The Patriotism of Fear: A Powellian Case Against Reform UK

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Saturday 23 August 2026

There are moments in the life of a nation when its greatest danger does not come from an enemy beyond its shores, nor from economic adversity, nor even from the incompetence of its governors. It comes instead from a corruption of the national imagination. A people begins to misunderstand itself. It mistakes resentment for patriotism, anger for courage and exclusion for strength. It persuades itself that the difficulties inseparable from national life have been imposed upon it by strangers and that, were those strangers somehow removed, an older, simpler and happier country might miraculously be restored.

Britain is approaching such a moment.

The rise of Reform UK and of the wider anti-immigrant politics from which it draws much of its emotional strength ought therefore to trouble every conservative in the proper meaning of that word. I do not mean merely those who vote Conservative. I mean those who believe that a nation is an inheritance rather than a slogan, that its institutions are precious because they have endured and that political action should proceed from an understanding of human nature rather than from the stimulation of its most combustible passions.

The language now employed in British politics should give us warning enough. Reform UK itself has recently described irregular migration as an “invasion”, has proposed an Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill and says that those entering Britain illegally should be made ineligible for asylum and removed. Its current programme also proposes ending benefits for substantial categories of foreign nationals and withdrawing from or overriding legal arrangements that it regards as impediments to its immigration programme.

Words matter. They matter particularly in politics because political language does not merely describe the world: eventually it teaches men how they are permitted to think about their neighbours.

An invasion is an act of war. An invader is an enemy. If the foreigner who crosses the Channel in a small boat is an invader, those who feed him become collaborators, those who provide him with legal representation become accomplices and those who insist that his case be determined according to law become obstacles to national survival. It is therefore not entirely surprising that Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary has threatened criminal liability for those who assist illegal entry and has specifically warned corporate officers that certain assistance to migrants could expose them to imprisonment under legislation a Reform government would introduce.

Here we encounter the ancient danger.

It is perfectly legitimate for a nation to control its borders. Indeed, it must. No sovereign state can surrender indefinitely the power to decide who may enter, who may remain and upon what terms citizenship may ultimately be acquired. Immigration may be too high. An asylum system may become dysfunctional. Governments may conceal failures behind euphemism and administrative statistics. Citizens who complain about rapid demographic change cannot simply be instructed that their anxieties are immoral.

But from these propositions another does not follow: that the immigrant is the explanation of Britain.

For that is the great deception upon which the new politics of resentment depends.

The British citizen who cannot obtain a doctor’s appointment is invited to look towards the migrant. The young couple who cannot afford a house are invited to look towards the migrant. The worker whose wages have stagnated, the pensioner whose town centre has decayed, the parent whose child’s school is overcrowded and the commuter standing aboard a cancelled train are all encouraged, with varying degrees of subtlety, to look in the same direction.

Yet the migrant did not devise Britain’s planning laws. He did not fail to build sufficient houses. He did not construct the Treasury’s fiscal assumptions. He did not devise the organisation of the National Health Service, neglect Britain’s railways, centralise local government, allow productivity to stagnate or permit successive administrations to substitute cheap labour for investment in machinery, training and infrastructure.

Those were British decisions.

That they were often foolish decisions does not make them foreign ones.

There is something almost indecent in the spectacle of a governing class discovering, after decades of its own errors, that the explanation for the resulting national malaise can conveniently be found in the face of a Romanian builder, a Nigerian nurse, an Indian programmer or a Ukrainian mother.

A serious patriot demands more of his country than an alibi.

Reform’s appeal must nevertheless be understood rather than merely condemned. Nigel Farage has proved exceptionally skilful at recognising political grievances that the established parties preferred not to hear. Reform now presents itself explicitly as the representative of a patriotic working class abandoned by Labour and betrayed by the Conservatives. That claim contains enough truth to make it politically formidable.

For there has been betrayal.

Successive governments promised control and delivered confusion. They celebrated globalisation while distributing its rewards unevenly. They permitted universities, businesses and public services to become dependent upon immigration while simultaneously assuring the electorate that immigration would fall. They encouraged the cultural transformation of communities without always asking whether institutions were capable of absorbing the pace of change. Worst of all, when citizens protested, too many members of the educated classes treated the protest itself as evidence of moral deficiency.

Thus was the ground prepared.

But a physician who correctly identifies the patient’s pain does not thereby demonstrate the wisdom of his prescription.

The question before Britain is therefore not whether immigration should be controlled. Of course it should. Nor is the question whether illegal entry should have consequences. Of course it must. The question is what kind of country Britain proposes to become in exercising those powers.

For there is a profound difference between a nation with borders and a nation obsessed with foreigners.

The former possesses confidence. The latter has lost it.

A confident Britain may say: these are our laws; these are the conditions upon which you may enter; these are the obligations you assume if you remain; this is our language; these are our constitutional traditions; obey them and you may make your life amongst us.

A frightened Britain says something quite different: you are the reason things have gone wrong.

The distinction is everything.

The genius of Britain has never consisted in racial purity. No such Britain has existed. The history of these islands is a history of successive arrivals, absorptions and transformations—Celt and Roman, Angle and Saxon, Dane and Norman, Fleming and Huguenot, Jew and Irishman, Indian, Caribbean, African and European. The English language itself is a magnificent monument to promiscuous borrowing. The monarchy is genealogically international. The City of London became rich because foreigners trusted it. The Empire, whatever judgement history passes upon it, ensured that Britain could never plausibly imagine herself an ethnically sealed provincial society.

This does not mean that unlimited immigration is desirable. It means that Britishness has never depended upon unlimited ancestry.

It has depended upon allegiance.

There lies the alternative which the anti-immigrant movements conspicuously neglect. The proper object of national policy is not ethnic homogeneity but civic integration. A state may reasonably demand knowledge of English, obedience to law, economic contribution, respect for constitutional government and loyalty to the country whose protection the newcomer seeks. These requirements are not xenophobic. On the contrary, they offer the immigrant the supreme compliment of taking seriously his capacity to become one of us.

The politics of permanent foreignness denies him that possibility.

And therein lies its most dangerous characteristic.

Once political advantage is obtained by identifying a class of people as the source of national misfortune, there can never be a sufficient victory. If the boats stop, attention must turn to legal migration. If legal migration falls, attention turns to dependants. If dependants diminish, settled migrants become the subject of controversy. If they cease to suffice, citizenship itself may be divided psychologically into older and newer varieties.

The appetite of resentment grows in the feeding.

One sees already how easily the categories expand. Reform’s contemporary rhetoric ranges beyond illegal migration into questions concerning settled migrants and access to welfare, while its broader political language increasingly portrays immigration not merely as an administrative problem but as a civilisational emergency.

That is precisely why those who consider themselves patriots should be wary.

Britain does not require salvation from its neighbours. It requires competent government.

It requires houses to be built. It requires energy to become affordable. It requires an economy in which productivity rather than population growth produces prosperity. It requires public services organised around the interests of those who use them rather than those who administer them. It requires immigration rules that are comprehensible, enforceable and connected to the country’s economic needs. It requires an asylum system capable of distinguishing rapidly between the genuine refugee and the person without a lawful claim to remain.

Above all, it requires politicians willing to tell the electorate something less agreeable than that all their troubles have identifiable foreign authors.

There is courage in controlling immigration. There may sometimes be courage in reducing it severely. There is no courage in teaching millions of people that their country can be restored simply by finding somebody to exclude from it.

That is not patriotism. It is nostalgia armed with a grievance.

The irony is that the very Britishness which the new populism professes to defend is endangered by the methods employed in its defence. Britain has traditionally mistrusted political hysteria. We dislike uniforms, ideological enthusiasm and men who claim exclusive possession of the national spirit. Our liberties survive partly because we have generally preferred muddle, compromise, humour and law to grand theories of national purification.

There is something profoundly un-British about being perpetually furious about who is British.

The Union Jack is not made more honourable by being waved more violently.

Nor should the established parties imagine that moral denunciation will defeat Reform UK. It will not. Calling voters bigots when they complain about immigration is both intellectually lazy and politically disastrous. Reform flourishes precisely because millions believe that respectable politics refuses to discuss what they can plainly see. The answer to demagoguery is not censorship of the grievance but mastery of the problem.

Control the border.

Enforce the law.

Reduce migration where the national interest requires it.

Integrate those who are lawfully here.

Punish exploitation by employers and traffickers.

Build the houses and infrastructure that population requires.

Then refuse—absolutely refuse—to make foreigners the repository of every British failure.

For nations, like men, reveal their character most clearly when they possess power over those weaker than themselves. A great country does not need to humiliate the stranger in order to know that it belongs to its own people.

The ultimate danger presented by anti-immigrant politics is therefore not that Britain will become insufficiently generous. Nations are not charities and governments have first obligations towards their own citizens.

The danger is that Britain will become smaller in spirit.

A country that once governed territories across the globe, that traded in every ocean, that absorbed exiles from revolutions and refugees from tyrannies, that produced institutions imitated throughout the world, may yet be persuaded that its survival depends upon the desperate men climbing from rubber boats on the Kent coast.

What an extraordinary collapse of national self-confidence that would represent.

There are indeed rivers running through the British story. They run through Oxford and Cambridge, through London, Glasgow, Belfast and Cardiff. They run past cathedrals and factories, mosques and synagogues, council estates and country houses. They carry with them the accumulated sediment of generations—native and newcomer, conqueror and refugee, aristocrat and labourer.

But they need not foam with blood.

They may instead carry something rarer in the politics of our age: the quiet confidence of a nation sufficiently certain of itself that it can defend its frontiers without hating those who stand beyond them, enforce its laws without surrendering to cruelty and cherish its inheritance without pretending that inheritance has never changed.

That would be a patriotism worthy of Britain.

And it would be a far more formidable answer to Reform UK than fear.