Catherine Dunlop

Farage has a reputation for being against immigrants, but is he?  What does his programme say? what does he say in interviews?  And crucially, what does he propose to do about the factors that drive immigration ?

The UK population has increased by around 8.2 million since the start of the twenty-first century. The UK population was 68m in 2023; it was 59m in 2003, 20 years previously.  

In 2021 the population included 9.5 million citizens not born in UK, of which 3.5 million were EU born. (ONS figures) To which must be added the millions born in this country of immigrant parents.

How did the UK get to these fantastic numbers?  Brexit was supposed to reduce immigration, and the opposite has happened.

The factors that drive these figures are 

1. Foreign wars that destroy countries like Iraq, Libya and Syria and cause the flight of their population.  While Farage has deplored constant foreign wars started by the US followed by the UK,  he also wants to vastly increase the armed forces budget.
2. Low birth rate; the Reform programme seems to have some awareness of this, as the programme includes fiscal advantages for married couples, and increased child benefit for the early years to make it easier for either parent to stay at home with infants.   Would that be enough to reverse the situation?
3. The demoralisation of the local working population after decades of societal catastrophe caused by deindustrialisation.

Let us say a bit more about this last point.

Deindustrialisation has come about in part by political choice and in part due to changes in the rest of the world, mainly the industrialisation of China, and, later, the end of the Soviet Union.  The defeat of the Soviet Union led to the West feeling it did not need to be industrially self-sufficient, since the West had nothing to fear from the rest of the world.  The West then could embark on a more risky form of capitalism, one which concentrated on ‘shareholder value’ and ignored the social aspect of employment.  This development started before the defeat of the Soviet Union and increased vastly afterwards.

This is how deindustrialisation was dreamed up by Blair: old fashioned industry, where it made no sense to compete with the rest of the world, [even if it still made sense in terms of employing people] would be replaced by the modern ‘knowledge economy’ sustained by a huge increase in university places.  The reality turned out to be, that industrial jobs were lost and replaced at one end by low paid services jobs and at the other end by very high paying finance jobs.  The remaining manufacturing was automatised.  The destruction of industry created a societal catastrophe; the prospect of the ‘knowledge economy’ raised expectations and devalued manual work.  A lot of the population did not want to take up service jobs, and high City paid jobs were utterly out of their reach.  Employers sought to replace demoralised workers with immigrants, for whom work was a matter of survival and who came from societies that had given them full training and/or the habit of hard work.  The children of these immigrants, brought up in Britain, do not acquire these habits and training; their parents in many cases are quite determined that their own children will not follow them in the same jobs.  This leads to the necessity for more waves of immigrants.  This is throw-away immigration.  Immigrants are welcome for their skills and/or willingness to work, but nothing is done for the training and morale of their offspring, who join those already living in Britain in that respect.

The striking thing is the huge and growing number of people who are surplus to requirements in Britain; 9 million working age people are not working, of which 6 are long term sick or disabled/incapacitated; and this number can only grow with the development of AI.  Farage said doing things with fewer human beings thanks to AI was the next fight coming with the trade unions.  He thinks doing away with employing human beings is a good thing.  He seems blind to the demoralising effect that results from being surplus to requirements.

The local population, which eventually includes the children of immigrants, is too depressed and demoralised as a result of the societal devastation wrought by deindustrialisation, or too conscious of their rights to decent pay and conditions,  to take on low paid jobs; at the top end, there are not enough opportunities for education and training in medical, scientific and technical education, both as a result of quotas and as a result of shrinking university science and engineering departments, as well as the neglect of further education. 

Employing ready trained workers from abroad reduces and eventually removes the need to have a flourishing education and training system of one’s own.  In parallel, buying cheap imports removes the need for local production, and therefore removes job opportunities.  

What does the Reform party programme say about this? 

 First of all, and crucially, it accepts ‘essential immigration’, ‘mainly around health and care’.  

There are measures in the programme designed to improve training and retention of health personnel:  zero basic income tax for front line NHS and care workers for 3 years; end of cap for doctor training.  Writing off student loan debt for doctors, nurses and medical staff who continue to work in the NHS.

The programme also includes measures to improve training of young people in general.  For example tax relief for employers taking on apprentices.  The question remains that if there is little industry, there will be little need for apprentices.

Reform’s main policies for home grown economic activity are to remove what regulations there are, including workers rights, that impede the freedom of employers.   As well as this carrot there will be a stick:  except in the health and care sector, employers will pay 20% National Insurance for foreign nationals they employ, as opposed to the normal 13.8%.  This NI hike could be circumvented by ‘self-employed’ status.

 The Reform programme says nothing about technical and vocational education.

On the question of loss of morale leading to people staying out of the work force, the answer is to coerce people back to work:  if two offers of work are rejected, benefits will be withdrawn.

Coercion is the Reform answer at the low paid end of the spectrum.  

Finally, the section on the economy stresses Small and Medium Enterprises, for example the exemption of high street based SMEs from Business Rates, and putting a 4% tax on large online delivery multinational businesses.

So, is Reform against immigration?  The obvious point is that they only want to freeze ‘non-essential immigration’.  The other point is that their main plan for raising the morale of the population is to favour employment in Small and Medium Enterprises, coupled with coercion of those on benefits back to work, and nationalist flag waving.  

What about the reputation of Reform?  The programme is careful to use words like ‘local people’, ‘those who have paid into the system’, rather than words referring to ethnic background.  Newly arrived immigrants are dubbed ‘foreign nationals’ to distinguish them from existing immigrants and their children who have British nationality.  Nevertheless, the impression given by Reform, and by the manner in which they are discussed in the media, is of an anti-immigrant party. Farage works very hard at not being racist; when asked, did he worry that only 77% of the UK population is white, Farage said that didn’t worry him.  What worried him was the difference in culture.  As long as people share British culture, they are OK as far as he is concerned.  Are they OK if they are Muslim?  It’s not clear.  Farage and his party would like to be against immigration, but they know it’s impossible, given that employers want immigrants.