Across the capitalist core, far right parties are surging, buoyed by economic stagnation, political alienation, decreased living standards and a fragmented working class. The re-election of Trump, this time with a more commanding majority of electoral college votes, is perhaps the most telling example of this. Additionally, in the UK, despite only gaining 5 seats in the 2024 general election, Reform came second in 98 constituencies, as well as gaining 677 council seats in the 2025 local elections and recently taking a 27% lead in the polls on Westminster voting intentions.
This is the result of decades of neoliberal restructuring: deindustrialisation, the move towards a service economy, financialization, the breaking up of organised labour, and the steady erosion of material security for both the working and middle classes. In this vacuum, the far right has created a powerful narrative that blames migration, globalisation and liberal elites for the economic dispossession wrought by neoliberalism.
In the context of deindustrialisation, financialization has become the key source of expansion for capital. The move to credit led accumulation has been described as a parasitic force on production, as profits are forced out of rentier and speculative practices rather than productive industry. But what also needs to be understood is that financialization has not simply replaced or even relocated production, it has restructured it in service of credit led accumulation and rentier profit extraction through asset purchases. Production itself has moved to service these industries, but perhaps even more importantly, financialised logics and practices have penetrated the ownership, governance and behaviour of productive industries.
This, among other things, has caused stagnating growth rates, drastically increased wealth inequality, financial crises, austerity and enduring levels of poverty, particularly among children. The geographic disparity of these effects are visible in virtually every metric of economic and social life. Research by IPPR and IPPR North found that if the North had received the same per-person spending as London, it would have gained an extra £140 billion over the past decade. In 2023, London had the highest GDP per head at £69,077,while the North East had the lowest at £28,583. In these contexts, access to the labour market is increasingly determined by proximity to capital.
This of course means that urban cities have much higher levels of immigration than rural economies. Almost half (around 46%) of construction workers in London were born outside the UK according to recent Labour Force Survey estimates and in hospitality 70% of the labour force in London is born outside of the UK. Additionally, as of 2023, approximately 30% of NHS staff in London reported a non-British nationality, including 35% of doctors and 28% of nurses. This is not to say that migrant labour is ‘stealing’ jobs from the national workforce, it is actually justification for the widespread benefits of migrant labour in terms of our economic reproduction. However, this is the context in which the far right is able to construct a narrative, offering scapegoats in the form of migrants and ‘woke’ liberal elites in place of a critique that focuses on structural changes under modern day capitalism.
The far right blame the loss of jobs and decreased living standards mainly on increased migration, but also on foreigners more generally(in terms of offshoring production). This needs to be understood in a context in which industrial job losses have not been matched by equitable investment or retraining programs in areas that were previously the epicentres of economic activity, whilst the shift towards financialization and urban service economies has meant that proximity to capital has become a key determinant of employment. This of course exacerbates the racial and geographic fragmentation of the working class, as migrant labour tends to move towards the metropolitan core.
This is where populist narratives are able to fill the void, suggesting that they were forgotten about whilst the others were prioritised. Populists argue in favour of ‘the people’ against a corrupt elite but with the very distinct characteristic of constructing an idea of the ‘authentic people’ entirely in opposition to the ‘inauthentic people’ who are against them. The construction of the ‘inauthentic people’ centres around immigrants and liberal managerial elites including teachers, doctors, university lecturers and journalists. They argue that this managerial class has risen out of welfare state capitalism and begun to control education systems, healthcare, the media and governments to impose their will on the ‘left behind’. For populists, the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were evidence that the liberal elite intensified its dominance and promoted multiculturalism, liberal identity politics and globalisation.
Yet the contradictions are glaring. Deindustrialisation has not just affected the white working class, ethnic labour has been massively affected across the board, particularly in US cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Chicago’s South Side. The far-right governments we have seen in recent times have also been some of the most elitist and patrimonial in the modern Western world. Trump’s core economic legacy remains a tax cut for the top 1% and Reform UK wants to cut corporation tax to 15%,significantly reduce inheritance tax, accelerate NHS privatisation and hand out tax breaks to landlords and private schools. And all whilst continuing with deregulation of the very financial markets that have hollowed out productive industries. Meanwhile the supposed liberal “ruling class” of teachers, doctors, and civil servants have faced decades of wage suppression and institutional attack.
What is therefore crucial is that we replace myths with factual analysis. Migrant labour is absolutely necessary for the functioning of our economy and our increasingly multicultural society, which is enriching in all sorts of different ways. The problem of aging populations means that we are experiencing much higher ratios of pensioners in comparison to workers. Some projections suggest that by 2050, the UK, along with 20 other countries, could see a ratio as low as one worker per retiree, if the state pension age were to remain at 66. This means that we do not actually have a sustainable national labour force without migrant labour, and this is true across both Europe and the US as well as the UK. The economic benefits of migrant labour can therefore not be understated. Clearly anyone who believes that migrants are a drain on public funds would do well to consider where we would be without them.
The notion of a zero sum game between migrant labour and native born workers is also a hoax. Even Rain Newton-Smith of the CBI noted that:
“The reality for businesses is that it is more expensive and difficult to fill a vacancy with immigration than if they could hire locally or train workers. Work visas already require higher pay than most domestic workers get for the same job. When considered alongside the large fees and accompanying charges, foreign workers are simply not the ‘easy’ or ‘cheap’ alternative.”
The increase in house prices also has far more to do with the influx of American finance capital and asset price inflation caused by wealth hoarders (like Trump himself or Farage’s pals at Nomad Capitalist) than increased demand from immigration.
The vilification of asylum seekers is equally based on false narratives. Asylum seekers constitute less than 1% of the population and the asylum budget amounted to around £4.7 billion from 2023-24, which is less than 0.5% of all government spending according to the National Audit Office. Yet the focus given to them by populists and the mainstream media would make anyone think these figures were much higher. Reform politicians and populist figures like Katie Hopkins also have a tendency to point out that Afghan and Eritrean men are ‘20times more likely to commit sexual assault than British citizens’. This is of course highly disputed and based on evidence from the Centre for Migration Control, run by Robert Bates who volunteered for the Reform Party in 2024. It also looked at recent crime statistics, compared with data from the 2021 consensus on the population, which predated the huge wave of Afghan migration following the Taliban regaining power. The comparison was also done against all British citizens, despite the fact that young men on the whole are more likely to commit sexual assault and that many Afghan asylum seekers were young men. The data was also highly unreliable as only a third of cases analysed saw ethnicity publicly reported.
When we consider that white men are the only over represented group in figures looking at sexual assault of children for example (though this too is based on incomplete data), or the fact that women tend not to report most cases of sexual assault and are far more likely to be assaulted by someone they know (which in Britain is much more likely to be a white person, despite what Tommy Robinson would have you believe), it becomes evident that the problem is one of misogyny perpetuated by men. This of course is the same misogyny incited by populists like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate (both alleged sex offenders). Meanwhile, for all the talk of a ‘migrant crime wave’, violent crime is down across the board whilst immigration rates are up, and the only US state to record ‘migrant crime’, Texas, actually found migrants were less likely to commit crime than native born citizens.
Asylum seekers are also denied the right to work and live on around £9 a week if their accommodation is catered and around £50 if it isn’t, with no access to the welfare state and no right to work. Anyone who thinks that constitutes even enough for survival money is clearly out of touch with the current cost of living. Evidently the asylum system manufactures dependency and then paradoxically vilifies it. Meanwhile, £121 million in dividends has been paid out collectively to shareholders by the private companies contracted to run government funded accommodation for asylum seekers since 2019. Yet they are seemingly absent from the narrative around a dysfunctional asylum system.
Clearly then, the narrative is centred around a moral panic used for political gain, but this also reveals a deeper truth about the realities: immigration is not just crucial for the reproduction of our economy, it is also a scapegoat for its pitfalls.
But the crisis isn’t immigration, it’s neoliberal restructuring, unfettered corporate power, wealth inequality and a lack of government investment into deindustrialised areas. Shabbanah Mahmood, Keir Starmer and their puppet masters Morgan McSweeney and Maurice Glassman have shot themselves in the foot believing that they can win over Reform voters by catering to this narrative. What is needed is an opposition that can understand the structural dynamics that have caused this resentment towards increased immigration and offer an alternative, whilst also challenging the simplicity of the far right response and exposing its contradictions and true loyalties.
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