Britain races to the bottom on migration

Fed up with the Conservatives, some voters turn to the anti-immigration Reform party for answers

- SYLVIA HUI

Reform party leader Nigel Farage at an arcade in Clacton-on-Sea, England. Farage is attracting Conservative voters with his pledge to "take our country back."

Dorothy Carr is fed up with how things are run in her hometown. It’s impossible to get a doctor’s appointment through Britain’s staterun health-care system. Local buses have been cancelled. There isn’t enough public housing.

Like many others in Clacton-onSea — a town on England’s southeast coast where many older, white voters used to staunchly support the governing Conservatives — the retiree feels a deep sense of disillusionment with the party. Instead, Carr says she is probably voting for the populist Reform U.K. party in next week’s national election because she agrees with its core message: Record immigration has damaged Britain.

“This country’s getting to be a joke, a complete joke,” Carr said as she looked out to the sea from Clacton beach. “Nothing’s like it used to be. There’s just too many people. We can’t handle it.”

Britain is going to the polls to elect a new House of Commons at a time when public dissatisfaction is running high over a host of issues, from the high cost of living and a stagnating economy to a dysfunctional health-care system and crumbling infrastructure.

That disillusionment has given the opposition Labour Party a significant lead in the polls — but it has also given oxygen to Reform and its leader Nigel Farage, who is drawing growing numbers of Conservative voters with his pledge to “take our country back.”

Opponents have long accused Farage of fanning racist attitudes toward migrants and condemned what they call his scapegoat rhetoric. They argue that chronic underfunding of schools, hospitals and housing under successive governments on both left and right — particularly in poorer areas like Clacton — is the real problem, not migrants.