Despite the unaffordable housing, poor healthcare and aging infrastructure in Britain, Nigel Farage has convinced many Britons that migration is the biggest problem. His party is leading in the polls.
You might think Nigel Farage has already become Prime Minister. While the Labour cabinet and parliament were idle during the summer recess, the leader of "Reform UK" has held weekly press conferences to present his migration policy. There he spoke of an "invasion of young men" who were entering the country illegally and were a "scourge of modern Britain".
With these populist statements, Farage is clearly touching a sensitive nerve among his compatriots, commented the German public broadcaster ARD. A survey by the YouGov Institute for Public Opinion Research shows that despite unaffordable housing, poor healthcare and outdated infrastructure - from water pipes to railway lines - many Britons clearly believe that no other issue is as important to the country as migration and asylum policy.
False proportions
The surveys also show that voters overestimate the numbers: 47% of respondents believe that there are more illegal migrants (people with overstayed visas or remaining in the country after a rejected asylum application) in the UK than legal residents. According to various official estimates, the number of illegal migrants is between 120,000 and 1.3 million. At the same time, there are about 11 million migrants living in the UK with official permission. The number of asylum applications is also lower than in neighboring European countries.
"Reform UK", however, ignores these facts. Farage's party colleague, Zia Youssef, even compared immigration to a military operation. "More people have arrived illegally on British shores in the last eight years than stormed the Normandy coast during World War II," Youssef said, quoted by ARD.
The media shapes opinion
Tim Bale, a political scientist at Queen Mary University of London, blames the British media for distorting the picture: "The electronic media are guided by the print media. But the newspapers in this country are overwhelmingly right-wing and anti-immigrant to a degree that is perhaps hard to imagine in other countries."
This means that the dark side of flight and migration - a favorite theme of "Reform UK" - is being played out across all channels. No other politician has dominated the headlines this summer as much as Nigel Farage - for example, with calls for protests outside refugee centres or for a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan to repatriate refugees.
And this campaign is paying off: with nearly 30 percent support, the right-wing populists are now leading the polls, about 10 percentage points ahead of Labour. For Nigel Farage and his party, the summer could not have been better, the ARD further comments.
Labour and Tories are losing votes
However, the party also owes its rise to the decline of the two main traditional parties - Labour and the Tories. "The historically unprecedented combination of a new, very unpopular government and an equally unpopular opposition, which has recently lost the election, has given "Reform UK" a great opportunity to become the most important voice of discontent," says political scientist Robert Ford of the University of Manchester.
According to him, only the complicated British electoral system has prevented this party from becoming the third force in parliament after the last election. It would have had enough votes for this, since dissatisfaction with the 14-year conservative policy of austerity and scandals was huge, the observer adds. 42% of those who voted for "Reform UK" were former Conservative voters, and 33% had never voted in an election until recently. Put another way: the populists have already replaced the oldest and long-standing most successful party in the UK as the official opposition.
In local elections in May, "Reform UK" won 677 seats on regional councils and assemblies, including in traditional Labour strongholds. And if Labour wants to catch up, it will have to try to attract centre-left voters. A survey showed they lost the most votes to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, as well as to wavering voters. Instead, however, the social democrats are either wandering off or trying to appeal to right-wing voters with quick fixes related to law and order, such as stopping family reunification - although statistically these voters mostly switch to "Reform the UK".
Simple recipes
The right-wing populists' solutions to illegal migration also sound temptingly simple: mass deportations, five flights a day to extradite migrants, huge detention centres for foreigners subject to deportation, linking all registers to track people living illegally in the UK.
This may be contrary to the principles of the rule of law, but the populists have an answer to this question too: the UK should simply withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention. Experts agree that this is possible, but it is extremely complex and takes a long time, writes ARD.
Unstable situation
To turn from a simple protest party into a successful ruling party, "Reform UK" will need to develop a credible program, says Robert Ford. "The one from last year was completely implausible, the numbers did not correspond to reality, and the ideas were largely unworkable. Even Farage distances himself from this program, admitting that it is more of a set of wishes.
A lot can happen in the coming years - so unstable is British politics at the moment. It is possible that the Conservatives will find a way out of their current hopeless situation - for example, with a suitable new party leader. It is not surprising if "Reform UK" also fails because of its main donors from abroad, which some media outlets claim are linked to tax havens. And the Left may strategically support Labor.
So anything is still possible, concludes ARD.