The Overton window on immigration has been flung so wide open that the idea of mass deportations is now part of the mainstream.

It’s only natural that some liberal-minded people are alarmed by this, especially those who have built their politics around openness and diversity. It is also only natural to look for bad actors behind the shift in rhetoric and opinion, which is said to have driven last year’s Southport riots, this year’s hotel protests, and the Raise the Colours movement.

Many liberal commentators blame the emerging mood on the critics of recent trends rather than the trends themselves: massive unselective legal immigration, highly visible illegal flows, a sense of disorder and criminality associated with some recent arrivals, the dramatic shift in Britain’s ethnic balance in just 25 years, and the return of the grooming gangs scandal.

Another example of blaming the messenger was published last week in the New Statesman. In a piece entitled “The age of deportation”, Tanjil Rashid asserts that the idea of mass deportation changes what it means to be British. He adds, in the accompanying podcast, that ex-MP Douglas Carswell — who does indeed say objectionable things about deporting all British Muslims — is “driving the agenda” of a Right echoing Enoch Powell’s ethnonationalism.

It is true that Nigel Farage’s aim of deporting 600,000 people who are here illegally — a little over half the estimated illegal population — is not something that would have been said a year ago. But why does sheer scale change the meaning of being British unless you think that deportation of illegal immigrants is itself un-British (beyond the current tiny numbers)? Rashid’s answer is an oddly old-fashioned one, based on an idea of Britain/England as something which isn’t really a place at all but instead “a grand confluence”, a crossroads-cum-melting pot with a “global identity”.

This takes us back to the Seventies and Eighties and publications such as Race and Class. The editor Ambalavaner Sivanandan — quoted by Rashid — took Britain’s pre-national imperial identity, still strong enough to inform the 1948 Act that granted citizenship to all people of the Empire and Commonwealth, and flipped it into a post-national, multicultural one. Under both regimes, we become interchangeable units outside of any particular national culture.

No other modern nation thinks like this. But it does help to explain the complexities and diffidence of England’s national identity, at least at the elite level, for so long subsumed within both Britain and Empire.

Rashid blurs the lines between racists and those with legitimate concerns about the scale and speed of immigration. The latter are just expressing a normal yearning for a national home with controlled borders. Such people aren’t against immigration in principle; they merely want moderate inflows and immigrants who pay their way and merge their own traditions with British ones. Instead, he gives succour to a naïve universalist idea of the country, one that is uneasy with a confident English identity.

Social tensions are on the rise and far-Right activists have played a role in recent protests. But the anti-racism taboo remains one of the strongest in British society — on the Right as well as the Left. Carswell’s “deport all Muslims” rhetoric is not mainstream. And who with influence on the Right supports this idea of a “pure English nation”? Kemi Badenoch? Zia Yusuf?

A country in which only 3% of the population says you have to be white to be truly British — yes there are still some racists — is hardly returning to the late Sixties. When I interviewed Farage on the 50th anniversary of the “Rivers of Blood” speech, he said that, though he was a Powellite in his youth, he now believed Ted Heath had been right to sack Powell from the Tory front bench. It was, he said, the brutality of Powell’s rhetoric that prevented a serious, hard-headed debate about immigration for three decades.

The rise of Reform UK and the hardening of rhetoric is a response to the failures of mainstream politics, especially over immigration and issues of national sovereignty and identity. It is not some monster from the Powellite basement that has awoken from its slumber.

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David Goodhart is the author of The Care Dilemma: Freedom, Family, Fertility, which is published in paperback on 11 September 2025. He is head of the Demography unit at the think tank Policy Exchange.

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