Yvette Cooper will this week release videos of people being deported from Britain, as the home secretary attempts to blunt the rise of Reform UK by claiming she is successfully cracking down on illegal working.
Nigel Farage’s rightwing populist grouping is alarming the main political parties, with Labour toughening its stance on irregular migration and the Conservatives trying to fend off suggestions they could strike a deal with Reform.
Farage announced on Sunday that Reform’s membership had topped 200,000. Meanwhile an Opinium poll of voting intentions showed Labour on 27 per cent, Reform on 26 per cent and the Tories on 22 per cent.
Cooper claimed she was boosting immigration enforcement to “record levels”, and that 828 visits and 609 arrests in January — a 73 per cent rise on the same month last year — showed she was tackling illegal working.
In a controversial move, the government will this week release video footage showing enforcement teams in action, in an effort to prove to voters that irregular migrants are being sent home.
“We’re doing it because we have a really strong record on this,” said one Labour official. “Foreign national returns are up 23 per cent on last year, but people don’t believe it. They haven’t seen it with their own eyes.”
A Border Security bill will receive its second reading in the House of Commons on Monday, with Cooper saying the legislation would strengthen the powers of enforcement teams to “smash” people smuggling gangs.
The Home Office said 828 premises were raided in January, including nail bars, convenience stories, restaurants and car washes, and that illegal working was linked to squalid living conditions and little or no pay.
While Reform poses a threat to Labour, it strikes an immediate and even existential challenge to Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives, given that Farage has successfully split the right.
His announcement of 200,000 members puts Reform well above the 131,680 members the Tory party declared before its leadership election last year.
The news will cast further gloom over the Conservatives. On Monday, Badenoch marks 100 days as party leader.
Speculation is swirling in rightwing circles about whether the two parties could form a pact or work together in a hung parliament, a scenario that the leadership of both parties have downplayed.
Alex Burghart, shadow Cabinet Office minister, did not rule out a future deal but told the BBC: “Reform’s stated ambition is to destroy the Conservative party — that’s a pretty difficult first date. While Reform is talking about completely killing us, I don’t think there is a conversation to be had there.”
Badenoch will put forward an amendment to the Border Security bill to make it harder for people to obtain British nationality, in one of her first policy pronouncements since becoming Tory leader in November.
Meanwhile Labour MPs have set up an internal group to focus on the rising threat from Reform after the party took the lead in a national opinion poll for the first time.
A caucus of “red wall” Labour MPs representing seats in the Midlands and northern England already exists, plus a smaller “blue Labour” group of socially conservative parliamentarians.
Apart from toughening up its message on migration, the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, last week told ministers they had to act more like “disrupters”, while Downing Street’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney wants Labour to be “insurgents”.
The first big electoral test for Farage will come on May 1 when local elections take place in 24 of England’s 317 councils. Reform and the Liberal Democrats are expected to win seats from Labour and Tories.
