"It won't work" Won't Work

Labour's response to Farage is bound to founder

This week, Nigel Farage announced Reform’s most aggressive policies on migration yet. His plan is to drive up deportations to 600,000 across the lifetime of the next parliament. Flights would be loaded with rejected claimants, with receiving countries paid to accept them, or potentially sanctioned if they don’t. These mass deportation proposals would require the UK to withdraw from a raft of international obligations and would necessitate a significant expansion of the surveillance state. It is further than they have gone before, and points towards even Farage being pulled along by the very online right.

The government response was to attack the plans as “unworkable”. They swung in against the legal and practical barriers of the Reform plan, and the lack of details in the announcement. This seems like poor politics. Even if it is true, it is an argument that will struggle to land with the electorate and will likely play into Reform’s favour. It misjudges how the public relates to such policies and where the persuasive power lies. The argument also fails to pull back those other votes that Labour is at risk of losing – those on the left, who don’t support immigration crackdowns and baulk at Farage.

The charge of impracticality appeals to wonks. But for most voters, the spirit trumps practicality. The critique of the practicalities falls flat, while heightening the salience of the overall issue. Instead, the appeal of the impossible endures, and dismissing the idea only empowers the anti-politics sentiments that Reform and other populist parties benefit from. A far better approach would be to engage with the adverse effects of the policy, drawing away more moderate, Reform-curious voters, and reinforcing their own supporters as a bulwark on the left.

A decade of rising populism has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the “it won’t work” approach to persuasion. Both Brexit and Trump were met with similar arguments. Predictions of chaos and incompetence abounded. A decent chunk of them transpired to be true. Yet few of them made an electoral mark. Indeed, these technical dismissals often seem to work in the populists’ favour.

There are some obvious reasons for this. The first is that arguing about feasibility can lead to getting drawn into hypotheticals. If the response to “it won’t work” is that “It will” or “It might”, the discussion stagnates. It becomes hard to persuade people that it won’t work, and while you are doing so, you are boosting the headline claim. Voters, especially low-information voters who tend to lean towards populists, aren’t listening to the details, but are hearing that Farage intends to deport large numbers of people. Even if they clock that he might not meet his target, they will be impressed by his vigour, and the thought that even falling short will still be an “improvement” on what happens now.

Beyond this, the practicality argument plays into the battle Reform wants to draw at the next election. As I’ve written before, part of the appeal of Reform is that it pushes an anti-politics, anti-system, anti-status quo position, and attracts voters who are willing to risk a throw of the dice. The established parties saying that a plan won’t work plays into this. “You can’t do this” tends to sound more like “We can’t do this and don’t want you to try”. It burnishes Farage’s radical credentials and Reform’s position as a rebuttal to the status quo. The government, by contrast, looks like impotent technocrats and naysayers, precisely the sort of thing that Reform are trying to contrast itself against.

By contrast, downplaying Farage’s plans is likely to embolden those who are more tentative about voting Reform. There remains a chunk of soft-Reform voters – the sorts of people who are concerned about immigration, but would baulk at rounding people up by the tens of thousands. Hearing that this plan “won’t work” or “can’t happen” soothes their worries about voting Reform. As seen with Trump and the run-up to last year’s election, the populist playbook survives on reassuring more moderate voters that you won’t, or can’t do the most extreme things you are talking about. The “It won’t work” approach does this for them. These two points may seem mutually exclusive, but voters look for the message they want to hear. Those who want Farage’s plan to happen will dismiss the naysaying. Those who are tentative about it will parse it as an excuse to back him and his party.

Running through all this is a bigger truth. Most voters aren’t focused on feasibility, but on resonance. They are voting for the person who understands them, not the one who understands policy. The desire for control, in this case of immigration, and for a straightforward solution, is more important than the actuality of it. They are looking at matters seriously, but not literally. A plan for mass deportations doesn’t have to be workable; it just has to look like a symbolic shift, a sign that Farage is going to be on their side. Displacing this means more than simply saying “it won’t work”.

Instead, the government would be better focusing on the implications if it did work. The most obvious aspect of this is the plan to shovel money at rogue regimes to accept migrants back. This has already proven unpopular, with a majority of voters finding it unacceptable to give money to the Taliban. Stressing that the policy would result in funding these regimes is far more effective than saying “it won’t work”. So, too, I suspect, would be pushing the idea that blanket deportations would mean returning people to torture and death. Yes, there is some element of the electorate that is totally uninterested in the fates of refugees. But it is a small fraction. A good play would be to appeal the rest. Again, that Farage is already rowing back on the deportation of women and children suggests he senses a vulnerability here.

The same goes for the domestic implications of such a policy. Examples from the US show what migrant crackdowns mean in practice – an erosion of liberty. The dragnet will never be as targeted as its proponents suggest. Instead, it would result in harassment of those who might be mistaken for illegal migrants (generally, non-white, legal migrants). It also runs the risk of unlawful detention and mistaken deportations, a Windrush-scandal writ large. Rather than dismissing this as something that can’t happen, show the dystopian implications, already handily illustrated by the record of our own Home Office, and what is playing out in the United States now.

These types of attack also play into the other element of what is missing from Labour’s “It won’t work” attack: an offering for those who are not Reform curious. Already, too much of the Labour response has boiled down to “they are right, but let us do it instead”. This lacks the moral clarity and defence of migration and refuge that many on the left are looking for. The government should be able to muster some reason for saying this is not just impractical but wrong in a way that appeals to their own voters and starts to persuade those who are Reform-leaning.

The real problem with the “it will not work” attack is that it treats politics as management when Reform is playing politics as theatre. They are not laying out a deliverable programme, they are performing anger and defiance, offering voters a gesture of rupture. In contrast, feasibility seems like a foreign language.

Labour needs an answer that speaks to both principle and persuasion. That means reminding voters why blanket deportations are wrong, not merely impractical. It means shifting the argument onto ground where they are stronger: rebuilding public services, restoring competence, lowering the temperature on immigration by addressing the broader conditions of insecurity. Above all, it means refusing to echo Reform’s framing. To say “they are right, but let us do it” is to surrender the argument entirely.

If mainstream parties cannot summon that clarity, they will find themselves endlessly dragged onto Reform’s terrain. And on that ground, no amount of warnings that something “will not work” will save them.

And now, something else…

My picks from around the web this week.