A thuggish consensus at the top of British politics says that immigrants are the cause of our national ill. For Keir Starmer, the Tories were too “liberal” on migration, turning the UK into an “island of foreigners”. Suella Braverman, former secretary of the interior, described immigration as an “invasion”. of Telegraph warns of a “civil war”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has implemented a draconian migration review. Not enough for Reform, which calls for mass deportations and ice-style raids. Too liberal for Tommy Robinson and his confederates, who want outright “emigration” – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. As racists escalate and riot, politicians and pundits simplify “legitimate concerns.” Amid the deviation and governing incoherence, the extreme right gains more.
How did this happen? It is, says Daniel Trilling in this short and 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 circles. There is a real danger that the Reformation could ride the tide of racist resentment of power and start dismantling our rights and colonizing institutions with its cubs – not exactly fascism, but something with its own grammar: humiliation, victimization and a rallying call to “clean up your community”.
Few are better placed than Trilling to make that case. As a journalist, he has reported on migration and racist backlash for nearly two decades. Trilling tells the tale through a dark cast of characters who have brought us to this impasse. There are far-right “fanatics” and their “ridiculous” detractors who flog their ideas from “well-paid seats within the mainstream media”; Conservative “opportunists” who try and fail to harness the energies of right-wing radicalization for a pro-business agenda; and the “cowards” in the progressive establishment, especially Labor and their elite acolytes, patronizing the “working class” with racism in a futile attempt to maintain control.
What went wrong? Almost everything. The neoliberal reformation of the British state destroyed community life and faith, igniting “toxic”, disaffected passions ripe for far-right mobilisation. Here, Trilling draws on my concept of “disaster nationalism,” which treats early fascism as an expression of widespread discontent, paranoia, and feelings of loss and decline. However, he rightly warns that racism is not an inevitable response. We can also “respond to the lack of community by trying to find more of it.”
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He shows that today’s far right is both a symptom and a response to social breakdown. For example, a spokesman for Reform complains that Britain is becoming “merely an economic zone, a shopping mall with a flag waiting to be exploited”. The solution? Prohibition of Muslims from building mosques in former churches. If neoliberalism reduces freedom to a nihilistic freedom to assemble, the far-right’s alternative is ethnic revenge.
The far right thrives on disruption. When the neoliberal solution began to unravel with the credit crunch, Trilling shows, a cascade of institutional pathologies ensued: austerity that wrecked the economy, elite scandals implicating the press, police and politicians, the rupture of Brexit, the panicked efforts to brand Jeremy Corbyn’s administration as a traitor to John the Boris. Truss, the captivity of a failed Tory government from the far right of the party and the loveless slide of Keir Starmer bringing into office a party that attacks the left while imitating the right.
To capitalize on this explosion, Trilling points out, the far right had to change. First, the British National Party (BNP) rebranded, repudiated its fascism and made huge electoral gains. When the BNP disbanded, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (Ukip) emerged from the Tory suburbs and working-class seats in which the BNP had grown, while Tommy Robinson’s English Defense League (EDL) organized casual football teams to march in Muslim areas. The two then turned to more celebrity-based operations. Farage, a notorious control freak, abandoned Ukip’s limited democratic structures for a new corporate entity under his control: the Brexit Party, now rebranded as UK Reform. Robinson turned his national profile into desperation after the EDL imploded amid infighting, styling itself a “citizen journalist”, agitating against Muslims and raising money through crowdfunding. The new extreme right has grown by abandoning the overt symbols of fascism while retaining some of its main features.
Unsurprisingly, much of the growth of the far right “took place during a period when the Conservatives enjoyed almost unlimited power in parliament”. Why? Because by taking a hat in the public sector, David Cameron abandoned the weak social liberalism on which he was elected. He began the race with an ominous promise to cut net migration to “tens of thousands” a year and followed it up with “symbolic strikes on certain types of immigration.” Hence the cruelty and chaos of the “hostile environment” overseen by Theresa May. Hence the attacks on “small boats” during the so-called “Boriswave” of migration after the Covid pandemic. Any attempt to appease racism while avoiding the realities of migration gave the far right a weapon and catalyzed conservative radicalization, setting the stage for Reform.
Why was the progressive wing of the establishment so desperate to resist this? Because it responds to demands for equality with performative gestures while strengthening its grip on power. It neutralizes class by defending workers as “a single, monocultural group that holds reactionary views,” says Trilling. So the BBC, according to a senior journalist, weighs its news coverage by asking: “What would Derek from Birmingham think of this?” So Labor leans towards “legitimate concerns” about asylum hotels as they address Trump. It doesn’t work. Those who want what they are selling prefer to get it from Reforma. But then why is the center left consistently right on immigration if it is a losing strategy?
A real strength of this book is how it guides the reader through a chaotic and politically controlled migration system while describing 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 the exploitation of migrants with few rights and no chance of citizenship. As an implication, Reform would objectively prefer the latter.
However, migration is not primarily a matter of growth for them. It was originally an agitating tool. When some Ukippers warned against linking Europe to immigration, Farage reportedly said: “Bloody hell, I’ve spent ten years trying to do that.” Now, it is the sharp end of a plan to “free the British people from the constraints of international human rights agreements, equality laws, perhaps even the welfare state as we know it”.
So what should be done? Strategically, Trilling notes, Reform and the far right beyond is a mess of contradictions. They accept workers, but their financiers are rentiers who earn their living from finance and property, and their heroes are Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph. They want to free 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 they want more control over our private lives: reform MP Danny Kruger condemns a “totally unregulated sex economy”. So they want regulation between the sheets and deregulation on the street. They are nationalists who think Britain should bow to Trump.
For an obstacle, 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 on future election cycles? Broad coalitions can block the far right, as has happened in Poland and Hungary. But they also restore failed centrism. It is simply clear that a stop is not enough: we also need a policy that reverses the deep social damage of neoliberalism.
There is a long rebuilding job ahead of us, and Trilling’s short book, packed with ideas, is the best guide to that task at hand.
Richard Seymour is the author of Disaster Nationalism: The Decline of Liberal Civilization (Verso)
If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable
Daniel Trilling
Chopper, 208pp, £14.99
(Further reading: Nelio Biedermann is no wonder worker)
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This article appears in the 20 May 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Definitely, maybe
