Love Without Substance

The populist right in Britain places a disproportionate focus on immigration. Their priorities lack substance, and taken together with Operation Raise the Colours last year, they show a love of country that doesn't extend much further than national symbols.

They blame immigration for problems it did not cause, from the housing shortage to low pay, while the real causes go unfixed. Net migration has fallen by three-quarters of a million since 2023, yet immigration is still the issue they put above every other.

When the figures show crime falling, in London and across the country, they deny them. "London is in a state of collapse. Crime is out of control," Nigel Farage posted in 2025, the year London recorded its fewest homicides since 2014.

A true love of country would prioritise its well-being, and the conditions in which its people live. Theirs does not. That is love without substance.

In 2025, Union Jacks and St George's flags flew from lampposts across the country. One could almost be forgiven for thinking the World Cup was taking place. Of course, what unfolded over the summer last year was no cause for unity. Instead, it further fractured an already divided nation.

The flags went up under the banner of a campaign called Operation Raise the Colours, and its own organisers said what they stood for. "Britons are starting to speak now," Carla Kennedy of the Worcester Patriots told the news agency AFP at the height of the campaign. "We are against illegal immigration and it is standing for that." Yet the people its supporters gathered against were asylum seekers, who have a right under international law to claim asylum. The same flags were carried to protests outside hotels housing them.

The campaign disguised itself as patriotism while weaponising national symbols against those its proponents believed didn’t belong.

Apologists for the movement ask why anyone should take offence at the British and English flags. The flags were never the problem. What they were being used for was. A flag hung to tell your neighbours they are not welcome is not an act of patriotism. And much of the country read the flags exactly that way. Half of Britons told YouGov that people putting England flags on lampposts mostly did it to express anti-migrant or anti-ethnic minority feeling, against a quarter who said national pride. Among ethnic minority adults, 52% said the England flag had become a racist symbol.

Operation Raise the Colours was the most visible sign of a wave of right-wing populism that has been rising in Britain for years. What sets this wave apart is that its targets can be traced back to a single event.

Where this wave came from

Hostility to immigrants and to Muslims is nothing new in Britain, but this wave found its targets in the marches against Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Within weeks of the first marches in October 2023, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, branded them "hate marches". On Armistice Day that November, far-right counter-protesters turned out against the march and clashed with police near the Cenotaph. Discussing the marches on GB News in February 2024, the Conservative MP Lee Anderson said Islamists had "got control of Khan" and "got control of London". Within three weeks he had joined Reform UK.

Nigel Farage dates the turn the same way. Writing on the third anniversary of 7 October, he set "the decent majority of British people" against "a substantial minority in this nation" who "felt something entirely different", and went on to name the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The marches were a protest against Israel's genocide in Gaza. The populist right recast them as a threat from Muslims and migrants, and in doing so found its targets.

What the populist right prioritises

Of all the issues facing Britain, immigration is the one the far right turns out for, the one Reform voters rank first, and the one Reform writes about.

Start with the streets. Every major far-right mobilisation since October 2023 has been about immigration or asylum accommodation, Islam, Tommy Robinson, "two-tier" policing or free speech, from the Southport riots of 2024, when mosques and asylum hotels were attacked, to the Unite the Kingdom rally that drew about 110,000 people in September 2025 and this autumn's attempts to stop small boats landing on the south coast. Not one was about housing costs, wages or the NHS. Where housing came up at all, it was to oppose housing asylum seekers. And they call it patriotism. The leader of Patriot Platform, one of the groups behind the boat protests, said they were driven by "love for our children, country and most importantly the future that we are leaving for our children".

Reform voters tell pollsters the same thing. In YouGov's 10,000-person voter study this summer, 86% named immigration as one of the most important issues facing the country, against 42% of all adults. Only 20% named the NHS, and just 5% housing. The cost of living is their second concern, named by 38%, but immigration outranks it more than two to one. Asked by Ipsos last month for the single most important issue, 55% of Reform supporters said immigration. Three per cent said housing.

And the party writes about little else. NewsCord counted every item on Reform's own news site, Reform Daily, since it launched in May 2026. Of 246 items, 71 were about immigration, three about housing and one about the NHS. Immigration outnumbered the economy, energy, housing, welfare and the NHS put together, and in August it filled more than half of everything the party published. At its conference in September, Farage told the co-founder of Raise the Colours, "What your campaign has done is wake up vast parts of this country."

On the streets, in the polls and on its own website, the movement that claims to love Britain gives its attention to one issue above every other.

What immigration gets blamed for

Immigration is blamed for problems it did not cause, and housing is the clearest case. "Britain is full," Reform's Zia Yusuf declared this month. A Conservative government said otherwise. Its 2017 housing white paper called the housing market "broken" and said the cause was simple. "For too long, we haven't built enough homes," it said. "This isn't because there's no space, or because the country is 'full'."

Migration does add to the demand for homes, most of all where planning makes building hard. But the shortage is half a century old. Britain fell behind the rest of Western Europe on homes per person between 1955 and 1979, years when more people left the country than arrived. House prices doubled relative to pay between 1997 and 2007, long before the migration rise of 2021 to 2023. Councils once built more than 120,000 social homes a year. In 2024-25, England built 12,198 for social rent, and more than two million council homes have been sold under Right to Buy since 1980. Even the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies calculates that holding migration to the tens of thousands since 1997 would have closed only about a third of the gap. Nor are newcomers being handed the homes that exist. Nine in ten new social lettings go to UK nationals.

The same pattern holds elsewhere. The government's Migration Advisory Committee found that migration is not a major factor in the wages of UK-born workers. Foreign nationals make up 12% of prisoners and about 13% of convictions, roughly their share of the adult population, though they are over-represented in some offences. And the NHS, which migrants are said to overwhelm, depends on them. One in five NHS staff in England reported a non-UK nationality in January 2026.

Cutting migration does not build a home, raise a wage or staff a ward. Blaming it lets the people who could fix the causes off the hook.

What happened when migration fell

If the fixation were about the numbers, the numbers should have eased it. Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year to March 2023 and had fallen to 171,000 by the end of 2025, down by "three-quarters of a million people", in the ONS's words.

Concern moved the other way. In November 2023, with net migration near its height, 22% of people named immigration as one of the most important issues facing Britain, according to Ipsos. By September 2025, months after the ONS had reported that net migration had more than halved, the figure was 51%, the highest in a decade. It is 44% now.

Small boat crossings did rise in 2024 and 2025, and asylum claims hit a record before both began to fall. But the total is what changes the size of the population, and it fell by three-quarters. The fixation grew anyway.

What they do with good news

The populist right says it cares about safety. When the evidence shows things getting safer, it rejects that evidence.

Crime in England and Wales has fallen a long way. The ONS's Crime Survey puts theft, violence and criminal damage around four-fifths below their peaks in the mid-1990s. Homicides fell to 499 in the year to March 2026, the lowest since current police recording began in 2003, and London's 97 homicides in 2025 were the fewest since 2014.

The populist right's answer has been to deny the figures. "London is in a state of collapse. Crime is out of control," Farage posted in July 2025. Eleven days later he told a press conference, "The crime survey for England and Wales is based on completely false data." Laila Cunningham, now Reform's candidate for Mayor of London, accused Sadiq Khan of posting "fantasy graphs". When the Mayor launched a campaign against online disinformation about London, she accused him of "suggesting that victims are liars". The campaign called no victim a liar. And when an interviewer told Elon Musk that the crime figures disproved his warnings of civil war in Britain, he replied, "What numbers?"

Not all the news is good. Shoplifting hit a record in 2025, and London's homicides this year look level with last year's. A patriot would want to know that too. But a person who wants their country safe wants to know what is working, so it can be kept. Refusing the good news keeps the fear alive, and the fear is what they campaign on.

How far the mainstream has moved

None of this has stayed on the fringe. The party that governed Britain for fourteen years now follows the populist right's priorities, borrows its language and has lost some of its own people to it.

As a Treasury minister in 2020, Kemi Badenoch said that cutting emissions to net zero by 2050 was "crucial". As Conservative leader in March 2025 she said, "Net zero by 2050 is impossible." In her 2024 leadership campaign she said leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would not be a "silver bullet". A year later she announced, "It is time for Britain to leave the ECHR."

Her language has moved too. Launching her leadership bid, she said that while everyone was talking about Reform's five new MPs, she was "far more worried about the five new MPs elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics". In January 2025 she said Britain "is not a hotel". By June 2026 Reform's Robert Jenrick was saying the same thing. "We're not a hotel, we're a country," he said.

The policies have followed. In June 2026 Farage promised to remove foreign nationals from social housing. In August the Conservatives announced much the same, and Labour called it "copied from Reform". So have the people. Danny Kruger left for Reform in September 2025. Robert Jenrick, sacked by Badenoch in January 2026, joined Reform the same day and is now its shadow chancellor. Eleven days later Suella Braverman, the former home secretary who had called the Gaza marches "hate marches", followed him. "I feel like I've come home," she said.

What began on the fringe now sets the agenda for the opposition.

What Britons should prioritise

What would a substantive love of country look like? The philosopher Stephen Nathanson, in Patriotism, Morality, and Peace, describes patriotism as involving "special affection for one's own country", "a sense of personal identification with the country", "special concern for the well-being of the country" and "willingness to sacrifice to promote the country's good".

The flag-wavers have the first two in abundance. The question is the third. A country's well-being is measured in the price of a home, the cost of food and energy, secure and well-paid work, public services that are there when people need them, and safe streets. These are the things that decide the conditions in which Britons live, and anyone who professes to love Britain should put them first.

Start with homes. A home in England now costs 7.6 times typical full-time pay, according to the ONS, against 3.5 times in 1997. A record 135,580 households are living in temporary accommodation, with 177,530 children.

Young people are being shut out of work as well as homes. The unemployment rate among 16 to 24 year olds is 16.4%, and 981,000 young people are not in work, education or training. Pay has barely grown in 18 years, leaving average earnings £278 a week below where pre-2008 growth would have taken them, by the Resolution Foundation's estimate. Prices are about 29% higher than in July 2021, and food about 40% higher. Inflation has slowed, but slower inflation does not mean lower prices.

A love of country with substance would put these problems first. The populist right puts immigration first, and immigration, as we have seen, did not cause them. That is a love without substance.

What the fixation costs

A politics this fixed on one issue costs the country it claims to love in two ways.

The first is that the real causes go unfixed. Every problem blamed on immigration is a problem whose cause is left alone. Reform's answer to the housing crisis is to reorder the queue, putting British-born workers at the front, and to scrap the contributions developers make towards affordable homes on brownfield sites outside five big cities. The Chartered Institute of Housing says those contributions have "historically" delivered "almost half of all new affordable housing". Reform does promise 50,000 social homes a year, which it says would need no new taxes or borrowing. Its welfare plan would cut £50 billion from benefits, £22 billion of it from disability benefits alone.

The second cost is division. In the year to March 2026, religious hate crimes against Muslims rose 15%, with a rise in September 2025 that the Home Office says "coincided with a number of protests and incidents of public disorder". The British Muslim Trust counted 78 attacks and incidents against mosques in a single year, one about every five days. In Rotherham in August 2024, people inside a hotel housing asylum seekers "were told by police officers to hide in bedrooms" as rioters set it alight.

And the anger is aimed at people who share the very problems the populist right says it cares about. Of the households in England assessed as homeless or at risk of homelessness, 78% are headed by a UK citizen and 22% by someone who is not. Migrants and the populist right's own supporters pay the same rents, earn the same stagnant wages and wait on the same lists. Setting them against each other leaves what hurts them all in place.

What love of country would look like

A patriotism with substance would not need a lamppost. It would start with the things that decide how people live, whether a young couple can afford a home, whether a wage covers the bills, whether the hospital can see you and whether the street is safe. It would judge the country by the evidence, good news included. It would go after causes rather than culprits, by building homes, raising pay and staffing the services. And it would refuse to blame neighbours, and refuse the violence that follows the blame.

That kind of patriotism asks more of people than a flag does. It means what Nathanson called "special concern for the well-being of the country", and the country is everyone who lives in it. The patriotism on Britain's lampposts falls short of that.

A love of country with substance is measured in what it fixes.