Farage has no answers on migration – but at the moment neither does Labour

The Reform leader has a long track record of offering easy solutions to complex problems, writes Anand Menon. But if we don’t want a repeat of Brexit, the government has to get out there and make a different case

Nigel Farage has a plan. One he claims will stop the small boats “in days”. As an example of media capture, the episode – in which the Reform leader claimed he’d deport 600,000 migrants within five years if he won the next election – was clearly a triumph. As a political manoeuvre, it may be equally successful unless his political opponents get their act together.

First, a bit of context. We’re where we are not because of the failings of this British government, but because British governments have failed for almost two decades. It is that long since we have seen meaningful economic growth. More recently, the visible failure of the British state to stop small boat crossings has become emblematic of the wider failures of economic management and public services.

In response, numerous politicians have tried the tricks that Reform UK are now deploying. Farage is hardly the first politician to stand up and claim that, if only we do what he says, we can deal with the problem of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel. From ‘stop the boats’ to ‘smash the gangs,’ successive prime ministers have promised what they could not (to date, at least, in the latter case) deliver. In so doing they have not only helped propel immigration to the top of the public’s list of concerns but undermined faith in mainstream politics.

Nor is this the first time that a political party has given hostages to fortune to get elected. Labour in opposition was quick to make rash promises on taxation that were, even at the time, obviously going to tie its hands in government. The ‘let’s win, and we’ll figure out the details later’ school of politics was not invented by Mr Farage.

Nor was the trick of carping from the sidelines while those in power make painful compromises with reality. Hard line Brexiters, Farage amongst them, were suitably outraged as ministers attempted to secure concessions to limit the constitutional and economic impact of Brexit. Accusations of betrayal were used to good effect to fatally undermine Theresa May. Meanwhile, the radical ideas (scrapping all retained EU law, or simply refusing to apply the Northern Ireland Protocol) were never actually tried.

Proposing neat and easy solutions is a proven means of attracting support. Little surprise that Mr Farage has chosen to adopt this playbook too in dealing with immigration.

None of which is to say that there aren’t real practical problems with what is being proposed. Most obviously, a removal rate of 500-600,000 people implies the police or the army swooping in to remove literally hundreds of thousands of people from London alone. In addition to which, there is the renegotiation of the Good Friday Agreement that Farage says he can undertake, or the problems under common law of deporting people to possible torture and death, or the moral and practical issues raised by plans to potentially hand over cash to the Taliban in Kabul or the Mullahs in Tehran.

All of which raises the question as to how the other parties, and particularly the government, should respond. I’m not convinced the approach adopted by Number 10 – refusing to take on Farage’s arguments while apparently pandering to racist stereotypes on social media – is going to be effective.

Personally, I’d like to see the government tackle head on the problems inherent in stoking racism, junking the rule of law, and sending people back to the Taliban. Even in narrow political terms, it’s hard to see how Labour comes out best from a steady normalisation of anti-migrant and racist sentiment.

Short of such a full-throated approach, there are obvious Reform UK vulnerabilities that can be targeted. Some work we’ve just done with More in Common, and which will be published ahead of the Reform conference next week, indicates that those considering a vote for Farage are most likely to be deterred from doing so by the party’s lack of experience in government. These are people who might listen to arguments stressing the shortcomings of the policies on offer, or who could be persuaded that Farage cannot be trusted and that his sums don’t add up.

Yet, as Stephen Bush argued the other day, Labour can’t expect to benefit from distrust of Farage unless it gets out there and rams home to voters what exactly they should not trust. Nick Thomas Symonds gave this approach a test drive recently – albeit that castigating Reform UK’s stance on an agricultural deal with the EU will hardly resonate the way a successful campaign will need to.

For now, what is clear is that Farage is winning what my younger colleagues would doubtless call the ‘vibes’ battle. I drove up to Edinburgh the other day from the southeast of England. As far as I could tell, there was a cross of St George or Union flag on virtually every bridge on the M6 from Birmingham to the Scottish border. Watching in silence as Reform UK dominate the airwaves and appear to win the arguments is not going to alter this direction of travel.

Professor Anand Menon is director of UK in a Changing Europe