The repercussions continue over Keir Starmer’s gob-smacking/ill-advised/inflammatory/provocative (take your pick) speech on immigration in which he echoed the language of the notoriously racist “rivers of blood” speech delivered by Enoch Powell in 1968 to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. At the time Powell was the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in the Shadow Cabinet of Tory leader Edward Heath. The backlash to Powell’s nakedly racist speech saw him dismissed from Heath’s shadow cabinet the following day. But, as it turned out, he was only articulating what many in the Tory party thought.
Now we have a Labour Prime Minister who channels some of the language of Powell’s speech. Powell was on the far right of the Conservative party in Heath’s day, now, even though Labour would disavow Powell’s unabashed racism, many of his anti-immigration and anti-European views would sit comfortably within the Labour party of Starmer. That tells you how far to the right the centre of gravity in British politics has shifted. Starmer himself has been a part of that journey from left to right. In 2020 he insisted that migrants were not to blame for housing shortages or failings in public services. By 2025, he’s sounding like an editorial in the Daily Mail.
Starmer, quite predictably, refuses to back down. The speech, and his inability to concede that his language and the sentiments he expressed in it were at all problematic, are further evidence of just how poor he is as a politician. It really doesn’t matter whether he echoed the most notorious anti-immigration speech in British political history on purpose, or out of ignorance. Apologists for him are saying it's the latter. I'd say "bollocks" to that. He's a trained lawyer and knows full well the power of words. He meant what he said and he knew what he was saying.
The “island of strangers” line wasn’t even the worst part of his speech. The worst part was how he legitimised the claims of the far right that immigration has done “incalculable damage” to Britain and restricts the access of native born British citizens to jobs and housing and public services. In so doing he has raised the white flag and surrendered to far right populism. He should be making a positive case for migration, just as he should be making a case for the reintegration of the UK into the European customs union and single market, if not for rejoining the EU. Instead he’s doing Nigel Farage’s job for him, simultaneously detoxifying and normalising Reform UK while toxifying the Labour Party.
The migrants who keep the NHS going, those who staff care homes, those who work in agriculture, hospitality, academia or deliveries. They’re not doing damage and it’s grossly insulting to claim that they do. They keep the UK economy going. Immigrants are essential for the NHS, social care, academia and business. Starmer also played into the favourite far right trope that mass immigration is part of an ‘elite conspiracy’ by referring to the past few decades as a “squalid chapter” in British political and economic history.
Politics is not really about facts and figures, it’s about perceptions, feelings, and above all stories. As a man who is clearly emotionally stunted, Starmer is ill-placed to do politics well. He obviously has no instinctive sense for how his words come across, he has no coherent or compelling story to tell. Starmerism is a vision-free zone. No one could tell you what he actually stands for or what he believes in. He has U-turned and been economical with the truth so much that even if he did, by some miracle, present a vision and tell an attractive story of where he wants Britain to be, no one would believe him.
Reform aren’t winning by rational argument, but they are gaining ground, by appealing, with the help of the media and now Keir Starmer, to our basest tribal instinct - the fear of the other. These fears have been overstated and repeated ad nauseum, but the fact is the vast, vast majority of immigrants make a positive contribution to society. And the vast, vast majority are here legally. Indeed, many have been actively recruited to come here.
What Starmer did last Monday was to tell voters that Nigel Farage’s story on immigration is correct. You do not challenge the rise of the far right by legitimising them. You don’t challenge an irrational appeal to base instincts by endorsing it. Given Starmer’s rather tawdry history of broken promises, no one who was tempted by Farage’s racist snake oil is now going to say that they’ll vote Labour instead. They’ll just see a Prime Minister who has agreed that Farage was right all along and that will only encourage them to vote for a far right party which has just seen its core message endorsed by the Prime Minister himself.
As such, it was a massive own goal which, far from helping Starmer to stem the rise of the far right, will only embolden and empower them. Starmer’s tin ear for politics continues to astound and amaze. He seems bereft of all substance. His core message is, in essence, “Stick with me and my Labour party, and eventually we will make things just a little bit less crap.”
That’s not at all appealing at the best of times, even less so when it’s delivered by Keir Starmer. It is also manifestly untrue, as millions of pensioners, disabled people, migrants, low income families with more than two kids, and members of the LGBT community will readily testify. He won the general election and now, as Prime Minister, he has nowhere to hide and his duplicity is catching up with him. The problem for the rest of us is that what is waiting in the wings is orders of magnitude worse. Within a short few years we could find ourselves part of a nakedly English nationalist far right UK. And if that happens, Starmer will have to shoulder much of the blame.
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