Racism and division are at the centre of Keir Starmer’s speech about immigration. It is a shameful aspect of Labour politics, argues John Westmoreland 

Starmer’s claim that Britain is becoming ‘an island of strangers’ has brought Labour to a new low, and it has led to a storm of criticism.

Zarah Sultana spoke for many when she tweeted: ‘Did Nigel Farage write this speech? Dehumanising and divisive. We deserve better than this. The Prime Minister imitating Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech is sickening.That speech fuelled decades of racism and division. Echoing it today is a disgrace. It adds to anti-migrant rhetoric that puts lives at risk.’

Starmer is clearly trying to block off Reform’s racist appeal. But he has enhanced its appeal. His ‘Immigration Plan’ was immediately seized on by Reform’s Richard Tice as ‘our policy’. And Farage was able to call it out as a ‘knee jerk reaction to our success’. For people who voted Reform because of immigration, Starmer just confirmed their judgement.

Interestingly, Farage, although he called for a cap on the numbers of migrants was quick to point out that Starmer may well damage business, something that the CBI has pointed out too.

In 1968, Enoch Powell made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, where he equated rising numbers of immigrants to a loss of national identity and to violence. He said that permitting high levels of immigration was ‘mad’: ‘It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’.

Every racist act that spilled innocent blood thereafter can be linked to Powell’s idea of ‘defending the nation’ from immigrant hordes.

Just last year the country saw the worst race riots in decades, in areas that had all recorded a high vote for Reform and their racist propaganda. And now Starmer and his equally obnoxious Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, are feeding the hatred by claiming that we are becoming ‘an island of strangers’.

Many of us have been nursed, educated, befriended and entertained by people from migrant backgrounds. To blame the real divisions in society on migrants is pure scapegoating.

Britain is divided by class and class devised policies that enable a tiny minority to lord it over the rest of us. Britain is the sixth largest economy in the world. The collective wealth of UK billionaires increased by £35m per day in 2024 reaching a total of £182bn.

A nonentity with attitude

Make no mistake, Starmer and Yvette Cooper are rehabilitating Powell’s racism, and Farage will benefit. Starmer spoke to the nation flanked by two union flags. He wants to be a national figure of importance, but he reveals himself to be a hapless nonentity at every turn. The speech was performative, posturing and simplistic.

He presented his Immigration Plan as the solution to a national crisis that the Tories had created. He was getting tough on something of concern to the electorate. Or so he would have us believe.

However, it is just possible that his ‘plan’ was suggested to him by those whom he loyally serves. Last Saturday, in the aftermath of Labour’s drubbing in the local elections the Financial Times, alarmed at the growth of a party that stokes anti-establishment and anti-EU feeling offered Starmer advice on how to turn back Reform.

Firstly, it argued, Starmer should maintain a laser-focus on economic growth, and secondly outdo Reform on immigration, by bringing the human rights lobby to heal.

The FT applauded Yvette Cooper’s promise to limit the powers of immigration judges to overturn government decisions on deportations and the desire to look at the way the ECHR is incorporated into the Human Rights Act.

These thoughts were clearly uppermost in Starmer’s speech. His plan to limit migration without damaging the economy was a constant theme, claiming, for example, that the highest net migration figures had failed to produce economic growth. Of course it is just possible, that without the rise in net migration the economy could have shrunk. And it leaves out of the picture completely, the relationship that social care has on the economy. Without immigrant labour our NHS would collapse, and that would lead to economic collapse too.

Denying the crisis

Capitalism is in a crisis, and racist grandstanding – which is what it is – isn’t going to fix it. No sooner was Starmer’s plank-like performance at an end than the British Chamber of Commerce expressed their doubts. They were worried about skills shortages and thought that Starmer’s multi-variety visa system would hit businesses that were already hampered by a ‘hugely expensive immigration system’. They also pointed out that labour shortages couldn’t be predicted, and sometimes importing workers was urgent.

The ‘rule-based system’ of controlling immigration is also going to be expensive. His insistence on visa holders being able to extend their stay if they can speak fluent English is bound to raise problems of education, assessment and enforcement.

A new layer of authoritarian management is going to emerge. And who will oversee its work? 

Starmer thinks he has come up with a simple solution but it isn’t going to work. 

What will happen is a crackdown on human rights and people who want to enter the country for family reasons, like the Palestinian family who used the Ukraine Family Scheme to enter Britain and was allowed to remain by an immigration judge. Starmer is committed to banishing compassion from court judgements.

Farage is licking his lips. He intends to finish the job that Starmer has started, and we can just imagine the horrors to come if he gets control of the project Starmer has begun.

The left has to oppose Starmer’s racism unconditionally. It is the product of capitalist crisis and the inability of the ruling class to solve it. We won’t let him scapegoat immigrants while he stokes war abroad and austerity at home.