While Nigel Farage’s Reform UK rides high in the polls and research shows Britons want major change on migration, the Prime Minister has hit back to call the party toxic and racist.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer spoke to ITV breakfast television programme Lorraine on Tuesday, tacitly dismissing the notion that voters were abandoning his party in droves and flocking to Reform UK because of concerns about mass migration and border control, instead blaming Farage’s faction for creating those worries in the first place.
Asked by show co-host Amir Khan about the rise of Reform, with the lead-in to his question seeing the television doctor state: “we’ve very much got a divided Britain right now, whether that’s with the rise of anti-Muslim hatred, antisemitism, LGTBQ+ hatred… as a brown person, I’ve never felt more unsafe in the country I was born in”, Sir Keir took the opportunity to portray himself as the true patriot.
The Farage approach was, by comparison, “toxic division” which is “tearing our country apart”, the Prime Minister said. This is making people feel “very scared”, he continued, stating: “we have to stand up to that racism, that division. And we have to proudly say that to be British is to be concerned for others, is to be reasonable, is to be tolerant and compassionate, and we’re proud of that.”
Indeed, polling suggests the Prime Minister is correct to observe that the United Kingdom feels increasingly divided, and particularly on immigration questions, although whether Britons are totally without agency and this sentiment simply being caused by Nigel Farage talking about border control is so far unproven. As reported last week, a major academic study of British public attitudes to the condition of the United Kingdom found a majority believe the country is divided.
Even more remarkable was the 86 per cent who said they think there is tension between “immigrants and people born in the UK”, the number having increased by 12 points since 2023. Half of voters said they believe the country is changing too fast, and a dominant plurality said they “would like my country to be the way it used to be”.
The acceleration of UK residents saying the country is changing too fast was driven by white Britons, the research stated, who have gone from basically agreeing with their “ethnic minority” neighbours about the country being fine just a few years ago to a majority saying it is out of control.
This research followed another release days before, which again showed the British public hold astonishingly robust views on border control, even to the right of their American counterparts. A study by the National Centre for Social Research found Britons are more likely to agree with migration-sceptic statements than U.S. Donald Trump voters, such as “We risk losing our national identity if we are too open to people from all over the world”.
A considerable 81 per cent of right-wing Brits agreed, trailed by 65 per cent of Trump voters. 70 per cent of the British right said they agreed that “It is bad for society if white people decline as a share of the population”, and 52 per cent of that same group said “society is weakened by being made up of many different races, ethnicities, and religions”.
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