Our research shows: By surrendering to the right, the work is pushing voters to the United Kingdom’s reform Tariq Abu Cheyi and Westwarter Turnboul Dujarti
AThe Liver Party in Liverpool brings together this week for its annual conference, everyone will discuss one word: reform. Nigel Faraj party Playing at the national level About 13 points before the conservatives and 10 points before the Labor Party. Even in Merseyside, who used to have 16 circles in safe labor seats, the party is no longer guaranteed. The government’s strategy has been formed to deal with this so far through a very defective instinct: if the last party in Farage wins its votes by talking about immigration, then the Labor Party must also turn the right.
Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech earlier this year represents a dramatic turning point to the right to migrate. The notorious moment was marked by the publication of a government white paper and promised with clear immigration shirts, and blamed immigrants to ignore public services – ignoring how chronic lack of investment left many of these services. Farage can hardly contain its happiness in the new Labor Party strategy. Starmer congratulated “learning a lot” from UK reform. Tradition is really the greatest form of compliments.
Work is not alone in this. Throughout Europe, the left repeatedly responded to the radical right Ending their speech On immigration. In Germany, the former coalition government, led by the Social Democrat, Olaf Schulz, as a consultant, changed its discourse and policies on migration and asylum as it tried to see Four Deutfand alternative (AFD). In the February 2025 elections, the Social Democratic Party obtained the worst result historically, with only 16.4 % of votes, while AFD was better than ever, by 20.8 % – an increase of more than 10 % compared to the last elections in 2021.
As political scientists, we spent years in investigating what is happening when the “prevailing parties become” difficult “to migrate, and how this affects the support of the radical right. Recently studied What happened to evaluate people to work, and the possibility of a party to vote or reform, shortly after the Starmer gave the speech of the island of strangers. The speech coincided with a useful time with a period of people answering a survey of Study the British electionsSo we collected responses from people who were interviewed immediately before the speech, and those who were interviewed immediately after that. Results: The speech is to make labor and Starmer less Popular, especially among voters in the Labor Party. Immigration has greatly strengthened as an issue in people’s minds. There is no evidence that it helped reduce the support of reform, or persuade the reformist voters that they should vote for work.
Recent research was narrated to persuade the United Kingdom, a non -profit organization, the same story. I found that the Labor Party Correspondence about deportation It strengthened the importance of the case while it is possible Promotion of reform. This is barely unique to work. We studied More than 70 different elections This happened in 12 Western European countries for several decades, And I found that when the prevailing parties take anti -immigration situations, they are Lead to more Support For the root right, not less. Our It was also found When social democratic parties propose to reduce migration numbers strongly, this leads to less support for social democratic parties in the ballot box. When the progressive parties imitate the right, they weaken their electoral horizons.
The image that arises from this research is clear: the transition to migration does not help the work. It alienates the progress of the progressive Labor Party and fails to beat the reformist voters. When the Labor Party defines the same as a happy party to imitate those who build a scapegoat, voters who think freely feel betrayal. Many decide that they can no longer vote for the party. Even in the first past, these voters will move to another party such as vegetables, or staying at home on election day.
At the same time, anti -immigration voters see the axis of the Labor Party as an unreliable tradition. Many of them do not even record the right -wing shift in favor of the Labor Party, because the work does not fall into the list of parties that may win their voices. For them, if immigration is the specific issue, reform or conservatives will always be the most credible option, regardless of what the Labor Party does.
In the short term, the introduction of the Labor Party as a difficult party to immigration is a vote losing strategy. In the long run, it may have an opposite effect to enhance the success of the Labor Party, which it seeks to overcome. When the root right words come from the mouths of labor, the epidemiological and non -liberal values associated with these words become increasingly normalized, which changes the limits of what is acceptable politically.
The root right copies is a subjective defeat in the electoral point of view. Social democratic parties trying to lose their supporters without obtaining new parties, and helping legitimacy to their opponents in this process. It is time to engage in some self -thinking about the type of party that wants to be. At the present time, it works as if to advance a progressive agenda and its presence in the government is mutually exclusive. This is far from the case. It cannot overcome the radical right by becoming a pale tradition of it.
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Tariq Abu Cheyadi, Professor of European Policy at Novield College, Oxford University. Stewart Turnbull Dujarti, associate professor of the quantum political science at Southampton University.