There is no migrant crisis. At least, not the kind Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson talk about. No swarm, no tidal wave, no national emergency. The real crisis is political, not demographic. It’s a crisis of legitimacy. Of a state that cannot provide, a media that cannot inform, and a political class that cannot lead. Into that vacuum pours the language of siege: the hotel, the dinghy, the border, the patrol. All symbols in an endless, paranoid pageant of national decline.
Let’s be clear: Britain is not full. The labour market is segmented, not saturated. There are shortages in care, logistics, hospitality, food production, and construction. The NHS is creaking under real, structural strain. Not from a handful of Channel crossers, but from decades of underfunding, privatisation, and staff attrition. Yet Farage and his outriders (Robinson, Braverman, Jenrick, and any number of Telegraph columnists) do not speak of class, capital, or crisis. They speak instead of “our way of life,” as if there were one, and as if it were under threat from desperate people in rubber boats.
This, in Marxist terms, is false consciousness. Ideology at work. It is easier, the media suggests, to believe Britain is being overrun than to confront the decay of the social fabric. Easier to hate the migrant than to ask why your rent is unaffordable, your town hollowed out, your job insecure. The “migrant crisis” performs a necessary ideological function: it channels popular rage away from capital and toward the stranger. The Daily Mail will shout about asylum seekers in hotels, but it won’t ask who owns the hotel, who profits from Home Office outsourcing, or why local councils are bankrupt. The Telegraph will frame anti-migrant protestors as “concerned locals,” while smearing anti-fascists as agitators and outsiders. One group gets sympathetic interviews; the other gets surveillance.
Tommy Robinson (who emerged, lest we forget, from the shell of the EDL) is not an aberration but a symptom. He monetises grievance and gives it a face: not Westminster, not the landlord, not the boss, but the asylum seeker. His nationalism is economic only in gesture; it is cultural in substance. It is nostalgia weaponised. Luton in 1955, Britain before immigration, before feminism, before queerness, before complexity. It is, in truth, a fantasy of whiteness, of imperial plenitude without the blood. But Tommy does not live this. He performs it. He is a voyeur of decline, not a victim of it. He shows up when there’s a camera, when there’s the chance to stoke chaos or provoke confrontation. Otherwise, he is on holiday, sunning himself abroad, living off the grift. His is not the life of the struggling British worker; it’s the lifestyle brand of the far-right entrepreneur. He offers the illusion of solidarity, but what he sells is resentment, spectacle, and retreat.
Labour, meanwhile, plays its usual role: triangulation dressed as moral clarity. Starmer talks of “control” and “smashing the gangs,” while quietly abandoning safe routes and dragging his feet on the Rwanda scheme not because it’s immoral, but because it’s expensive and unworkable. Yvette Cooper repeats the slogans of securitisation, promising “security at the border” as if that’s where the crisis lies. What’s missing (always) is any commitment to the right to stay, to safe passage, or to the idea that migration is not a pathology but a condition of the global system Britain helped build.
Not every migrant is a refugee. Of course not. Some are fleeing war, others poverty. Some are here for family, others for work. But that is precisely why we need safe routes and legal clarity. Because economic migration is not illegitimate. It is structurally necessary. Unless Britain is prepared to give up strawberries, takeaway deliveries, taxi pickups, and elder care, then it will remain dependent on the very people its politics seeks to demonise.
The problem is not the migrant. The problem is the system that requires migrants and simultaneously criminalises them. It is the asylum process that traps people in limbo. It is the border regime that funnels profit to Serco and G4S. It is the state that welcomes wealth with open arms but meets the vulnerable with fences and handcuffs.
Farage doesn’t want to fix the system. He wants to ride it, like a wave, like a brand. His rhetoric is not designed to solve anything. It is designed to generate heat, not light. Like Trump, he promises the impossible: to protect a working class he never belonged to, from a threat that never existed, in the name of a nation he helped sell off.
What Britain faces is not invasion. It is enclosure. Not from the outside, but from within. From landlords, bosses, hedge funds, and the state itself. From politicians who sell fear because they have run out of hope. From a media class that repeats, amplifies, distorts, and never explains.
We must stop asking how to stop the boats and start asking why the boats are necessary. We must stop repeating “crisis” and start asking whose crisis, and for whom. Because if we do not challenge this narrative now, the target will not remain the migrant. It never does. The same apparatus that vilifies the asylum seeker will be turned on the striking worker, the protestor, the dissident, the poor.
The migrant may be today’s scapegoat. But tomorrow, it will be you.
