot of resentment.
The government has now committed to ending that policy, but I think that’s why this issue has become so salient. In fact, just this week in our tracker of Britain’s top issues, the number of people selecting immigration or Channel crossings eclipsed the NHS for the first time in levels of concern. So it is definitely a top-tier issue. But as you say, most people in Britain aren’t saying, pull up the drawbridge. Very few people want to build a wall in the English Channel. It’s more that people feel the numbers are too high, we need to focus on skills-based immigration, and we need to make sure our asylum and refugee policy is genuinely helping those in need. When people do come, we should have expectations around integration, following the law—and if you don’t play by the rules, you can’t stay in the UK. I think that’s broadly where the media and public opinion lie.
Mounk: What do you think Reform’s immigration policy would likely be if they did get into power? Clearly, on one side, part of the party’s support base does consist of voters who aren’t comfortable with Britain as a multi-ethnic society. Nigel Farage has tried to draw a political line between himself and that position in a number of ways—including by expelling some people who more openly argue for that kind of view from the party. As you mentioned, Zia Yusuf, who was until very recently the chairman of Reform, is himself from a Syrian background—he’s Muslim, I believe. So there are obviously non-white and non-Christian politicians within the Reform Party. What is Farage’s promise on immigration? Would he be able to keep that promise? What would he actually do if he did win a majority?
Tryl: You’ve hit the nail on the head with the balancing act that Reform faces. A lot of their more online, ideological supporters would like them to embrace a mass deportation policy, as has been advocated by some of the people Farage has since distanced himself from. Farage, instead, has leaned much more into, firstly, ending the use of hotels. But in particular, they have this policy approach of net zero migration, which is the idea that the number of people coming into the country should balance the number of people leaving. That’s been their framing. They’ve also said that they would take Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights. Britain has left the European Union, but we are still a member of the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights. That institution has been blamed for some of the UK’s inability to deport individuals who shouldn’t be in the country or who have committed crimes. So that’s their policy at the moment.
It actually looks like the Conservatives are leaning toward a similar commitment. But it is a very hardline position. Certainly more hardline than any immigration policy the UK has had in recent years. Still, it isn’t quite what Reform’s more—I think it’s fair to say—extreme supporters would like. Farage’s task now, if he wants to be a credible candidate for prime minister, is to pass that credibility test. He’s got to show that, yes, I’m sticking to my principles—unlike other politicians—but at the same time, I’m not going to do something that crashes the economy or puts the UK at risk. When you ask people about specific types of immigration, they’ll say, well no, we don’t want fewer care workers. We don’t want fewer students. We don’t want fewer people coming into skilled roles. So I think that’s the line he’s going to have to walk. When we ask people in that group you just described—those who aren’t currently voting for Reform but might consider it—what the biggest barriers are to voting Reform, three things tend to come up.
Number one is that credibility point. Number two is Farage’s relationship with Donald Trump, who is very unpopular in the UK. And number three is the allegations—and in some cases, proven instances—of racism among some Reform candidates and members. So Farage has to shut that down and show that they’re a proper, mainstream party. He’s taken some steps to do that. For example, Tommy Robinson—an English nationalist who has been convicted of a number of crimes—was explicitly told by Farage that he is not welcome to join Reform UK. That triggered a row with Elon Musk, actually, who has to some degree backed Robinson’s cause. So Farage is putting those guardrails in place.
Mounk: I think Elon Musk briefly called for Tommy Robinson to be the leader of the Reform Party, or something along those lines.
Tryl: He did. But it’s fair to say Nigel Farage is significantly more popular than Elon Musk in the UK. So, that is the line Farage is trying to tread. Then there are other areas—around Ukraine and the economy, for instance—where Reform has tended to be out of line with public opinion. You’re seeing Farage trying to scrape some of those barnacles off the Reform vote.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Luke explore why Britain is so miserable, the reasons behind the country’s decline—and why things are better in France. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
