The summer of 2026 was not quiet for Nigel Farage and his political party, Reform UK. Amid investigations into a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire, Farage resigned his Clacton parliamentary seat, only to stand immediately in a by-election in a bid to secure a fresh mandate from his constituents. Farage defeated Count Binface, the self-described “intergalactic space warrior.” Yet, despite his victory, controversy over Reform UK’s donations has continued, as has intense media scrutiny.

Just one year ago, the media dubbed the summer of 2025 “The Farage Season.” He dominated the political landscape, holding weekly press conferences across Britain. As recently as May 2026, Farage and his right-wing anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, held a ten-point lead in national polls, and the prospect of a Farage premiership felt inevitable.

Examining the Rise

In just two years, Reform UK moved from a marginal force to Britain’s most popular political party. From May 2024 to April 2026, the average constituency in Great Britain (a geographical area that elects a single Member of Parliament (MP) to represent it in the House of Commons) swung 19.7 percentage points to Reform UK, with 78% of British constituencies moving towards Reform by at least 15 percentage points. The two-party grip of Labour and the Conservatives on electoral politics appears to have been broken. Immediately after World War II, the two parties together won a combined 97% of the vote. By 2025, however, their combined “national equivalent” vote share had fallen to just 37%, while Reform UK won the highest third-party vote share in UK electoral history.^[1]

Britain has long resisted electing political extremists, but that resistance could potentially falter amidst a global surge in far-right politics. No single factor explains Farage’s rise; yet, 72% of those considering voting for Reform cited migration as their main motivation. That framing raises two questions: is migration actually driving Reform’s rise, and if so, which migrants, in which places? To answer these questions, an original constituency-level dataset covering all 631 Great Britain parliamentary seats across eight polling waves from May 2024 to April 2026 and four complementary regression models may offer some insight.

Standard explanations linking migration and the far-right emphasize nativism or economic deprivation. This data challenges both accounts and points toward a third: a cultural political economy view, in which voters respond most strongly when culturally distant migrants receive visible state support in constituencies where migrant placement is uncommon.

The Nativism Explanation

Nativism is a common explanation for the link between migration and the far-right. In Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, William Howell and Terry Moe argue that nativism constructs an imagined community, defined by a shared language and culture. This community is explicitly exclusionary toward minorities and immigrants, projecting a romanticized vision of a national identity lost to globalization and cosmopolitan elites.

Farage’s public persona is built around this kind of restoration nativism. Farage is often seen sporting tweed sport-jackets, pastel trousers, and Union Jack socks. While often criticized as inauthentic, his dress invokes a nostalgic view of post-war patriotism. His posturing goes beyond the sartorial; he is known to stage photoshoots that promote old ideas of British pub culture, sipping pints and smoking cigarettes in open defiance of UK regulations. During his Brexit campaign, Farage emphasized that Brexit would restore freedom, declaring that he wanted to get “my country back.” His position on migration follows a similar logic. Farage’s plan, Operation Fortress, frames migration as an ongoing invasion, invoking a similar nativist restoration of a supposedly lost past way of life. Through his dress, political stunts, and rhetoric of past British glory, Farage embodies restoration nativism.

If Reform UK’s rise is driven by nativism, visible migrant presence, regardless of origin, should be associated with rising Reform support. Voters mobilized by nativism, as defined by Howell and Moe, respond to the presence of an outsider. This theory can be tested by examining three separate predictors of Reform vote share: arrivals under the Homes for Ukraine program (roughly 130,000), migrants under the Afghan resettlement scheme (roughly 27,000), and supported asylum seekers on Section 95 or Section 4 support.

The results challenge a generalized nativist account. Neither Ukrainian nor Afghan migrant populations show a positive association with Reform support. Ukrainian arrivals, if anything, correlate with lower Reform support, possibly due to Ukrainian refugees concentrating in cosmopolitan seats where support was already trending away from Reform. Afghan resettlement shows no detectable relationship with Reform vote share in either direction.

If British voters are simply reacting to the presence of foreigners, all three migrant groups (Ukrainian, Afghan, and asylum-supported) should move the needle toward Reform. They do not, indicating that voters have distinguished among migrant groups, and that nativism, in its simplest form, cannot explain the interaction between migration and Reform UK’s rise. This does not rule out the importance of cultural reactions; rather, it shows that the relationship between migrant presence and Reform vote share differs by migrant group.

The Economic Distress Explanation

Economic distress offers a second common explanation for the link between migration and the far right. In The Causes of Populism in the West, Sheri Berman argues that xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and resentment towards outgroups tend to intensify during economic hardship, when lower-education, lower-income, working-class people are worried about unemployment and future job prospects. For example, in The Trade Origins of Economic Nationalism: Import Competition and Voting Behavior in Western Europe, Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig theorize that the “losers” of globalization, the segments of society who bear the greatest adjustment costs of international trade, may gravitate towards radical right parties whose rhetoric “tend[s] to bundle support for domestic free market policies with strong protectionist stances.”

Reform UK’s economic populism targets this demographic, calling for a strong domestic production economy and a retreat from globalization. As constituency-level data on economic distress is not widely available in the UK, unemployment data provides the best available test. The results challenge the economic-distress account: rising unemployment in a constituency correlates strongly with lower Reform support, not higher. A one-percentage-point increase in a constituency’s unemployment rate corresponds to roughly a two-percentage-point decline in Reform vote share. 

This pattern is not unique to Britain. The findings align with the work of political scientist Pippa Norris, who uses World Values Survey data to argue that a cultural backlash against liberal values drives support for the far right. Citing the rise of populist-authoritarian figures in secure, highly educated nations like Sweden and Denmark, Norris suggests that economic inequality alone cannot explain this shift.

While unemployment does not capture economic distress or despair in full, it is the best available indicator at the constituency level. If neither economic distress nor generalized nativism explains the data, what does?

A Cultural Political Economy Account

A cultural political economy perspective draws on both traditions, treating economic and cultural factors as jointly shaping voting behavior. The data suggest that voters may not react to migration in the abstract, but instead respond to a specific, highly visible type of migration. Section 95 supports asylum seekers awaiting a decision on their applications, while Section 4 supports those whose applications have been rejected but who cannot return home. Both of these categories of migrants receive accommodation, typically in hotels or other temporary settings, as well as a financial allowance. Asylum-seeking migrants hit a peak of 175,457 in June of 2023 and remained high throughout the data collection period in this study.

Asylum-seeking migrants–highly visible yet perceived as culturally distant–are seen by voters as threatening social services and welfare resources, driving support for Reform UK. A one-percentage-point increase in a constituency’s share of residents receiving asylum support corresponds to a roughly 11-percentage-point rise in Reform’s vote share, controlling for all fixed constituency characteristics and nationwide shocks. The coefficient is large partly because supported-asylum populations typically make up a small share of constituency populations.

The effect is not uniform across constituencies. In less-deprived constituencies, those above the median on the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), the UK government’s multidimensional measure of area deprivation, the asylum-Reform association is roughly three times larger than in the more-deprived constituencies, and undetectable in the 100 most deprived seats. These findings appear to suggest that the effect is strongest where migrant placements are unusual.

The data suggest that more affluent constituencies respond most sharply to asylum-supported placements, placements that are visible, unusual, and perceived as competition for local resources. This interpretation aligns with Noam Gidron and Jonathan J.B. Mijs’s 2019 paper, Do Changes in Material Circumstances Drive Support for Populist Radical Parties, which examined whether individual-level changes in economic circumstances drove support for radical parties in the Netherlands after the Great Recession. They found that economic factors do not shape support for the radical right primarily through personal income loss, but rather through “an increased scarcity of welfare services, a sharpening of moral boundaries towards outgroups, or growing concerns over subjective social status.”

Take, for example, the constituency of Mid Sussex, a well-off region consistently ranked among England’s least-deprived constituencies. During the period of examination, the constituency’s share of residents receiving asylum support nearly tripled, rising by 0.29 percentage points, while Reform’s vote share increased by 16.4 percentage points. In May 2024, Reform UK polled at 5.6%, and climbed to a peak of 25.7% by January 2026 as exposure to asylum-seeking migrants increased. Furthermore, significant media coverage of a notable migrant hotel, the Copthorne Hotel London Gatwick located in the Mid Sussex area, drew further attention to the migrants in the area.

Mid Sussex’s low unemployment and relative material affluence cannot explain the rightward shift. Instead, the most visible local change was the arrival of a state-supported asylum-seeker population in a constituency where such placements had previously been rare.

Policy Implications

The UK’s Labour government has made progress in reducing the asylum backlog, with applications falling by 21% and small-boat crossings declining by 40% between 2025 and 2026. However, these policy gains have failed to shift public sentiment. As of July 2026, immigration remains the primary concern for UK voters, with 40% incorrectly believing that boat crossings are increasing. This gap likely reflects how Britons understand the term “immigrant,” as 70% primarily associate immigrants with asylum seekers rather than workers or students, and 62% believe asylum seekers take unfair advantage of economic resources.

To bridge this communication gap, the Labour government must continue reducing the asylum backlog, which would shrink the visible asylum population far more rapidly than declining arrival rates alone. This policy should be paired with a strong public messaging campaign by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, drawing on his strength as a skilled communicator.

Furthermore, the Labour government should work to move away from hotel-based accommodation toward more dispersed housing. Though they raise quality of living concerns, hotels are particularly visible and evoke images of luxury in voters’ minds, regardless of the reality inside. This move should be paired with engagement prior to placements. Direct community engagement, such as speaking at town halls, is an inexpensive method of showing that the government values voters’ concerns. Such engagement is particularly important because the sharpest reactions to asylum placement occur in constituencies where such placements are unusual, often affluent seats that are not typically considered political battlegrounds.

Globally, mainstream parties in other countries combating the far right should learn from Britain and disperse migrant placements rather than concentrating them. With the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the National Rally in France, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, all of which echo Farage’s anti-migration rhetoric, the time to act is now.

Nigel Farage’s political future is uncertain. A summer of donation controversies and declining poll numbers has made a Reform UK premiership feel less inevitable than it did earlier in 2026.

However, the underlying pattern that fueled the far right’s rise, voter reactions to visible migrant placement, remains. With at most three years until the next British general election, the evidence suggests that responding effectively to voters’ concerns requires managing where, and how visibly, the state places its most vulnerable residents.

^[1] Calculated from the 2025 local election results, the National Equivalent Vote translates council-level voting into an estimated nationwide vote share.

^[2] The analysis draws on four complementary models: a two-way fixed-effects panel regression, a migration composition model, a matched-pairs design restricted to the 100 most deprived seats, and a stratified fixed-effects model separating deprived from less-deprived constituencies. Full results and dataset available upon request.

Image: Facebook | Reform UK