Plaudits from Robinson should be a flashing red light on any government’s dashboard.
So, it’s finally happened. Tiny Tommy Robinson – or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as his Irish immigrant mum christened him – has publicly endorsed the Labour government’s new immigration policy.
“The Overton window has been obliterated,” he cheered. “Well done patriots!”
For those of us who have spent years campaigning for a fairer, more tolerant, more open-minded Britain, this is a moment of pure political horror. But for regular Ugly Politix [and West Country Voices] readers – who like to get under the bonnet to understand why our politics is so broken – it will come as no surprise.
It is a predictable, structural, and inevitable symptom of the disease at the heart of Westminster.
These new Labour policies are a catalogue of “performative cruelty” lifted straight from the Danish far-right playbook: temporary refugee status, a 20-year path to settlement, asset confiscation, and the explicit threat of deporting families.
And the backlash from within Labour has been visceral. Backbenchers are correctly identifying the plans as “dystopian,” “cruel,” and a total “departure from traditional Labour values.”
They are right. But they are also missing the fundamental point.
This isn’t just a failure of ideology or a sudden lurch to the right by Keir Starmer. This is what first past the post (FPTP) does to political parties. It rots them from the inside out, forcing them into a race to the bottom they can never, ever win.
The first rule of gesture politics is that you cannot beat the extremists at their own game.
When a mainstream, centre-left party adopts the language and policies of the far-right, it doesn’t win those voters. It legitimises the far-right’s arguments. It signals to the public that the “cruel” and “dystopian” position is, in fact, the new centre ground.
Tommy Robinson’s glee says it all. Labour has done his job for him. They have “obliterated” the previous Overton window (the range of political ideas and policies that are considered acceptable by the mainstream public at a given time), validating the divisive and destructive politics that campaigners for democratic reform have been fighting to contain.
This isn’t a show of strength to “restore order.” It is a catastrophic act of political self-harm, a panicked reaction to the fear of losing.
And that fear, that panic, is a direct product of our electoral system.
Let’s be clear about the political mechanics at play. The Labour government is not crafting this policy for the 70 million or so people who live in the United Kingdom. It is not even doing it for the millions who voted for them in 2024.
They are doing this to appease a few thousand perceived swing voters in a handful of “Red Wall” marginal seats.
This is the grim reality of FPTP. The system forces our two main parties to ignore their national vote share and obsess over a tiny slice of the electorate in key postcodes. Labour MPs in these seats are terrified of Reform UK, so party managers – Morgan McSweeney et al – are pushing the leadership into tougher and tougher stances, parroting far right immigration garbage in the misguided hope it will stem the precipitous fall in support seen since the 2024 election.
This is the “minority rule” I often talk about. A policy that is abhorrent to the vast majority of Labour members and voters – and likely a majority of the country – is being steamrolled into law because a tiny group of voters in the “right” places holds the entire government hostage.
This is not proper democracy. It is a cynical strategic manoeuvre, and it is failing on its own terms.
And just look at what happened under the “Danish model” Labour is so proud to be copying. The Danish Social Democrats shifted hard-right on immigration to stop voters from defecting to the far-right. The result? They lost their progressive, urban base and, according to analysis, simply “primed their own voters to join the far right” in the long run.
It is a strategic, political, and moral dead end.
The internal Labour dissent is justified and welcome, but it is aimed at the wrong target. Getting angry at Keir Starmer or Shabana Mahmood for this “betrayal” is like shouting at the symptom rather than curing the disease.
As long as we are trapped in the FPTP death spiral, our politics will always be dragged to the extremes. Parties will always be forced to choose gestures over solutions, and fear over values, just to win those few crucial marginals.
The only way to stop mainstreaming the far-right is to fix our broken political ecosystem.
Under a system of proportional representation (PR), this entire toxic dynamic vanishes. A party like Reform UK might get 30 per cent of the vote, but in those circumstances PR would give them a fair 30 per cent of the seats – not 100 per cent control of the national agenda as FPTP would.
PR would free Labour to act on its values, secure in its national vote share, without being held to ransom by the perceived prejudices of a small minority of voters. It would force a politics of consensus and long-term problem-solving, not short-term, cruel gestures.
Much as it pains me to say it, Tommy Robinson is right on this point (even a blind squirrel will occasionally find a nut) – the previous Overton window HAS been obliterated. But it was our unfair and dysfunctional first past the post system that provided the brick.
It’s time to stop getting angry at all the ugly politics and start fixing the ugly system that gives rise to it.
This article was first published in Ugly Politix and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.
