Every system in decline leaves wreckage in its wake. When the state fails to provide for basic needs, such as housing, health care, security, dignity then people improvise. They lash together whatever scraps remain of political traditions, cultural myths, and collective memory, hoping to build something that floats. These makeshift vessels are what we might call rafts of resistance. They are provisional, fragile, and often contradictory. Some rafts are built for survival; others for conquest. Some set out toward freedom, others drift back toward authoritarian shores.

The current wave of anti-immigration protests sweeping across the United Kingdom is one such raft. Sparked by an incident at an asylum-seeker accommodation in Essex, protests have mushroomed into a nationwide movement, with marches from London to Liverpool, Cardiff to Portsmouth. On the surface, these demonstrations look like spontaneous eruptions of local anger. In reality, they are being steered and reinforced by forces with far more sinister ambitions – far-right agitators, media opportunists, and most prominently Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s hard-right party, which has surged in the polls by posing as the only voice of “ordinary people.”

These anti-immigrant mobilisations are not merely expressions of community frustration. They are rafts built from the debris of neoliberal collapse, steered by authoritarian hands, and designed to shore up a politics of exclusion and fear. They represent a hijacking of grassroots energy that could otherwise be directed against the state and capital. For anarchists, the challenge is not only to expose the rotten timber holding these rafts together but to offer alternative vessels rooted in solidarity, mutual aid, and internationalism that can navigate us toward liberation rather than xenophobia.

The Wreckage of Neoliberal Britain

To understand why anti-immigrant protests have found fertile ground, we must begin with the wreckage left by decades of neoliberal governance. Successive governments, Conservative and Labour alike, hollowed out the social safety net, privatised public services, and left working-class communities to rot. Austerity slashed local government budgets, gutted youth centres, libraries, and housing maintenance. The NHS, once a point of pride, became chronically understaffed and underfunded.

Into this landscape of precarity came waves of crises – financial crash, pandemic, spiralling rents, stagnant wages. For many, daily life feels like survival on a sinking ship. When local hotels were converted into temporary housing for asylum seekers, they became convenient symbols of everything the state had failed to provide.

Instead of asking why public money goes to private contractors running these facilities for profit, or why the government refuses to invest in social housing, many were encouraged to blame migrants themselves. This scapegoating is not accidental – it is cultivated by tabloids, amplified by politicians, and weaponised by the far right. It is easier to direct rage downward at the stranger next door than upward at the class that profits from misery.

The Rise of Reform UK – A Raft of Reaction

Enter Reform UK. Like its predecessor UKIP, Reform is less a coherent political programme than a floating raft cobbled together from resentment, nostalgia, and authoritarian promises. Its planks include mass deportations, withdrawal from human rights frameworks, and the end of hotel-based asylum housing. Farage positions his party as the authentic voice of the people, a direct rebuke to “elites” in Westminster and Brussels.

But make no mistake: this is not grassroots power. It is a managed performance of revolt, one that thrives precisely because of state failure yet always circles back to reinforce state power. By directing working-class anger against migrants, Reform strengthens the ruling class’s ability to deflect blame for systemic crises. The party may rail against “elites,” but its vision is of a fortress Britain tightly controlled by borders, police, and authoritarian leaders.

The raft metaphor helps here. Reform’s vessel is not seaworthy in the long run. It leaks contradictions, it is held together by nostalgia rather than a plan for survival. But in stormy seas, even a shoddy raft can look like salvation. For those abandoned by neoliberalism, Reform offers the illusion of safety and order, while in practice tightening the chains of exploitation.

Carnival of Protest, Spectacle of Exclusion

The anti-immigration protests themselves resemble carnivals: street marches filled with flags, chants, and confrontations with police. In many communities, they have temporarily overturned normal hierarchies – neighbours uniting in defiance, councils scrambling, police mobilising in large numbers. On the surface, these are moments of empowerment for participants and a chance to feel part of something larger, to assert collective strength.

Yet the carnival is hollow. Rather than challenging the state or capital, these spectacles reinforce the border as the central political question. Instead of asserting the dignity of the dispossessed, they scapegoat the even more marginalised. What could have been an uprising against austerity becomes a theatre of exclusion.

This is how authoritarian populism works: it gives people the thrill of rebellion without threatening the system’s foundations. It offers the intoxicating feeling of collective power while funnelling it into reactionary channels. It builds rafts that float, but only in circles, never toward liberation.

The Global Drift: From Trump to Farage

The UK is not unique. Across the globe, far-right leaders have mastered the art of hijacking discontent. Donald Trump in the United States channelled anger at globalisation and economic decline into a nationalist crusade. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil rode resentment at corruption and crime into authoritarian rule. In each case, the far right presents itself as anti-elite and anti-system, yet serves the very interests of capital.

The common thread is appropriation. Elements once associated with radical critique – distrust of institutions, calls for free speech, disdain for bureaucrats – are stripped of liberatory intent and reassembled as tools of reaction. These leaders do not invent new vessels; they salvage from the wreckage of left traditions, hammering together rafts that resemble revolt but sail toward authoritarian shores.

Reform UK’s rise follows this script. It is Trumpism translated into British idiom, a movement that cloaks xenophobia in the language of common sense and community defence.

Anarchist Rafts: Building on Solidarity

Against these reactionary rafts, anarchists must build our own. Ours are not vessels of exclusion but of solidarity. They are crafted from the same wreckage – economic collapse, political disillusion, community despair – but assembled differently. Instead of scapegoating migrants, we insist that borders are weapons of the ruling class. Instead of clinging to nostalgia for empire, we imagine futures of mutual aid and collective care.

History offers examples. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the US state abandoned Black communities in New Orleans, anarchists and grassroots groups organised food distribution, health care, and housing. During the pandemic, mutual aid networks provided groceries and support when government failed. These are rafts of survival that embody anarchist principles: horizontal, cooperative, rooted in care rather than coercion.

The task is to make such rafts visible and viable, to show that liberation is not only possible but already being practised in fragments. We must be ready to intercept those drifting toward authoritarian vessels and offer them space on ours.

Confronting the Far Right: Beyond Liberal Condemnation

Too often, the liberal response to anti-immigration protests is moral condemnation. Politicians scold protesters for bigotry, journalists warn of extremism, police crack down with arrests. While necessary in rejecting racism, these responses miss the deeper point: – people are angry because life under neoliberalism is unbearable. Simply condemning them will not stem the tide; it will only deepen the appeal of those who claim to be the only ones listening.

Anarchists must go further. We must both oppose the far right and address the material conditions that fuel its growth. That means fighting for housing, health care, decent wages, and dignity, not as reforms granted by the state, but as rights we organise and seize collectively. It means entering into dialogue with those swept up in nationalist fervour, not to excuse racism but to redirect anger upward, toward the true architects of misery.

Only by offering a raft that genuinely floats, one built on solidarity and mutual aid, can we prevent people from clinging to the sinking wreck of nationalism.

Toward Internationalist Resistance

Borders are lines drawn by states to divide the working class. They are tools for controlling labour, policing movement, and fostering division. Every anti-immigrant protest strengthens the border regime and weakens class solidarity. For anarchists, internationalism is not optional, it is the only viable strategy.

When migrants arrive in the UK, they are not invaders; they are fellow workers, fellow humans fleeing wars, poverty, and climate disasters often caused or worsened by Britain’s own imperial legacy. To scapegoat them is to side with empire, not against it.

Our rafts must therefore be internationalist. They must link struggles across borders: tenant unions in London with migrant workers in Calais, anti-deportation campaigns in Manchester with climate justice movements in the Global South. Against Reform’s call for mass deportations, we respond with mass solidarity. Against nationalism’s drowning tide, we float together or not at all.

Choosing Our Rafts

We live in stormy seas. The wreckage of neoliberal Britain litters the waves, and people are desperate for something to hold onto. Far-right movements like Reform UK offer rafts that appear sturdy but are built from fear, exclusion, and authoritarian nostalgia. They may float for a time, but they carry us backward, not forward.

Anarchists must expose the rotten planks of these rafts and build our own vessels of solidarity, mutual aid, and internationalism. We must remind people that their anger is real, their suffering valid, but their enemy is not the migrant in the hotel down the street, rather it is the state and capitalist system that abandoned them.

The seas are rough, but the choice is before us – drift toward authoritarian shores, or set sail for freedom.

Originally published August 30th 2025 at https://theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com/2025/08/30/rafts-in-troubled-waters-anarchism-anti-immigrant-protest-and-the-rise-of-reform-uk/