ON Aug 11, US President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to Washington D.C., to seize control of the city’s police force while calling the capital ‘lawless’. Weeks before, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage lamented ‘societal collapse’ in the United Kingdom, calling attention to Britain’s ‘lawless’ streets.

These statements by Trump and Farage, in association with the larger far-right narrative on crime and immigration, reveal critical insights. First is the sharp delineation between a ‘safe and peaceful’ West threatened by its native non-white population and the amorphous dark shadow of immigration the East casts over Western civilisation. Streets in Britain remain unsafe because of the arrival of “droves of unvetted men into our towns and cities”, per Farage. In Washington’s case, it is the city’s homeless population, largely African American, threatening public order.

Images of “droves of unvetted men” add a sexualised and gendered connotation — a narrative going as far back as colonial times when brown and black men were seen as promiscuous and violent.

Second, on display is the contradictory relationship between the political right and the state. Staunch critics of an overbearing and expansive government, the right, instead, advocates minimalist official intervention — a “hollowed out” state, as David Harvey says. Monitoring immig­ration and crime, on the contrary, requires active state intervention and an expanded state apparatus that actively patrols and surveils the bodies of coloured individuals, immigrants and even alters the physical spaces they occupy: think the ‘Haus­smanisation’ of Paris in the 19th century to root out resistance to Napoleon III’s rule.

The state does not operate as a neutral actor.

America under Trump perhaps reflects these contradictions most sharply. While asserting himself and the American state globally, he has adhered to typical Rep­ublican prescriptions of cutting back the state’s presence domestically.

Through his ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ (OBB), signed into law on July 4, the government has made a substantial 12 per cent cut to Medicaid spending, enhanced the work requirements for SNAP benefits — in essence, food stamps for the low-income — and extended tax cuts for the rich.

The OBB becomes a critical component of our analysis, shedding light on how the seemingly disparate strands of the far-right narrative are in fact deeply interwoven. The measures under the OBB, for instance, will further exacerbate inequality within America which already stands at unprecedented levels following the 2007 recession. In particular, the steps targeting Medicaid and food stamps will disproportionately impact low-income households (in most cases people of colour), triggering increased poverty and homelessness, thus serving as further justification for policing and control. Crime and rising poverty in the UK too, stem from dwindling social safety nets and steps that enhanced inequality in Britain.

It is this overlap between government decisions and rising subsequent poverty and inequality that demands scrutiny and reveals the fallacies within far-right conversations on immigration, crime and violence. For it is not the rising numbers of immigration that makes Western cities more lawless; it is the unfettered adherence to neoliberalism’s flawed economic logic that triggers economic precarity and threatens the social fabric.

The history of the world since neoliberalism’s advent in the 1980s and the sharpening elite-poor divide coupled with a backlash against glo­­b­­­alisation reinforces this ar­gument, dema­nding cri­­tical engagement with how certain state policies — such as the OBB Act — will impact p­­ov­erty and homelessness rates, placing coloured and imm­­igrant communities at greater risk of violence and public ostracism.

The OBB Act, narratives from public figures and crackdowns on immigration thus highlight a basic point: the neutrality, or lack thereof, of the state and its engagement with society. Contrary to dominant economic thinking, the state does not operate as a neutral actor within the economic realm. Instead, as tax cut policies and the rolling back of social systems indicate, official decisions weigh disproportionately on the impoverished, with verbal and often physical fallout on immigrant com­­­­­­munities.

This nuance remains actively absent in multiple narratives, absolving entrenched inequity in modern economic thinking and the system it births of its pernicious role in perpetuating social rupture and violence, while continuing to position the state as a neutral force. In reality, government decisions actively affirm — or mitigate — inequality and its social concomitants including rising crime, thus necessitating a rethink of the state and its role in the modern economy.

The writer is a civil servant and an alumnus of Cornell University and the University of Oxford.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2025