How the Dangerous Rise in Anti-Immigration Politics Went Mainstream

Earlier this week, a Sudanese man who was seeking asylum in the U.K. was arrested in Belfast for attempted murder, after allegedly stabbing someone in the street. Following this attack, violence broke out across the Northern Irish city, with cars being lit on fire and immigrants being chased from homes that had been set ablaze. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, has called for calm, but several far-right personalities in Great Britain and the United States—including Elon Musk—have used the attack to foment hatred against immigrants.

I recently spoke by phone with Daniel Trilling, the author of the new book “If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Acceptable,” to talk about the rise of far-right and anti-immigrant politics in the U.K. and around the world. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the United Kingdom has become a symbol of global reactionary politics, why some British élites have stopped pushing back against far-right narratives about multi-ethnic societies, and whether the media in the U.K. is stoking hatred or merely responding to it.

When you look at the recent riots in Belfast, do you consider them as something specific to the United Kingdom, or are they part of a larger anti-immigration trend we are seeing internationally?

I think very often that the specific incidents themselves are local, and related to a national issue, or even something to do with the city or the region that they take place in. What’s changed over the last five to ten years is that the international dimension has become much more significant. Particularly when there is video footage, an event in one country will be taken up by international far-right influencers and networks. And then that feeds far-right narratives and ideas in other countries, but also feeds back into the country where the narrative originated. Certainly that’s the case for the U.K.

You have to see this rioting as the latest in a string of similar events that have been happening in the U.K., especially in the past two years, and there’s a kind of momentum to them. What happened this week is obviously off the back of there being disturbances in other parts of the U.K. after footage of the murder of Henry Nowak was made public. Nowak was an eighteen-year-old man who was stabbed to death in Southampton, toward the end of last year. And his murderer lied to police who arrived on the scene, and claimed that he, the murderer, had been the victim of a racist attack. So the police initially handcuffed Henry Nowak as he lay dying, and were slow to recognize that he had actually been stabbed. Nowak was white, and his killer was of a Sikh, South Asian background. So that prompted protests and disturbances in Southampton, and a huge, angry reaction from the far right, both within Britain and internationally.

We also had a large far-right march in central London, the so-called Unite the Kingdom Rally, which happened in May. And shortly before that, local elections in which the far-right party Reform U.K. did very well. So there’s this constant drumbeat of events allowing right-wing forces in the U.K. to gain momentum, and feeding the appetites of the far right internationally. And the U.K. seems to play this quite symbolic role, particularly for far-right actors in the U.S. Their main trick is to link any unwelcome incident or social development to mass migration, and they like to hold Britain up as a kind of cautionary tale.

Do you have a theory for why that is? I’ve noticed that, too. It’s funny, because the nonwhite population in the United States is more than twice as large as it is in the U.K., in percentage terms.

Yes, and despite current events, Britain is a pretty successful multi-ethnic democracy. But I think the reasons are, one, that English is the main language here, so Americans have easier access to news reports, and, two, Britain, being in Western Europe, has a lot of overlap with the U.S. in terms of when people are on the internet, and then there’s a bit of an overlap with India as well. But, mainly, it is just easy for far-right actors in the U.S. to project these things onto a country that your main audience is not as familiar with, because you can massively distort things.

Do you think even liberal élites in the U.K. have, in many cases, stopped celebrating what you describe as a successful multi-ethnic democracy?

Yeah, I think that is fair. In terms of the traditional governing élites, there’s still a lot of support for ethnic and social diversity, and a rhetorical commitment to anti-racism when those things are easy to defend. As soon as they’ve come under pressure, the élites have kind of just backed away from it as much as possible. I think it’s partly fear-based. Labour, since they took power in 2src24, have oscillated between panicked immigration-policy proposals in response to the uptick in support for Reform U.K., or just this kind of rabbit-in-the-headlights paralysis. But I think it’s also due to some longer-term factors. There has been, really since the two-thousands, from the traditional right-wing press and other sources, a persistent attack on “multiculturalism.” Stephen Lawrence was a black teen-ager who was murdered by a gang of white racists in 1993. His death was not properly investigated by the police at the time. And some years later, in 1999, an official inquiry produced a report in which it said that institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police was partly responsible for his killers not being brought to justice. And that prompted a kind of reckoning within the British state about policing and racial discrimination and so on. But there was also a backlash from the right, which began almost immediately, and was based on this idea that if you apply anti-racist measures to state functions like policing, you will paralyze them, because police officers will be scared to be called racist, and they won’t enforce the law properly, and so on. And that’s something that the right-wing press has kind of banged on about for years and years. And for a long time the political center largely ignored it, but as politics has become more unstable, and with the rise of right-wing populism here, that narrative has really taken hold, to the extent that I think the people at the top of the Labour Party, and people running our large political and cultural institutions are now scared to push back against it, because either they’re worried about the backlash, or they feel like they’ve lost the argument.

The United States is now living through the second term of an anti-immigrant, far-right leader. The United Kingdom has not had that happen. Nigel Farage, if he wins in the next election, will probably pursue similar immigration policies to Trump. But what Trump has done, in addition to his horrific policies, is create space in the culture for people to push back, and for people to say this has gone too far. You’ve seen in both Trump terms that the public’s support for immigration has actually gone up in opinion polls. In the U.K., you haven’t had this backlash to the backlash yet.