Anti-Immigration and the Far-Right: Examining the Effects of Far-Right Parties’ Anti- Immigration Ideologies on Immigration Legislation in Britain

Abstract

The far-right’s recent electoral success has raised a number of concerns around the influence of far-right parties’ programmatic agendas on legislation, particularly in the field of immigration. Cas Mudde’s (2012) theory of ‘the democratic order’ has been highly influential within this field of Western European far-right politics. Despite its applicability to a number of Western European countries, applying this theory to the case of Britain illuminates a number of major drawbacks that render the theory incomplete. Using Britain as a case study, this thesis fine-tunes and reformulates Mudde’s theory through the research question, to what extent and under what circumstances do far-right parties have an influence on legislation? The study covers a 20-year period between 1990 up to and including 2016 and focuses on the two main far-right parties in Britain, the British National Party (BNP) and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). While the study confirms Mudde’s conclusion that the far-right acts as a catalyst in enacting restrictive immigration laws, it adds a number of fine-tuning changes, including the timing of the far-right’s electoral breakthrough, its effects on the mainstream left, and the dynamic nature of extremist right parties, among other things.