When Patriotism Needs an Enemy: Britain Should Remember Where This Road Can Lead
by David Palethorpe
There is nothing shameful about loving your country.
There is nothing unreasonable about wanting secure borders.
There is nothing extremist about believing immigration should be controlled, that asylum claims should be decided quickly, that people with no legal right to remain should ordinarily be removed, or that governments have a responsibility to consider the effects of rapid population change on housing, wages, public services and communities.
Those are legitimate political arguments.
But something different is happening when immigration ceases to be a question of policy and becomes a story about who really belongs.
That distinction matters.
Britain is again hearing the vocabulary of national emergency, invasion, betrayal and restoration.
Reform UK has described the Channel situation as a “national emergency”; its own material has used the language of Britain being “invaded” and promises what it calls the largest mass-deportation operation in modern British history.
Restore Britain states that mass immigration has damaged the country and proposes removing some legally resident foreign nationals as well as making citizenship harder to obtain. (Reform UK)
These positions should be debated on what they actually say—not caricatured but not sanitised either.
And Britain should be particularly careful about the political transformation that occurs when human beings become an undifferentiated threatening mass.
A border is a policy.
A human being is not.
The latest Home Office statistics provide a useful corrective to political theatre.
In the year ending June 2026, about 38,000 people were detected arriving through illegal entry routes, including approximately 33,000 by small boat.
About 86,000 people claimed asylum during that year.
Just over half of asylum seekers had arrived through illegal routes, while 41% had previously held a visa or other permission to be in Britain.
Britain ranked fifth among EU+ countries for the absolute number of asylum applicants in the comparable period—but sixteenth when measured per head of population. (GOV.UK)
Those figures do not tell us what immigration policy ought to be.
They do something more elementary.
They tell us what we are actually talking about.
A democracy is perfectly entitled to decide who may enter its territory.
It can reduce immigration.
It can increase enforcement.
It can remove people whose claims have failed, subject to its laws and obligations.
Citizens can peacefully protest against immigration policy; indeed, a parliamentary motion sponsored by Restore leader Rupert Lowe explicitly frames such protest as a democratic right. (Early Day Motions)
But none of those propositions requires us to transform migrants collectively into an invading force.
That is a political choice of language.
And history teaches us to pay attention to language.
The dangerous word is “they”
Nationalism becomes most combustible when complicated social problems acquire a wonderfully simple explanation:
“They did this to us”.
Housing shortage?
“Them”.
Pressure on the NHS?
“Them”.
Crime?
“Them”.
Low wages?
“Them”.
A changing high street, unfamiliar languages, cultural anxiety, national decline?
“Them”.
It is politically intoxicating because it turns structural problems into human enemies.
Britain has a housing shortage created over decades.
Britain has struggled with productivity, regional inequality, social-care capacity, infrastructure and public-service provision.
Governments have repeatedly made choices about migration while failing adequately to plan for its consequences.
Immigration interacts with those problems.
Pretending otherwise would be foolish.
But reducing them all to the presence of foreigners is equally foolish.
And once politics starts dividing society into an authentic national “us” and a suspect foreign “them”, the argument is no longer merely about how many visas should be issued next year.
It becomes an argument about belonging.
That deserves scrutiny whichever party uses it.
We have seen the machinery before
Europe does not lack experience of ethnic nationalism.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in 1914 occurred within a combustible landscape of Serbian and South Slav nationalism, imperial rivalry, militarism and competing alliances.
It would be absurd to claim nationalism alone caused the First World War.
It would be equally absurd to pretend nationalist movements played no part in the Europe that exploded.
The lesson of the twentieth century is not that every patriot becomes a fascist.
That is historically illiterate.
The lesson is that nationalism possesses an extraordinarily powerful political mechanism: it can persuade ordinary people that strangers who share their nationality matter more than neighbours who do not.
At low temperature that can mean flags, football, ceremonies and affection for home.
At higher temperature it can mean exclusion.
At still higher temperature it can become the belief that the nation is being contaminated, replaced, invaded or betrayed from within.
Europe knows where that vocabulary can lead.
Yugoslavia knows.
Rwanda knows.
India and Pakistan know what happens when identity, territory and fear become fused.
None of this means Britain in 2026 is Nazi Germany, Rwanda in 1994 or Yugoslavia in 1992.
Such comparisons, casually made, illuminate nothing.
History does not repeat itself by photocopy.
What history gives us instead are warning mechanisms.
One of them is the deliberate conversion of individual human beings into a threatening category.
The politics of “invasion”
Words deserve particular attention because they shape the problem before policy has even begun.
Reform’s Zia Yusuf has described Britain as being “invaded” and called a proposed migrant accommodation site “ground zero for the invasion of Britain”.
Reform proposes using the Royal Navy to intercept unauthorised Channel crossings and return those aboard.
Nigel Farage has separately described masked protesters involved in recent demonstrations as “horrible”, illustrating that Reform itself contains arguments about where legitimate anti-immigration politics ends and harder nationalist activism begins. (Reform UK)
Restore Britain occupies different territory again.
Its published immigration policy does not limit proposed removal to illegal entrants.
It identifies circumstances in which legally resident foreign nationals could also be deported and concludes: “If that means millions go, then millions go.” (Restore Britain)
People should read these policies themselves.
They should also ask difficult questions.
What precisely constitutes failure to “integrate”?
Who decides?
What protections exist against arbitrary decisions?
What happens to families containing British citizens and foreign nationals?
How should long-term residents be treated?
Where does enforcement of immigration law end and an ideological project to alter the ethnic or cultural composition of the country begin?
Those questions are not an attempt to silence debate.
They are the debate.
Patriotism does not require amnesia
Britain’s national story has never been ethnically pure.
The Romans came.
Angles, Saxons and Jutes came.
Vikings came.
Normans came.
Huguenots came.
Jews fleeing persecution came., – and returned after they had been expelled.
Irish people came.
Caribbean families came.
Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Africans, Poles, Ukrainians and countless others came.
Some arrived freely.
Some arrived through the violent machinery of empire.
Some were invited because Britain needed workers.
Some fled persecution.
Some came because British power had helped create a world in which London sat at the centre of enormous networks of trade, government, war and migration.
They did not erase Britain.
They became part of Britain.
That does not mean unlimited immigration is desirable.
It does not answer whether net migration should be 50,000 or 500,000.
It does not tell us what the asylum rules should be.
It establishes something simpler:
Britishness has never been a sealed biological inheritance.
The test of patriotism
Perhaps patriotism should be measured less by the size of the flag than by what someone believes the flag represents.
If Britain means parliamentary democracy, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, peaceful disagreement and the dignity of the individual, those principles become most important when applying them is inconvenient.
A principle that protects only people we like is not much of a principle.
And there is another uncomfortable truth.
Nobody chooses where they are born.
Move the cradle a few hundred miles and the anthem changes.
Move it several thousand and perhaps the religion, language and passport change too.
Yet every nation teaches its children that their particular accident of geography carries profound significance.
Perhaps it does.
Home matters.
Language matters.
Shared memory matters.
Community matters.
But the accident of birthplace cannot tell us the value of the person standing in front of us.
That must be the line Britain refuses to cross.
Control the border if voters demand controlled borders.
Debate immigration numbers.
Enforce democratically enacted law.
Demand competent government.
Prosecute criminals regardless of nationality.
Remove people who have no lawful entitlement to remain where the law provides for removal.
But never confuse administration with human worth.
Never allow “illegal” to become a description of someone’s humanity rather than their immigration status or manner of entry.
And be suspicious whenever politicians need an entire category of people to explain why the country is failing.
Because history’s most dangerous political sentence rarely begins:
“I have a complicated policy proposal.”
It begins:
“Your problems are because of those people.”
A confident Britain should be capable of something better.
It should be capable of controlling its borders without surrendering its humanity; of discussing immigration without pretending every concern is hatred; and of challenging hatred without pretending every concern is illegitimate.
Most importantly, it should understand that patriotism does not have to mean narrowing the circle of people whose lives matter.
A country is not made stronger by discovering more people to fear.
The question facing Britain is therefore larger than immigration.
It is what kind of patriotism Britain wants to practise: one defined principally by ancestry and exclusion, or one rooted in institutions, citizenship, obligations and a shared civic life.
That argument belongs to the British people.
But history gives them every reason to examine the language, the policies and the consequences with their eyes wide open.
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