The Electoral Risks of Accommodating the Radical Right. Evidence from the British Labour Government

Social democratic parties have increasingly adopted restrictive immigration rhetoric in response to radical right challengers’ electoral successes. The consequences of accommodation remain contested. This paper leverages a pre-registered quasi-experimental design exploiting within-individual variation from as-good-as-random exposure to UK Labour leader Keir Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech – a major rhetorical turn toward anti-immigration positions. We find that the speech altered aggregate perceptions of Labour’s position on immigration and increased the salience of the issue, but was unsuccessful in boosting support for Labour. Instead, the anti-immigration rhetoric yielded no significant increase in Labour support, significantly reduced Starmer’s personal favorability, and there is suggestive evidence that it benefited the radical right party Reform UK. These findings indicate that social democratic parties may have more to lose than to gain by contesting elections on the terrain of their radical right competitors.