The impressive shift in the terms of trade of the immigration debate in the last 24 hours proves one unlikely proposition: that the British political marketplace actually works. A new consensus is emerging, comprising the Labour government, Conservatives, Reform and even Tommy Robinson. Off the back of all of this, there is a chance that the public may actually get some of what it wants.
Giorgia Meloni is the only leader of a major European country in these times who seems successfully to have united the grievances of losers and winners in a viable political coalition
Nigel Farage was correct this morning to assert that the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood would not have spoken as she did but for Reform successfully conditioning the terms of trade in this Parliament. However, he in turn was forced to concede that her rhetoric, at least, deserved serious consideration – even as he threw doubts on her capacity to deliver. But will this new consensus yield much policy fruit? Post Cold War Europe is littered with the carcasses of political parties with detailed policies to limit immigration – many of which made little progress.
France will now be a particularly critical testing ground for that key, very open, question. The issue at hand is the rebalancing of France’s fraught relationship with Algeria. This is, again, one of the hottest button issues in Paris – the very topic which brought the Fifth Republic into being back in 1958-59 – and now promises to be a highly significant issue in the presidential election of 2027.
Such is the context in which Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale (RN) has won its first-ever victory on a motion in the French parliament – as Deputies voted by a margin of 185-184 in favour of her resolution to scrap the 1968 agreement with Algeria regulating the movement of Algerians into France.
This pact proved to be a key stepping stone in the process of granting Algerian nationals a range of privileges accorded to no other country – which has been expanded massively in the intervening years through a kind of rights-based mission creep.
The issue of Algeria was most recently vaulted up the national agenda by the attack in Mulhouse in February of this year, which left one person dead. Many of the ingredients will be familiar to observers of ‘Broken Britain’.
The killer was an Algerian illegal migrant on the French security services’ terror watchlist – whom the Algerian authorities had refused to take back despite at least ten attempts at repatriation by the French.
Unsurprisingly, according to a recent CSA poll for CNews, Europe 1 and the JDD, 74 per cent of voters now want the 1968 accord terminated.
French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu and interior minister Laurent Nunez have announced that the government will not leave the treaty, but will instead push for reform. The problem for this government, like so many of its predecessors, is that through the years, there have been multiple stations of the cross on the Via Dolorosa of treaty renegotiation – all to as much effect as ECHR/HRA reform.
Even if this parliamentary vote has no immediate policy or legal impact, no one can doubt that the political cordon sanitaire around the RN is dissolving rapidly. Significantly, the coalition in favour of terminating the 1968 agreement included not just Les Republicains, but also the smaller right-wing parties and the centrist Horizons party led by Macron’s first prime minister, Édouard Philippe.
Yet, curiously, Algeria has not got onto the policy (as opposed to the political) agenda because of the RN. Indeed, considering its lead in the polls the party still boasts relatively little in the way of an overt ‘brains trust’ – notwithstanding the attention lavished on Les Horaces, an under the radar group of énarques helping Le Pen to prepare for government with the assistance of serving senior officials.
Rather, the real intellectual ‘hard yards’ on the asymmetries in France’s relationship with Algeria have emerged from two apparently un-populistic sources – who are less interested in national preference than they are in the core founding ideal of the French Revolution, as articulated in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, which holds that the law must be the same for all.
The first inspiration for this emerging policy shift is Xavier Driencourt, a leading retired servant of the French state and a former two-time ambassador to Algeria and author of France-Algérie, Le double aveuglement (‘France-Algeria, double blindness’ – L’Observatoire, 2025); even when they are free thinkers, at odds with the government of the day, the French tend to revere their past envoys more than we do. Driencourt eschews front line politics but will gladly talk to anyone who will listen to him, the RN included.
The second inspiration is Charles Rodwell, a 29-year-old half-English MP from the Macronist Renaissance Party – whose 107-page report for the National Assembly’s Committee on Finance, General Economy and Budget was published in October. This the most comprehensive examination, across the policy piste, of the special status of Algerian nationals under French law.
The killer was an Algerian illegal migrant on the French security services’ terror watchlist
Intriguingly, Rodwell abstained on the Le Pen motion because he saw it as performative rather than substantive, proposing no alternative legal framework. He knows it will be infernally hard to extricate France from these arrangements; the status quo governing the presence of Algerian nationals on French soil is undergirded by no fewer than 200 legal instruments – which confer advantages on Algerians far beyond what was originally envisaged at the time of the much-debated 1968 accord.
This legal and administrative evolution consists of an interlocking web of subsequent bilateral Franco-Algerian treaties, such as the General Social Security Convention of 1980 governing benefits between the two countries; the ECHR; EU law; general international treaties such as the Refugee Convention; presidential decrees; the CESEDA decree of 2004, consolidating laws and regulations relating to entry and residence for foreigners in France; and a very extensive corpus of domestic case law forged by an activist Conseil d’État and other courts; some of these French jurists make Brenda Hale look like Albert Pierrepoint by comparison.
And then there is the question of who now has the competence to withdraw from the 1968 agreement, which was forged by presidential decree: the president, the prime minister, or parliament?
Rodwell’s taxonomy of Algerian ‘exceptionalism’ within the French system is breathtaking. Entry into France is permitted with only a short-stay visa rather than the long-stay visa required of others; a ‘private and family life’ residence certificate is granted automatically, even without legal entry into France; family reunification is simplified in terms of time and income requirements.
Despite domestic legislation in 2003, a French citizen’s Algerian spouse is entitled to a residence permit without needing a long-stay visa because the treaty has not been updated to reflect this statutory change; judges cannot demand proof that the couple actually lives together, thus facilitating ‘sham marriages’; residence permits cannot be withdrawn for polygamy; nor, in certain instances, even for acts of domestic violence.
On welfare, no residency or waiting period is required to receive minimum income (RSA) or the old-age allowance (ASPA), even if the recipient has never contributed to the system; and because Algeria refuses to pay pensions to Algerians who live outside Algeria, France – without any legal or international obligation– now pays those pensions itself.
Finally, Algerians are also the only nationality exempt from signing a pledge to respect the ‘values of the Republic’; they are not obliged to the usual checks on a minimal knowledge of the French language; Algerians deemed ‘a threat to public order’ cannot have their residence permits withdrawn; and, as per the case of the terrorist illegal migrant in Mulhouse earlier this year, returns of Algerian nationals who have broken the law are virtually unenforceable because of the non-cooperation of Algiers.
The RN is now the most durable force on the post-War European right seeking to speak for the resentments of the economic ‘losers’ from globalisation and mass migration
As a result, the French equivalent of the ONS states that there were 890,000 Algerian nationals on French soil in 2023, the largest grouping of foreigners, bar none; and they know how to operate the system. Although the French dispute this figure, the Algerian president reckoned in 2020 there were around six million people of Algerian origin in France.
According to the French ONS’s 2021 census, 38.9 per cent of Algerian nationals in France over the age of 15 were neither employed, nor studying, nor retired. For Algerian women, this rises to 51.3 per cent. The French ONS stated in 2023 that the employment rate of first generation immigrants from Algeria stood at just 56.2 per cent; even for second generation migrants, where improvements are usually expected, it stands at just 48.9 per cent. Strikingly, almost half of households of Algerian origin live in social housing.
The Algerian state sees all this as no less than its due. President Tebboune of Algeria articulated this grievance culture best when he observed that France owes Algeria 132 years of visas on these terms – in compensation for the 132 years of French colonialism. Much of the Algerian nomenklatura – and their children – are now in France, but it is reflective of the strange paralysis which overcomes much of the French decision-making classes when it concerns their former colony that they seem unable to exploit any potential leverage they have here (conversely, rather fewer French énarques have opted for comfortable berths in either Algiers or Tindouf).
In consequence, as Driencourt observes, a full 63 years after the brutal termination of French rule, it is still hard to know where Innenpolitik ends and Aussenpolitik begins. Or, as Abdelmalek Sellal, the former Algerian prime minister told Driencourt, ‘we know you better than you know us’.
Of course, it can be argued that Algeria is a unique case; perhaps the most comparable arrangement is the Common Travel Area between the United Kingdom and Ireland, allowing Irish people to travel freely through these islands.
But there are, still, wider lessons for France’s neighbours. First of all, effective policy will require D-Day like levels of preparation. The current French political consensus about Algeria, stretching from populist right through to mainstream right and even to elements of the centre is impressive – far more so than the policy and operational consensus on how to do it.
That’s why the results have been so unimpressive over the past three decades. There have been many parties of the populist right who seemed either to be on the verge of electoral success themselves or else had managed to push parties of the mainstream right into embracing their agendas on immigration (such as the Dutch Liberals). Sometimes, this apparent anti-immigration consensus even seems to have comprised left-of-centre parties, such as the Belgian Social Democrats in the 1980s.
The Algerian president reckoned in 2020 there were around six million people of Algerian origin in France
Over a decade and a half ago, Liz Fekete of the Institute of Race Relations penned A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (Pluto Press, 2009). As per the title of one of Tom Clancy’s best-known novels, her fascinating account is ‘the sum of all fears’ – in this case, of much of the left. She, like many others on her broad side of the political spectrum, envisaged a bleak and stigmatised future for migrants. But in the longer term, did these fears really turn out to be correct?
As Fekete saw things, much of Europe was highly vulnerable to the rise of the populist right: in 1992, Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party had launched its 12 point ‘Austria First’ petition; the old Front National under Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen was preparing its ‘300 measures for the renaissance of France’; the Belgian Vlaams Blok had published its own 70-point programme against immigration.
Fekete’s book is also a useful reminder of just how long parties of the populist right in France, Austria, Norway and Denmark have positioned themselves as protectors of the working class – gaucho-lepénisme, as one academic termed it. Of those parties which actually formed governments on a regular basis in that era, the CDU-led government in Germany in 1993 amended Article 16 of the constitution guaranteeing the right to seek asylum known as the Asylumkompromiss; it even badged 1998 as ‘the year of security’.
Indeed, under Tony Blair, the Home Office’s White Paper of 1998 was entitled Fairer, Firmer, Faster – to minimise the attraction to the UK of economic migrants; amongst other legislation, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 sought to limit the benefits eligibility for certain categories of asylum seekers.
In short, neither the populist right, nor the mainstream right, nor the centre have made much impact on the immigration numbers for over three decades. Indeed, the very reverse. When Fekete’s book was published, the EU had 1.4 million legal non-EU migrants. By 2023, that had risen to 4.3 million.
It is, of course, possible that the actual policy offerings listed here were meagre in practice; that they were not implemented because populist right parties never enjoyed proper majorities; and that even when there were majorities of some kind, the national and supra-national judiciaries successfully diluted the programmes of elected politicians.
But all in all, to adapt Garry Wills’ observation about the distinctly un-populistic William F. Buckley, Jr, these parties have shown themselves to be better at striking political poses than at striking policy blows.
Where there is a continuum of a kind from France to this country is on what the French call les aspects régaliens – those policies that are exclusively the preserve of the State such as migration and security. For the longest period here, the post-Thatcherite economy was the topic which promoted the widest consensus on the right and centre ground; historically attempts to tackle immigration tended to trigger headlines of the ‘Tory splits’ genre and conjured up memories of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.
Now, it is the reverse: consider how little divergence there is between Conservatives and Reform on the related and relevant topic of ECHR withdrawal – and how little internal dissension was provoked by Kemi Badenoch’s recent proposal to leave the Strasbourg Court. Economics, by contrast, is the new ‘third rail’: even though he is riding high in the polls, Farage showed in his recent keynote address in the City that he has not yet come to a final view on the size of the State, notwithstanding that his inclinations are far more Thatcherite than those of Marine Le Pen.
Reform’s price tag and methodology for calculating savings will now come under similar scrutiny and may yet suffer a battering
Curiously, even the narrower point of costing immigration and asylum is proving hard. Thus, Rodwell’s report for the Assemblée Nationale has come in for most criticism from his detractors in the Socialist and La France Insoumise blocs for his estimate of 2 billion euros (£1.8 billion) worth of potential savings to be derived from limiting the scope of Algerian ‘exceptionalism’; he retorts that he has, if anything, lowballed on his estimate.
Part of this uncertainty over the cost estimates derives from the shortcomings of official data such as the ability to break down all welfare spending by nationality; the issue of statistics in the British context was also highlighted by Farage today. It is unlikely that any potential savings will resolve France’s financial crisis, but such reductions will be substantial in and of themselves – and would restore a sense of fairness around the fraying Republican pact. Reform’s price tag and methodology for calculating savings will now come under similar scrutiny and may yet suffer a battering.
Nonetheless, putting a price on both legal and illegal migration thus has the capacity to unite economic and cultural conservatives as no other topic does. The ‘fairness’ agenda is therefore now arguably owned as much by the broad right as by the broad left.
In consequence, the RN is now the most durable force on the post-War European right seeking to speak for the resentments of the economic ‘losers’ from globalisation and mass migration. By contrast, the Northern Leagues in Italy, for some time now rebranded the Lega, was one of the first major European force to speak for the resentments of economic ‘winners’ over mass migration, amongst other things.
So far, Giorgia Meloni is the only leader of a major European country in these times who seems successfully to have united the grievances of losers and winners in a viable political coalition. As Lyndon Johnson said of Gerald Ford, the rest of them will all have to learn from her on how to walk and chew gum at the same time – if they are to have either a policy or a political future.
Dean Godson is Director of Policy Exchange and a member of the House of Lords
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