How can Labour fight off the threat of Reform UK? That question is becoming increasingly pressing for Sir Keir Starmer’s party as polling shows Labour and Reform in a statistical dead-heat, with three Reform leads, two ties, and one Labour lead in the six polls conducted since the start of February.

Labour’s answer to Reform’s challenge is taking shape. This week we learned that the government plans to change British citizenship rules to prevent adult refugees from ever becoming British citizens, regardless of their contributions to British society. Labour is aping Reform’s politics, rather than combatting them – a strategy that will fail and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of modern political communication.

The same approach has been taken across Europe with little success, often merely legitimising radical right parties and their policies, leading voters to opt for the ‘full-fat’ option. A 2023 analysis of twelve Western European countries – including the UK – led by Dr Werner Krause, now Chair of Comparative Politics of the University of Potsdam, found that mainstream parties campaigning on tighter immigration rules caused even more voters to vote for radical right parties than otherwise would.

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Understandably, politicians will seek to ‘steal’ their opponents’ policies, particularly if those policies are popular and are attracting voters. After all, that is exactly how centre-left and centre-right parties have won power off of one another in liberal democracies for decades. The temptation is particularly strong for modern social democratic parties, whose electoral revival in the 1990s across Europe, ushering in a decade of social democratic electoral dominance across much of the........

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