Immigration and deprivation causing UK public to lose faith in politicians, says Rayner

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/22/immigration-and-deprivation-reasons-uk-public-losing-faith-in-politicians-says-rayner

Posted by acrimoniousone

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28 Comments

  1. Big-Mongoose-9070 on

    It is amazing people in office who show no political will at all to tackle both legal and illegal immigration write such stern articles as this.

    This just adds to people losing faith.

  2. Emergency_Muscle1187 on

    Like I put in another post, she is positioning for the inevitable leadership change that will happen before the next election

  3. This lot are so far behind with public opinion.

    U-turn after u-turn. Just call an election now and be done with it

  4. Academic-Key2 on

    Labour are doing a good job to address it, but the resentment is far too high for the current action to be enough. 

    All the media need is one fresh story of an immigrant doing something bad and the riots are guaranteed. It’s not going to go away because future immigrants have been deterred. 

  5. Competitive_Pen7192 on

    The optics of the Winter Fuel payment back track is terrible.

    Pensioner welfare needs to be tackled, it’ll only get worse as we’re an aging population with less children.

    Hopefully it gets looked at before any major tipping points where the weight of the elderly welfare just crushes everything else as there simply isn’t enough money or working people to get anything done.

    The economy is going to be hard to manage going forward. There is growing global strife which strains economies world wide.

  6. BoringWozniak on

    Economic deprivation is surely the underlying factor.

    With no opportunities to move forward, bad actors will whip up resentment towards immigrants that fuels the fire of scapegoating and hatred.

    What hope can we give people that there are ways to improve their lives?

  7. Remarkable_Misty on

    Well when we effectively have a open border policy with labour i can see why

  8. Intergalatic_Baker on

    Thought she was banging the drums of Far Right Thuggery to blame… when investigators turned up empty and said it was spontaneous action, she still kept her trap shut and didn’t apologise.

  9. coffeewalnut08 on

    And it’s mostly deprivation.

    I mean seriously it’s not that hard to invest in parts of the UK besides London and the Southeast. We need devolution.

  10. Combined with politicians like Labour who do not make work pay and incentivise a benefit culture.

  11. Maybe they’re finally starting to get it, after 30 years of Labour completely ignoring what most people were saying about immigration. I’m still not convinced they actually mean it, let’s see if they actually get immigration figures down to below the values that triggered the Brexit vote.

  12. Labour before the election: *We will smash the gangs, and stop the small boat crisis!*

    Labout after the election: *2025 has seen a record number of small boat crossings to the UK for the first half of the year, up 48% compared to the same period of 2024*

    Gee I wonder why people are losing faith in politicians.

  13. AnalThermometer on

    A snag Labour have is that in opposition they campaigned around deportations being too inhumane, and boiled down the boats problem to “process them faster”, “stop the gangs” and some conspiracy theories about the Tories purposefully letting them in or gumming up the processing system. Labour then quickly scraps the Bibby Stockholm and Rwanda schemes within weeks, which looks weak now that four star hotels are being bought out for migrants. They basically misjudged the problem while in shadow government. Now there are more boats than before.

    The France deal, possibly, isn’t terrible but isn’t sufficient in scale. Italy’s Albania deal (which Starmer tried and failed to join), and Trump’s El Salvador deal are doing more. He effectively needs to be seen to punish what are viewed as freeloaders in the public consciousness, problematically he seemed willing to do so for pensioners and disability benefit receivers but not the migrants.

  14. SeveralAnteater292 on

    The major issue with immigration is your everyday person struggling to get by, having to work all their lives sometimes never getting a house and then seeing the system being exploited and taxpayer money just being given away to people not from this place. Tough pill to swallow.

  15. Hellstorm901 on

    There’s no easy solution to this crisis but let us not for a moment fall for Reform UK’s nonsense and the product they are selling which they advertise will stop the small boats and illegal immigrants overnight as it is about as believable as a man on a wagon in the old west telling you his murky bottle of yellow liquid will cure all ailments

  16. Remove the pull factors for economic migrants and reduce legal immigration below 100k and this problem would go away. Why are they not doing this? It’d solve the majority of their bad press.

  17. Politicians will only do what makes themselves rich and fills their own needs and back pockets. So therefore immigration and putting a foot on the working class will always happen because there is no politician back bone. Reform will be even worse your pension ages will rise… the working class will earn less than the rich your human rights will be tested to a limit to work people into the floor

  18. iamnotinterested2 on

    “The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing”?

    # Nvidia CEO Says He Has Plans to Either Change or Eliminate Every Single Person’s Job With AI

  19. New-Doctor9300 on

    No im fairly certain its the fact that the future of many peoples lives have been fucked over. Age of retirement being pushed up, wages stagnating, housing and living costs going up. People see nothing in the future and realise that nothing will change.

    Immigration is a cheap and easy distraction.

  20. ThinkSpend7452 on

    As is the lack of any discernible difference between Labour and the Conservatives.

  21. I lost faith years ago when the tories and liberals brought in their murderous austerity measures. They caused excess deaths to spike and life expectancy to fall. This current blue tories are continuing the malice and cruelty.

  22. Employ-Personal on

    It’s neither of these, the real reason is that the government has lost legitimacy with the British population, immigration and deprivation are symptoms of incompetent ministers, uncaring and selfish civil service and the fact that the ruling elite has absofuckinglutely no idea what the native population want and actively dislikes and is contemptuous of them.

  23. Things are spiralling out of control, and it seems conventional politics has us locked into a trajectory for collapse.

    Feels more like a managed decline at this point.

    Shame no lessons have been learnt from history. Silly humans

  24. DrIvoPingasnik on

    **THAT’S** what’s causing UK public to lose faith in politicians?

    That’s it? Nobody cared about all the other things like rampant corruption, obstructing bureaucracy, gross incompetence, crumbling NHS, firing of thousands of police officers, austerity, cambridge analitica, defrauding millions in contracts for covid ppe, cuts to Royal Mail, mini fucking budget, stamp duty, housing crisis, allowing the energy companies to fleece people, cost of living crisis…

    But immigration and deprivation crossed the line?

    Get me the hell out of here, this country and its people are done.

  25. Inverted_Goalkeeper on

    Can’t we just put armed boat units in our seas?

    It’s extremely embarrassing that we are being infiltrated like this when we are literally an island. Half of the frustration is knowing how easy it is to stop.