It’s No Longer Wrong to be Right

Starmer’s adoption of Powellite l rhetoric on immigration isn’t all it seems

It is no longer Far Right to be far right. The kind of rhetoric on immigration that used to be reviled by the left is now being deployed by the Labour leader, Keir Starmer. An Islington human rights lawyer, who used to argue the case for migrants to stay in this country, now believes that they are a threat to British, white culture.

At any rate, that is one obvious interpretation of his remark that we don’t want to live on an “island of strangers.” He means that mass immigration — or the “failed open borders experiment,” as he puts it — has led to parallel communities of immigrants who not only arrive with a different cultural heritage but remain an alien cultural enclave or enclaves. The Labour MP Zara Sultana said he was echoing Enoch Powell. “Shame on you, Keir Starmer,” she said.

But you don’t have to look far into the city centres of many English cities — like Bradford, Coventry, or London — to see what he means. They certainly don’t look like they did in the 1970s, when they were predominantly white. There is currently a kind of racial meme war on social media, whereby opponents of immigration post videos and pictures of English high streets with white women pushing babies in prams while white men in suits sell wares from roadside barrows.

Starmer insists he is only arguing for better integration, but his words are jarring. Only the day before yesterday, liberals like the PM argued that “diversity is a strength”; that migration is a good thing because it introduces new ideas and ways of living to staid, conservative communities. Not only that — it has been argued repeatedly by academics and journals like The Economist and the Financial Times that the British economy needs immigrants to generate growth. We also need them to run the NHS and provide babies to make up for our increasingly geriatric and birth-averse society.

Well, Sir Keir has firmly squashed that UK Treasury orthodoxy in his press conference this week. He now says emphatically that mass immigration does not generate growth. “Just look at the last four years,” he told journalists. “We had the highest net rate migration when the last government lost control to nearly one million and stagnant growth”.

Meanwhile, mass immigration has put huge strain on social services, the NHS, and housing. Half of social housing in London is now occupied by people who were not born here. We are also spending large sums of public money housing asylum seekers in hotels. Many illegal migrants are allowed to stay on in Britain because of the way liberal judges interpreted the European Court of Human Rights’ Article 8 on the right to family life and privacy. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, made clear on Sunday that this must come to an end. No longer will illegals be allowed to remain because they have family connections — or, as the former Tory minister John Redwood put it, because their “children don’t like chicken nuggets”. An Albanian criminal who had entered Britain illegally was last year granted indefinite leave to remain because his children could not be expected to eat Albanian food.

Now it hardly needs to be said that this is all regarded as right-wing tropes. Academics on Twitter insist that it is inherently racist to talk of “foreign-born” people taking up social housing. They are British citizens, aren’t they, who have as much right to be here as Boris Johnson, who was also born abroad? They dismiss the claim that “activist judges” have been manipulating the law to help illegal migrants remain in the UK.

After all, the boat people represent only a tiny proportion of migrants to the UK. Most of them are also legitimate refugees from countries like Afghanistan or Iran, or other nations where their lives would be in danger if they returned. We were happy to invite tens of thousands of refugees from the wars in Ukraine and from Hong Kong. So how can we ban others, such as Palestinians? A judge, Hugo Norton Taylor, was criticised recently for allowing a family from Gaza to remain, even though they had applied through a resettlement scheme for Ukrainian refugees.

This very phrase “illegal immigrant” was itself regarded as a right-wing trope — and still is on social media, where left-wing Labour politicians express horror at the change in rhetoric. “Kein Mensch ist illegal,” as they say in Germany: “No human being is illegal.” We are all citizens of the world with rights enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention. The very elision of illegal immigration with general immigration is also something that was studiously avoided in the past by liberals. Now Starmer seems to be inviting the comparison - adopting the language of Nigel Farage

I say “seems” to be inviting comparisons because I’m not entirely sure that Keir Starmer has turned into a latter-day Enoch Powell, though there are striking similarities of rhetoric. Look behind the words, and the new policy on immigration doesn’t look that different from the old. Yes, perhaps there is a bit more pressure to learn English. There are curbs on the ability to bring in relatives, and changes in the law to stop judges using the “exceptional circumstances” clause in the Human Rights Act to allow illegal migrants to stay. But Labour is actually making it easier for undocumented migrants to stay if they have lived here as children to age 18. Labour has abandoned the Tory Government’s “duty to remove” migrants who have come here by unlawful means. This will allow some 70,000 migrants already here to claim asylum. The Tory Rwanda scheme is dead, of course, and Starmer is pressing ahead with the plan to restore free movement for under-40s from the EU. Critics suggest that this could mean the EU dumping migrants who were not born within Europe. Labour may have upped the earnings floor for legal immigration, but there will always be exceptions for “essential services.”

So I don’t think Labour has changed into a reincarnation of the British National Party. It is a classic exercise in triangulation: adopting some of the rhetoric of your opponents, the better to undermine them. Tony Blair seems to be okay with the new tone — and he was responsible for some of the largest increases in immigration after 2004 and EU enlargement. If this is what it takes to counter Nigel Farage, so be it. The Labour left and Scottish nationalists claim that this is legitimising Reform’s language and that we will soon be talking about “remigration” like the Alternative für Deutschland. But maybe they should reconsider their own inflammatory rhetoric. They have painted everyone who criticises mass immigration as far right. Perhaps, though, they should have listened to their own Red Wall voters — and their equivalents in Europe.

There has been a very marked change in attitudes to immigration in the European Union. Some of the most supposedly liberal countries, like Sweden and Denmark, now have the most draconian policies. Denmark’s social democratic government has literally been bulldozing migrant estates to prevent them becoming parallel societies.

The grooming gang scandal has also changed the climate of opinion on immigration. The perception that liberal-left councils, social workers, and police suppressed the scandal of young white girls being gang-raped by predominantly Muslim men is not a right-wing fantasy. Even Starmer said that it was a scandal and arose from “perverse ideas of community relations.” In other words, it was downplayed in case it was explosive and exploited by the far right. A “dog whistle,” as the Labour minister Lucy Powell put it on BBC Question Time last week.

With Reform now leading the major parties in some opinion polls, it was clear something had to be done — even if it means meeting the critics halfway. Maybe working-class Brits were right to resent the way their communities were transformed by mass immigration without their consent. They were accused of being racists by academics and journalists who live in predominantly white suburbs.

It is a lesson learned: the right isn’t always wrong.