Britain’s failing state is handing Farage win after win

LONDON — Nigel Farage is on the march. And every lever Britain’s prime minister pulls seems broken.

More than a year after his center-left Labour Party stormed to victory on a promise of change, Keir Starmer is yet to show voters he is truly in command.

With Reform UK’s Farage eclipsing him in the polls, Starmer’s government has now been hit by a series of unforced errors on the issue on which he’s acutely vulnerable on the right: migration.

Small boats carrying asylum-seekers continue to cross the English Channel, with numbers for this year already surpassing the 2024 total. In a farcical twist, one migrant, removed to France with much fanfare under the government’s flagship “one in, one out” deterrent scheme, arrived back on U.K. shores by small boat less than a month after being deported. 

More damaging still, on Friday an asylum-seeker jailed for sexually assaulting a teenager — and whose crimes sparked a wave of protests in the U.K. over the summer — was mistakenly released from prison, prompting a weekend manhunt. He was eventually re-arrested on Sunday morning — but not before torrid headlines and a declaration from Farage that Britain is “broken.”

It’s been “deeply damaging,” a Labour MP in a marginal seat, who had been door-knocking over the weekend, said of the latest events.

It is “playing into the hands of Reform that Britain is ungovernable by traditional parties,” the MP, granted anonymity to speak candidly, added.  

Unlike some of his centrist contemporaries in Europe battling populist insurgents, Starmer should be ascendant. He has a commanding House of Commons majority, and isn’t due to face an election until 2029.

But events last week are “grist to the mill” to Reform’s argument that the British state is “totally dysfunctional,” Reform MP Danny Kruger, who defected to Farage’s outfit from the Tories and its leading its preparations for the prisons system, said. Kruger will make a speech Tuesday and told POLITICO he is calling for “serious surgery on the system.”

In agreement  

The frustration in Starmer’s top ranks is evident.

“There is a deep disillusionment in this country at the moment and I would say a growing sense of despair about whether anyone is capable of turning this country around,” Wes Streeting, the health secretary and a close ally of Starmer acknowledged in a broadcast interview on Sunday. 

Starmer — who has hit out at the legacy handed to him by the Conservatives from their 14 years in power — has hardly been shy about criticizing the state either.  

Keir Starmer — who has hit out at the legacy handed to him by the Conservatives from their 14 years in power — has hardly been shy about criticizing the state either. | Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images

His claim last December that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” even prompted accusations from civil service unions that he was using “Trumpian language.”  

MPs are not so squeamish. A parliamentary committee on Monday launched a blistering attack on the Home Office — Britain’s interior ministry — which it said had squandered billions of pound on the U.K.’s “failed, chaotic and expensive” asylum accommodation system. 

Reform — which, apart from recently gained footholds in local government, currently has the luxury of observing rather than running things — insists it would take a different tack. Kruger said Tuesday’s speech would be “high level.”   

He argues the country is facing a “multifactor crisis,” which makes an argument for “wholesale reform” of the machinery of state more “politically compelling and acceptable.”  

“Being radical is becoming something that respectable mainstream parties need to do. We’re not diluting our radicalism, it’s that our radicalism is becoming more acceptable,” he said.  

While Reform wants to make “quite serious surgery on the system,” the party is not going to come in with a “chainsaw or wrecking ball,” he insisted.

Kruger will on Tuesday pledge to reduce the civil service headcount (though he will not specify by how much), make officials directly answerable to ministers, and close some government buildings.

When asked on Monday about his own plans for government after the prison release debacle, Farage pointed only to his party’s existing plan to recruit experienced people to develop policy, who could then become ministers in a Reform government.

Labour MPs hope a simultaneous racism row in Reform will halt its momentum.

Farage on Monday admonished one of his own MPs for saying she was driven “mad” by advertisements featuring black and Asian people. The comments were “ugly” and “wrong,” the Reform UK leader told a press conference.  

The Labour MP quoted above said that row had “stemmed the bleeding” for Starmer’s party over the weekend. Labour MPs repeatedly bring up infighting at Reform-run Kent County Council, too, hoping it will demonstrate the challenges the party would face if it’s actually given power.

But pollsters aren’t so sure.

YouGov’s Patrick English said “any stories which relate to issues surrounding or adjacent to immigration and small boat crossings will move conversations onto grounds upon which Farage and Reform are more comfortable.”  

Reform currently leads the pollster’s “best party to handle immigration” tracker by some distance, with 36 percent of the public picking them compared with just 10 percent picking Labour, and 6 percent picking the Conservatives, English points out.

Starmer’s predecessor as prime minister, Rishi Sunak, discovered the cost of failing to get a grip on the Home Office and to stop the flow of small boats across the English Channel when he led his party to a historic defeat last year.

His former Deputy Chief of Staff Rupert Yorke said the recent debacles were “yet more evidence for the public that the British state is completely broken.” 

 “Worrying about a lack of vision — which MPs understandably demand —  is missing the point,” Yorke warned. “The government has to instead focus on solving these knotty problems which are so ingrained in the public psyche.  

“Otherwise they are in deep trouble, and support for Reform will continue to grow.”

Martin Alfonsin Larsen contributed reporting.