The mob doesn’t stop with migrants. Once the language of politics legitimises scapegoating, once “small boats” become a synonym for national decline, the logic of persecution extends outward. First to migrants, then to their defenders, then to any minority unlucky enough to be cast as the new Other. That’s what we’re living through.
The weekend’s protests outside asylum hotels tell their own story: flags raised, petrol bombs thrown, red crosses daubed on buildings in imitation of crusader marks. MPs report rape threats, death threats, daily abuse, worse even than during Brexit. And why wouldn’t it be? If the prime minister insists the problem is “ungripped” migrants, if Labour grandees like David Blunkett talk casually of suspending the European Convention on Human Rights, if Nigel Farage promises mass deportations within 30 days of arrival, then the mob quite reasonably believes it has the backing of the state.
Mainstream politics has decided to compete on the terrain set by the far right, which means each concession becomes a staging post for the next escalation. First migrants were to blame for stretched services, then they became supposed criminals, now MPs who defend them are smeared as apologists for rape. Brendan Cox was right: threats don’t come from nowhere. When ministers talk about “illegals” or “hotel criminals,” the language is picked up and sharpened by the street, until the dividing line between parliamentary debate and fascist threat collapses.
Starmerism promises managerial competence but delivers scapegoating in bulk. Cooper’s fast-track asylum appeals, stripping judges of oversight, isn’t about justice. It’s about speed, removal, optics. It’s a structural shift toward treating refugees not as people but as problems to be cleared. Yet the poll numbers show that no matter how far Labour moves rightward, Reform UK wins the contest of cruelty. Thirty-one percent now think Farage’s party is best placed to handle immigration, compared to Labour’s nine. You cannot outbid the far right on its own ground: every time you try, it raises the stakes.
This is why the mob will never be satisfied. Deport one group and another becomes the target: queer MPs, feminists, trade unionists, Muslims, Black Britons. The appetite for scapegoats is endless once you concede the principle that society’s problems are caused by an Other within. Yesterday it was Poles, today it’s Eritreans, tomorrow it will be someone else.
The crisis is not migrants but a political class that treats human beings as tools for narrative management. That’s why the fever keeps rising. The solution isn’t to “grip” the issue with tougher laws and faster deportations; it’s to break the cycle of scapegoating altogether. But that requires courage Westminster lacks: the courage to say migrants are not the enemy, capital is; that the mob will never be sated until we strip it of the legitimacy handed to it by ministers and newspapers; that real security doesn’t come from exclusion but from solidarity.
“Small boats” are just the latest scapegoat. In raw numbers, they are a fraction of overall migration. Legal migration into Britain dwarfs boat crossings many times over—work visas, student visas, family reunification, seasonal labour schemes. Every government knows this, because it signs off the figures itself. Yet no one marches on Oxford colleges because of foreign students, or outside hospitals because of Filipino nurses. Why? Because that reality doesn’t serve as a symbol.
The boat is the perfect scapegoat: visible, televisual, desperate. It carries the image of invasion while distracting from the truth that Britain actively relies on migration to function. The real scandal is not a few thousand people crossing the Channel but a political class that knows the arithmetic, relies on the labour, and still pretends the problem is dinghies in the water. The far right understands the symbolism, which is why “small boats” has become a metonym for national decline. Westminster, instead of breaking that fiction, competes over who can promise to stop it first.
But you cannot deport a symbol. Even if every boat were turned back tomorrow, migration would continue through the same legal channels it always has. And so the mob, finding its phantom enemy undefeated, will simply look for the next target. That is why the fixation on boats is not about numbers at all. This is about legitimising the hunt for scapegoats.
I saw it myself last night driving back from Stoke-on-Trent: every other overbridge strung with a St George’s Cross or Union Jack. Not the product of some new-found patriotic fervour, but a warning. A visible sign that you are not welcome here. The line has been drawn, and it was not drawn by the mob alone. It was laid out by politicians and newspaper editors who taught Britain to see a scapegoat in every neighbour. The flags only make their work visible.
