Reform’s new Welsh leader warns against the terrible things migration has done to London

James Downs, Mental health campaigner

Dan Thomas has been announced as the new leader of Reform UK in Wales, and he has begun his tenure with a warning.

He says he has “seen what uncontrolled immigration has done to London over the last 20 years”, pointing to pressure on public services, housing, and community cohesion, and that he does not want Wales “to go down the same path”.

It is a striking way to frame a political project: not around what Wales might become, but around what it must avoid becoming.

But what, exactly, has immigration “done” to London?

Alongside its very real problems – housing costs, inequality, strained infrastructure – London is also one of the most economically productive cities in the world. Migrant workers are not an inconvenient footnote to that reality. They are central to it.

Research on London’s economy estimates that migrant workers contribute around £83 billion a year, accounting for roughly 22% of the city’s total economic output, alongside substantial wider effects on employment, productivity, and business formation.

If Wales were to “go down the same path”, one terrible consequence might be a larger, more dynamic labour market, linked into international networks of skills, trade, and investment. This is surely unconscionable. Worse still, it would lead to – brace yourself – greater tax receipts.

Who is really “pressuring” public services?

Immigration is routinely presented as the cause of pressure on public services. Yet public services require two basic things in order to function: funding and staff.

On funding, the empirical picture is considerably less dramatic than political rhetoric suggests. The Oxford Migration Observatory summarises the evidence as showing that the overall fiscal impact of immigration in the UK is small relative to the size of the economy and often positive for particular groups and time periods. Migrants from the European Economic Area make a net positive contribution to UK public finances, paying more in taxes than they received in benefits and services. 

In other words, many migrants are not draining public services. They are helping to pay for them.

On staffing, the picture is even clearer. Around one in five NHS staff in England report a non-British nationality. In London, that figure is closer to one in three. So when someone says they have “seen” immigration putting pressure on hospitals, it is worth asking whether they have also seen who is keeping those hospitals running.

If Wales is being warned not to become like London, are we also being warned not to become a place where internationally trained nurses, doctors, and healthcare professionals help fill chronic workforce gaps? Are we being warned not to become a place where migrant-founded businesses create jobs? Are we being warned not to become a place that attracts people who want to live, work, and build a life here?

None of this is to deny that migration interacts with housing shortages, underinvestment, and planning failures. But those are political choices. They are not natural consequences of people crossing borders.

Blaming immigration for pressures created by decades of domestic policy failure is rather like blaming rain for the fact that the roof has not been repaired.

Whose mobility is treated as growth?

There is another contradiction running through Mr Thomas’s comments, one that sits beneath both his warning about London and his defence of his own time away from Wales.

When challenged in an interview with the BBC’s Walescast about how well he knows Wales after having lived away for twenty years, he rejected the premise, describing such a question as small-minded. He spoke instead about the value of going away, about how people gain perspective, confidence, and maturity by spending time elsewhere, and about how his own move from Wales to London had been formative in shaping who he is. He later clarified that he was not talking about going to another country.

This clarification is doing more political work than it first appears.

His personal narrative treats mobility as intrinsically valuable: leaving home is framed as a route to growth, experience, and self-development. Yet his wider political argument rests on portraying certain forms of movement – specifically, people crossing national borders into the UK – as inherently harmful. One version of mobility is celebrated as aspiration; another is problematised as a threat.

What makes this tension so revealing is that many migrants are doing precisely what he claims to value in his own story. They move in order to work, to learn, to build a future, and to expand what is possible for themselves and their families. The real problem seems to be that they are doing so in a political context that persistently refuses to plan for, invest in, or seriously organise around the social and economic benefits that such movement can bring.

Should London be ashamed? 

Perhaps the most telling feature of the “don’t become London” warning is that it relies on a shared understanding that London’s success is somehow shameful.

A city that attracts people from across the world. A city that drives the UK economy. A city powered by a globally recruited workforce. Does that sound shameful to you?

If this is the path Wales is being cautioned against, then we should be honest about what that means. It means being warned not to become more economically productive. Not to become more internationally connected. Not to become a place that people actively choose.

One might ask whether that is really a vision for national renewal that Reform claims to be offering. 

Let’s focus on the real problems

Yes, Wales has serious problems. Housing is unaffordable. Public services are stretched. Inequality is entrenched.

But none of these will be solved by pretending that people who move here are the primary cause.

The version of London being invoked in these warnings is not the complex reality of a global city whose successes and failures are inseparable from migration. It is a caricature: a symbolic container into which a wide range of unresolved policy failures are poured.

If anything, a Wales capable of welcoming newcomers, employing them well, and integrating them into communities is more likely to be a Wales with the economic and institutional capacity to address its problems, not a Wales condemned to repeat them.

Being told not to become like London is therefore less a serious diagnosis than a refusal to engage with the harder question of how Wales builds the conditions in which people can live decently, whether they were born here or not.

James Downs is a mental health campaigner, researcher and expert by experience in eating disorders. He lives in Cardiff and can be contacted at @jamesldowns on X and Instagram, or via his website: jamesdowns.co.uk