The Prime Minister’s use of terms such as ‘our country’ and ‘island of strangers’ sent the name Enoch Powell trending on social media, writes Darren Lewis
Rhetoric has consequences. This column doesn’t know how many times that point has to be made for the likes of Sir Keir Starmer to get it.
We saw it last summer when thugs using slogans such as “Stop The Boats” targeted people on UK streets for the sole crime of being different.
We see it now with the wedges driven between communities by a far right normalised by Starmer and sections of the right-wing mainstream media.
And we will see it again after the Prime Minister, the man in charge of the supposed party of the working classes, threw millions of the people who voted for him under the bus on Monday morning. Starmer has announced plans to make it harder for legal immigrants to permanently settle in the UK.
In his press conference early on Monday morning, Starmer sounded like Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman or Rishi Sunak. Same rhetoric with different wrapping paper.
His use of terms such as “our country” and “island of strangers” didn’t just spark a Mexican wave of eyebrows, it sent the name Enoch Powell trending on social media.
Why? Have a read of this from Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech: “But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For they found themselves made strangers in their own country.”
Edward Heath famously sacked Powell for that speech. Starmer believes it will woo back voters gazing in the general direction of the Reform party.
But pivoting to the right won’t make Labour popular with those who would otherwise go that way – it will merely confirm Starmer’s willingness to continue betraying so many of the people who trusted him to be the antidote to the Tories’ xenophobia. This is a country built on immigration. Many employment sectors recruit from abroad because immigrants came here for the low paid jobs – skilled and unskilled – that many here did not want. It remains an issue to this day.
Shame on Starmer and his Under-Secretary of State Seema Malhotra who appeared to legitimise his comments and frighten our horrendously undiverse media into not correctly characterising them as xenophobic. Shame on them too for their willingness to abandon the elderly in pursuit of this policy. The Homecare Association maintains the care industry is struggling to fill more than 130,000 vacancies.
Unison general secretary Christina McAnea points out: “The NHS and the care sector would have collapsed long ago without workers from overseas.”
Starmer knows this. In 2020, he said: “We need to make a wider case on immigration. We should welcome migrants, not scapegoat them.”
When he was running for the Labour leadership, he vowed to defend migrant rights. Item six of his 10-point plan promised: “Full voting rights for EU nationals. Defend free movement as we leave the EU. An immigration system based on compassion and dignity…”
Now he says: “I’m doing this because it is right, because it is fair and because it is what I believe”. It isn’t the first time Starmer has embraced right-wing rhetoric – after his comments about Bangladeshis last June which he clarified rather than apologised for – and it won’t be the last.
He is in grave danger of increasing the widespread belief that he will say different things in different rooms depending on his audience.
None of it will help his desperate bid to cling to power. He might not even be the leader of his own party by the next election.