Britain is in crisis. The cost of living is spiralling, wages are stagnant, public services are collapsing, and trust in politics is at an all-time low. People feel powerless, ignored, and abandoned by those in charge. And when that happens, anger grows. Populists know this. They thrive on it. They don’t want to fix the problems; they want to exploit them. They fuel resentment, offering easy scapegoats and simplistic answers that sound good but solve nothing.
They tell people that migrants are stealing their jobs, that the NHS is broken because of bureaucracy, that the economy is failing because of a corrupt elite. Reform UK and the Conservatives both play this game, but they do it in different ways. Reform shouts about “taking our country back” while offering no real policies beyond shutting the borders and slashing taxes. The Conservatives, desperate to hold onto power, mimic Reform’s rhetoric, blaming migration for their own economic failures. Neither of them is interested in solutions. They want people to be angry because it keeps them in business.
It is easy to be angry. I understand why people are furious. They have been let down. They have been promised change again and again, yet nothing ever improves. But anger alone won’t fix Britain. It won’t shorten NHS waiting times or put money in people’s pockets. What we need is leadership that takes that anger and channels it into real action. If we want to defeat populism, we need to do it by delivering real results, not through fear-mongering or division.
Populists succeed when people feel like they have no control over their lives. They feed on frustration and convince people that only drastic, destructive action can change things. Reform UK wants to scrap Net Zero, pull Britain out of international agreements, and introduce a US-style immigration system that would choke businesses of the skilled workers they need. The Conservatives, rather than offering stability, now talk about legal migration caps and sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. These aren’t policies—they’re distractions. The only way to stop them is to address the root causes of their success—economic insecurity, public service decline, and political failure.
Fixing immigration with competence, not chaos
Immigration has become the greatest weapon in the populist playbook. Every failure of government is blamed on migrants. If the NHS is struggling, they claim it is because of health tourism. If wages are low, they say it is because of migrant workers. If housing is unaffordable, they insist it is because of immigration. But the facts tell a different story.
The NHS would collapse without the doctors, nurses, and carers who come from overseas. Wages are low because of exploitative employers and weak workers’ rights, not because of people moving here to contribute. The housing crisis is caused by decades of failure to build enough homes, not by those who come to Britain to work and pay taxes.
Instead of fixing the system, the Conservatives promise gimmicks like sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, an expensive and unworkable plan that won’t deter crossings but does create headlines. Reform UK goes even further, calling for zero net migration, which would devastate industries like healthcare, construction, and agriculture. The real way to take back control of immigration is to manage it properly. That means linking migration to workforce planning, ensuring that public services get extra funding when population growth increases demand, and cracking down on rogue employers who exploit migrant workers to undercut wages.
Tomorrow, at the same time, I’ll look at the NHS, the economy and our political system.
* Mo Waqas is Chair of the Lib Dem’s Stockton branch and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.
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10 Comments
@Mo, you seem to be making the mistake of presuming people with right wing views must be acting in bad faith. On the whole they aren’t. Politicians of all hues (left and right) generally say what they do because they believe it. Personally I abhor much of what – for example – Nigel Farage says, but I don’t doubt he says what he does because he genuinely believes it. Saying things like They want people to be angry because it keeps them in business is (a) wrong and (b) unhelpful because when we dismiss the concerns of populists in this way, we prevent ourselves from understanding why people are voting for them.
Also, you say you want to manage immigration properly, but give no idea what that would look like. Immigration HAS been too high for too long and the resultant rapid population increase has put an intolerable strain on our housing stock, our services and our infrastructure, directly contributing to many of the cost of living problems you identify. If we don’t acknowledge that and seek solutions, we just look out of touch and make it even easier for Reform to get more votes.
A useful argument in the immigration debate is to point out just how the birth rate has fallen over previous generations.
Everywhere in the developed world immigration levels are matter of political concern. The situation in the UK is fairly typical. Despite the impression given in the media, most immigrants don’t arrive on rubber dinghies on the south coast. Last year some 36,000 did out of a net migration of 728,000. I make that about 4.5% of the total.
The Tories found themselves in the position of promising lower levels of migration but only came up with a totally impractical attempt to control a tiny fraction of it. Their financial donors want a high level of immigration so they couldn’t do anything to actually lower it but to appease the electorate they had to be seen to be trying to do something.
The Labour Govt have the same problem, of course, so nothing much will change anytime soon.
So why is there a need to have higher levels of immigration? We are all living longer and starting work much later than we used to. It’s mainly a question of demographics though. Previous generations simply haven’t produced enough children to keep the economy fully staffed!
In 2020 the number of children per woman in the UK was 1.56 The no-growth replacement rate is about 2.3
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXYy5R9WYAYcxSs?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
Populism won’t be beaten by a Starmer Labour Party which doesn’t know what it believes, which is scared to admit that it hasn’t a clue, and which thinks that advocating populism-lite is somehow going to attract voters away from populism-heavy.
An important new book, “Get On”, reveals just how badly Starmerism is floundering. It should be required reading for Labour’s opponents on its left.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/09/get-in-by-patrick-maguire-and-gabriel-pogrund-review-inside-story-of-labour-under-keir-starmer-morgan-mcsweeney
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/09/keir-starmer-politics-labour-growth-reform-uk
(Why do I say that the Lib Dems are now clearly to the left of Labour? Because Starmer has shifted Labour miles to the right, that’s why!)
One thing that the party will need to reconcile itself to, is that any effective immigration policy will need a deterrent. Some people will need to be detained and forcibly removed against their will. Without the deterrent you have a de facto open door policy.
For any difficult and complicted predicament there is an answer that is simple, obvious and wrong.
“Reform UK goes even further, calling for zero net migration, which would devastate industries like healthcare, construction, and agriculture.”
But it won’t happen, whoever runs the country. Trump can bluster, but he didn’t dent the immigation statistics last time and he won’t do it this time. Farage can bluster, but he wouldn’t dent the immigration statistics either. Nobody can “stop the boats”.
Merely explaining why Britain needs immigrants sounds complacent, and hence serves to throw away votes. Racists and non-racist voters alike can see that the global flight to the rich West does pose a threat, even if net immigration is beneficial in the medium term.
Voters are right to ask for rational control measures to limit immigration. Voters need to be persuaded that crazy schemes like Rwanda or sinking the boats will not cut migration and will only hurt the UK.
Better to attack Farage as a charlatan. He mis-sold us Brexit, which made us poorer and INCREASED migration, and then blamed everyone else. Now he wants to mis-sell us another phantom promise – that he can cut migration. He can’t. He’ll say anything that will gain adulation from the gullible.
Jenny Barnes. Trouble is millions of people understand simple answers and vote for it.
“The cost of living is spiralling, wages are stagnant” – not so, average pay rises have been higher than inflation for over a year now – https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/november2024# (figures 2 and 3)
Tim and Jenny: Ian Dunt tells it like it is: Most people are idiots! I think the problem is the education system: it hammers home the three R’s and exams but doesn’t tell people how to think or how to care
“The cost of living is spiralling, wages are stagnant, public services are collapsing, and trust in politics is at an all-time low.” We need to avoid playing the populists at their own game of hysteria-tinged pessimism. As Tim Leunig points out, some economic indicators are favourable. Public services are not collapsing, at least in my area (admittedly prosperous Kingston-upon-Thames). On the contrary, there have been improvements in GP services and in public transport with wonderful new electric buses and new rolling stock on South Western Railway. It’s notorious that the person in the street distrusts politicians in general but usually likes their local MP (as I do, but then it’s Ed Davey). While respecting those who are excessively concerned about immigration, we should not close our eyes to the fact that their views are economically illiterate and usually coloured by xenophobia. We should offer honest, caring and competent politics and try to build social solidarity. If that doesn’t work then at least we can look history in the eye and say we tried.