IN THE darkness of early morning, a man, face blurred, is escorted by Immigration Enforcement Officials on to a waiting plane on the runway of an unidentified airport. Other men, some manacled, alight from a bus to be led on to the same flight. The footage is accompanied by menacing, suspenseful music, the kind that is usually used in true-crime documentaries to indicate foreboding. As the sun rises, a plane takes off, sending “illegal migrants” far away. This is not propaganda from President Trump’s administration: it is a Home Office video, posted on the department’s X account on Monday. An accompanying post states, proudly: “The Government’s ‘Plan for Change’ removed almost 19,000 people including failed asylum seekers, foreign criminals and immigration offenders from the UK since July 2024.” The message is clear: we are acting, not simply talking, tough on immigration.

After his landslide election victory last July, Sir Keir pledged to show that “politics can be a force for good.” Was this video — borrowed from the Trump playbook — what he had in mind? We doubt it. It is more likely that, as the Labour MP Diane Abbott told Channel 4 News, his government is “panicking because Reform is second to us in so many seats, so they feel they have to echo the Reform narrative”. An Opinium poll for The Observer this week suggests that Labour is right to worry about Nigel Farage’s party, given that Labour is on 27 per cent, Reform is on 26 per cent, and the Conservatives are on 22 per cent. Among Reform’s supporters, more than one third (37 per cent) said that the party’s hardline policies on immigration and border controls were the reason.

Labour may well believe that mimicking Reform is the politically astute path to take. But this is a worrying direction of travel. Six months since rioters from the far Right took to the streets in senseless violence, footage of deportations, joined with heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric, risks escalating tensions. As the immigration-policy specialist Zoe Gardner told LBC on Monday, “What Labour is doing, through releasing these videos, is upping the ante.” It is highly unlikely that Labour will be able to “out-tough” Reform. As Ms Gardner suggested, it will simply impel Reform further towards the far Right. To see where this leads, one need look no further than Germany, where the AfD is making gains, and, as we report this week, mainstream parties are proposing drastic new restrictions on immigration and more deportations, to win votes in this month’s elections.

Churches in Germany are speaking out, and Churches here should do likewise. Bishops did not fight shy of criticising Conservative governments for sowing division and dehumanising vulnerable people. A Labour government that succumbs to the same temptations should be treated no differently. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, should heed the words of his Foreign Secretary, who responded to the previous government’s “hostile environment” with a salutary warning: “If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.”