Labour’s answer to illegal migration is a TikTok feed of raids and arrests, borrowing the aesthetics of successful enforcement without the substance that made it work.
Government by gimmick. Less than two years into their term, and Labour are already reduced to trying to reduce illegal migration with short form video content.
Keir Starmer’s struggling regime has launched an official TikTok account called “Secure Borders UK” to post videos of immigration raids, arrests and deportations in an effort to counter online misinformation and deter migrants from attempting dangerous Channel crossings. Say what you want about his efforts, but at least Canute had an air of dignity.
The account closely mirrors the Trump administration’s embrace of short-form video, borrowing formats that first emerged within online right-wing Twitter circles. Official US government accounts such as the Department of Homeland Security have long discovered that performative enforcement plays well on social media: tightly edited montages of raids, handcuffs, officers in tactical gear, and suspects being led away, set to punchy music and bold captions such as “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED”.
Labour now appears to believe that mimicking the aesthetic might substitute for actually exercising authority. The problem is that the Trump administration has been deporting tens of thousands. Keir’s videos will be of arrests; the American equivalents are of arrests and subsequent deportation flights. Performance was matched by consequence.
This matters because the politics of enforcement are not primarily visual but substantive. People may support deportations in the abstract, but they do not like the aesthetics of deportation, any more than they want to watch where their pork chop comes from. The American experience shows that over-emphasising spectacle carries real risks: in the US, a cadre of professional agitators now follow ICE agents in the hope of filming arrests that go badly or simply look unpleasant, precisely because they know the public recoils from images that feel cruel or mean. In other words, even when deportations are actually happening, the memes are of dubious value. In Britain’s case, Labour have managed to invert the logic entirely—foregrounding the aesthetics of enforcement while failing to deliver the underlying policy. They have got it ass-backwards. Anyone being cavalier about how this plays with the general public does not care about achieving the meaningful substance of immigration enforcement. It is another of the sophisticated Shabana Mahmood bait-and-switch plays identified by Chris Bayliss.
To Labour’s credit, enforcement activity has increased. The number of raids by British immigration enforcement teams are up 77% since July 2024, whilst arrests are up 83%. According to the Home Office, it represents the highest number of arrests and enforcement raids against illegal workers and those facilitating illegal employment since records began — all the way back in 2019. Labour must be given their due; this is an improvement, but it is only the lowest hanging fruit – which the Tories somehow left unpicked. A total of 1,726 people arrested have been sent back to their home countries; yet 41,472 arrived last year via the Channel alone. The number of returns is not 10%; it’s not even 5%.
But it’s not quite fair to say Labour have been “reduced” to government by gimmick. Labour’s proposals on illegal migration have always been gimmicks, little more than headline grabbing slogans designed to signal action and produce — at best — marginal effects, whilst the substantive pull factors are left untouched.
“Smash the gangs”, unaccompanied by it was by any serious programme to reduce migration pull factors or introduce measures that would have made it substantively easier to deport illegal migrants — and therefore break the gang’s business models —has never amounted to anything more than a slogan, as empty of “stop the boats” before it. Tackling pull factors would involve cutting the overly generous settlement package given to new arrivals, something the hardcore base of Labour is unlikely to stand, and may drive them to the rising parties of the left. It would also mean confronting the dense web of international human rights law routinely weaponised by activist lawyers to prevent removals of people who should never have been here in the first place in the country. are of limited value when lax regulation in sectors such as food delivery continues to provide easy workarounds.
A Whitehall source told The Sun that the account was to help prevent people being exploited by “fake news superspreaders” and to tackle “those who deal in mis- information”, though whether this refers to domestic activists or foreign smuggling networks remains unclear.
The source also claims it will “act as a channel to show those paying people smugglers that you will be caught if you come to the UK illegally, and deported.” Statistically that isn’t likely, but marginal effects are still effects. These videos are aimed at suggestible people; accounts posting scantily clad girls on nights out in cities like Manchester and Leeds are used by people smuggling accounts as recruitment tools.
Video has also been shown to have deterrent effects, too; more than a decade ago, Australian government warnings promising migrants “if you travel by boat without a visa you will never make Australia home” proved successful; it should be noted, however, that they were accompanied by an aggressive programme of of boat turn-backs: vessels were intercepted at sea, with those on board either pushed back, returned to their country of origin, or transferred to third countries for offshore processing, such as Nauru or Papua New Guinea.
Starmer is not going to order turn-backs, has cancelled the Rwanda scheme, floated and abandoned a similar deal with Albania, and announced a “one-in, one-out” deal that has produced a net effect of zero. Without enforcement that bites, what remains is not deterrence but theatre, a government that can do little more than hope a few viral clips might succeed where years of legal timidity and bureaucratic paralysis have failed.
