Reform, Robinson and racism – a dangerous turning point in British society

“You look like you just come off the boat.”
The comment was from an acquaintance with whom I had just shared a photo of myself aged around 20.
It was meant as a bit of pub banter. But in the current climate it felt like a legitimisation of the kind of casual racism I thought had gone out with the 70s.
In another incident my son told me about bumping into an old school friend. As they chatted this young man in his mid-20s was soon ranting about immigrants, literally frothing at the mouth with anger and expressing a newfound zeal for Christianity. The last my son saw of him he was staggering down the street trying to pick a fight with anyone of colour.
These are just two personal anecdotes. But it's not difficult to find many more examples of anti-immigration, anti-asylum, anti-Islamic and racist rhetoric across the UK. On the back of a summer of St George’s flags and London's Unite the Kingdom rally, it’s hard not to feel something sinister is in the air.
Amid all the heightened debate and whipped up emotions, it can be difficult to know what the true facts are about immigration.
You can go down a rabbit hole with the data but in essence, here are some basic facts:
- Last year net immigration to the UK was 431,000. This is the total amount of people classed as 'long-term' arrivals staying more than a year minus those leaving
- Net immigration last year was higher than the average for the 2000s, when it was 223,000, and the 2010s, when it was 260,000. But it’s a substantial drop from a high of 906,000 in 2023
- Nearly half of arrivals are students (47 per cent) and 20 per cent are on work visas
- In the year ending June 2025 there were 49,300 unauthorised arrivals to the UK, representing just five per cent of the 852,300 total immigration for that period. But it's rising, up from 38,700 the previous year
- Most of unauthorised arrivals – around 88 per cent – arrived in small boats across the English Channel
- Out of a list of 34 democratic, free market economies the UK comes 18th for the size of its foreign-born population (15 per cent)
One could go on analysing where people are coming from, how many seek asylum (109,000 in the year to March), what immigration contributes to the economy and society (the NHS and social care depend on it) versus the cost... But none of that really matters.
What matters is the narrative that has taken hold in the British public that immigration is the biggest problem we face.
A YouGov poll recently reinforced this. People in the UK are more concerned about immigration than someone waiting ten hours in the back of an ambulance for a hospital bed. Or that they are struggling to feed their family, pay their bills, get a good education for their children or buy a house.
Indeed, immigration is blamed for all these things.
How did we get to such a situation? You could trace it back to a clear morning in New York on 11 September 2001. When those two planes slammed into the twin towers it arguably marked the beginning of the end of what in retrospect seems like a golden period of multiculturalism in the UK.
People with brown skin suddenly found themselves under suspicion. A few years later, the 2005 7/7 suicide bombings in London saw the roots of Islamophobia grow with, aided by media storries, such as Britain's inability to extradite extremist Islamic hate preacher Abu Hamza.
Coinciding with this was the rise of the charismatic populist politician Nigel Farage whose anti-Europe stance and border control message increasingly resonated in a world of international terrorism and mass migration. Brexit was the culmination of this.
But Brexit wasn’t just a vote against immigration; it was also an expression of frustration by a large section of the population that felt forgotten and “left behind”.
Battered by years of austerity following the financial crash of 2008, losers in globalisation, their trust in mainstream politicians was already waning. The MPs' expenses scandal of 2009 didn't help, exposing politicians for claiming expenses for anything from duck houses to garlic peeling sets and bath plugs.
Add to this zero-hour contracts, cuts to public services, the cost of living crisis, rising energy prices and growing poverty and inequality and you have the seeds for discontent.
There is also another important ingredient that should not be underestimated – the rise of social media. Platforms like X, Instagram and TikTok have pushed people into echo chambers through algorthms thriving on angry discourse, selecting bias-confirming content to keep people hooked and scrolling.
When people feel scared and insecure conditions are ripe for finding scapegoats. And in the UK, the likes of Farage and Robinson have been good at exploiting social media to spread their simplistic, quick-fix message that it's all the fault of immigrants.
Islamophobia has now become the acceptable face of racism, with the far right painting Muslim men in particular as criminals, rapists and child abusers who are a threat to the British way of life.
Depressingly, this week has seen racism, Islamophobia, as well as misogyny, exposed in the Metropolitan Police again. Such is the climate of fear that last month Lib Dem MP Munira Wilson, who was raised as a Muslim but now a convert to Christianity, said: “As a brown person brought up in London, for the first time in my 47 years on this earth I felt should I be concerned to go out and about.”
The Jewish community have also experienced rising hate crime. As I write, details are still unfolding about a horrific terrorist attack that left three dead, including the attacker, outside a Jewish synagogue in Manchester on the holy day of Yom Kippur.
The politics of fear have now brought us to a place where the prospect of Nigel Farage as the next Prime Minister is not only a reality but increasingly looks inevitable. And meanwhile, people of colour and other religions, even those born and bred in the UK, continue to feel unsafe and othered.
Yet there is hope. Up until recently, the two biggest political parties in the UK have largely aped Reform's anti-immigration rhetoric. 'Stop the boats', Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech and ID cards have all looked like riding on Farage's coattails.
But perhaps week, for the first time, we have seen the tide turn, with the Prime Minister at last delivering what has been so missing – an alternative, inclusive, tolerant vision of what Britain is and can be to the Labour Party Conference.
It could be that despite all the noisy flag-waving and rallying, the far right's xenophobia and racism is shared only by a minority of the British public. That there voice has been disproportionately amplified. That beneath this lies the sleeping majority of decent, fair-minded people who have no truck with the politics of hate and grivience.
If so, now is the time for them to wake up and speak out. Because if they don’t, racism, Robinson and Reform will triumph.
Read BASW's statement on the rise of anti-migrant discourse.