Britain has finally become a European country

Finally a decade after the Brexit vote, British politics is becoming fully European. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is catching up with the political operations of Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni, who began by winning municipal and mayoral elections.

Farage is a great advocate of European proportional voting systems and has recently started extolling European health insurance schemes to replace Britain’s taxpayer funded National Health Service.

Two giant parties – Conservative and Labour – dominated UK politics from 1945 onwards. But Brexit put a stop to that. The new political volatility has been so great that, since 2016, there have been five prime ministers.

The result is that Britain now looks more politically European, not less. Across the EU most member states have four, five or more parties, all of which have representation at the local and national level.

Keir Starmer has 410 MPs, a formidable number, although he did lose one seat to Reform in a May Day byelection. Even so, Starmer only managed to win a third of votes in last year’s election. Like the French centre-right party Les Républicains or the Italian Christian democrats, the British Tories have become a diminished force, with just 121 MPs out of a total of 650. They are now little more than a party of England.

Starmer’s advisors know that Labour’s big majority flatters to deceive. Farage’s anti-immigrant message is winning support, just as the ethnonationalist lies of Le Pen in France, of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the AfD in Germany or the Meloni-Salvini duo in Italy have also proved popular.

Chris Giles, economic commentator at the Financial Times, points out that Donald Trump’s lies that massive protectionist tariffs would relaunch the US economy mirror the Brexit lies that leaving the EU would unleash new economic activity in the UK.

But the opposite has happened. The UK economy has shrunk and nearly every sector reports a loss of exports to the giant European single market.

Farage tends to be quiet on the EU these days as his Brexit project is falling apart. To replace all those European workers who once kept British businesses afloat, the Brexit Tories brought in workers from Pakistan, Nigeria, India and Ghana.

Voters were told by Brexit Tories that leaving Europe would mean Britain could control – that is reduce – immigration. The opposite has happened. There are more immigrants than ever in Britain.

Britain now has a four or five party system, with space for smaller regional parties from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Green vote is going up just as it has done across the Channel. The LibDems came back with a bang in the July 2024 election and now have 72 MPs.

The new identity and cultural politics is now as deep rooted in Britain as in any EU member state with an unspoken but barely hidden politics of hostility to foreign born, non-white citizens and above all to Islam. The most popular name for a new born London boy is Mohammed. There are 25 Muslim MPs and 500 Muslim councillors, nearly all from the Labour Party.

On social media there are endless posts on crime or terrorism or undocumented asylum seekers linked to Muslims. The implication is that Labour is not sufficiently strong in promoting the idea of an all-white, all-Christian England.

In her victory speech as the new Reform mayor for Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns said asylum seekers could be housed in tents while waiting for their appeal to be treated as refugees goes through the usual lengthy legal process. That is no different from Le Pen or AfD or Vox in Spain and Swedish Democrats.

Writers on British politics used to look down their noses at the messy coalitions and instabilities of continental now EU politics. Now Britain has adopted European style politics with consequences difficult to foretell.

Denis MacShane writes on European policy and politics