The speech this week by the Labour leader marks a new low in fomenting racism and scapegoating migrants. It needs a strong response, argues Kevin Ovenden  

Keir Starmer set a fire on Monday with his ‘island of strangers’ intervention over immigration, fuelling xenophobia and racism. By Tuesday he was pouring on more and more petrol. Far from drawing back from a full-on attack on immigration, with barely noticeable nods to ‘migrants making a contribution’, he doubled down on Tuesday evening saying, ‘Settlement in the UK is a privilege that is earned, not a right.’ 

The language is straight out of the racist right. He also at a stroke denies the rights of, for example, Hong Kong holders of UK passports who do indeed have a right to settle in Britain (until perhaps a racist scare takes it from them). The ‘privilege’ in that case was that of the British empire exploiting the territory as a colony for a century. Are Ukraine refugees who fled terrible conflict to be considered ‘privileged’? Will they be kicked out when there is some temporary peace in a shattered country if they have not ‘earned the right’ to stay? 

Those and other facts are rapidly going out of the window as Starmer and his gang engage in a race to the bottom with Nigel Farage and the far right over anti-immigration rhetoric. Labour is this week setting the pace in that race. 

The time for Labour MPs with qualms and for the labour movement to speak out and act is now. Already wannabe Tory leader Robert Jenrick has raised the stakes. In what might prove a historic week in politics the Labour government is set to go further in bashing migrants. 

Gutter politics  

The Starmer operation is daily authenticating Farage and every little Farage who wants to be a big Farage, or worse. At the same time it is demoralising people who just want to get along with one another and who have seen this kind of thing before and know where it leads. The path at this precise moment to opposing snake-oil salesman Farage lies through confronting the Starmer government on all fronts. On his gutter politics on immigration and his imposition of yet more austerity and authoritarianism. 

Lord (Alf) Dubs, the Labour politician who arrived in Britain on a Kindertransport escaping the Nazi Holocaust (with what fluency in English I don’t know), says this: 

‘I’m unhappy senior politicians are using language reminiscent of [Enoch] Powell and I’m sorry Starmer used some of those phrases.’ 

Powell referred to white people coming to feel ‘strangers in their own land’. The idea that Starmer’s speech writers did not know the historical resonances is laughable. It’s not often you agree with former Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster’s political assessment, but she convincingly said that it is inconceivable that no one in Downing Street knew: ‘Island of strangers is a very particular form of words. It’s almost a term of art.’ 

David Blunkett, who as a Blair-era Home Secretary led the charge against ‘bogus asylum seekers’, has also criticised Starmer: ‘I never felt I lived in, or had a part to play in, a country of strangers.I thought welcoming people from across the world was a tribute to our society, where people want to make their homes, to build a life and their economy and to contribute to our society.’ 

Park for a moment the brass neck given his role 30 years ago in providing a mudguard for all sorts of reactionary populist policy and rhetoric. It tells you just how out on a limb Starmer is. Toadies will point to snapshot polls saying that most people agree with him. But the full import of what he said is yet to be felt and popular discussion to take place. 

Those who strongly agree with his ‘island of strangers’ rhetoric are unlikely to vote Labour anyway – especially as it doubles down on cuts and Treasury orthodoxy. 

Meanwhile those who hoped for some relief from Tory scapegoating, if from little else, may well see this as sealing Labour’s abandonment of them. 

Backlash  

There is a palpable backlash from many people – beyond the left – who are retelling stories of their or their family’s arrival in Britain over the last century and a half. Or of their neighbours, friends, workmates. Perhaps it is Starmer’s monumental political incompetence, but he has managed to tell millions of people perfectly settled in Britain that they have created an atmosphere in which others are coming to feel they are strangers. 

That is the most poisonous aspect of what this Labour government is doing and doubling down on. 

It takes the social reality that people are feeling growing atomisation, alienation and community breakdown arising from contemporary capitalism. It leads to loneliness and seeing others increasingly as strangers, whatever their background. It repackages those real feelings in the xenophobic frame of the far right. Xenophobia, of course, meaning literally ‘fear of the stranger’. 

This is a way that racist ideology works. It takes real social discontents or political failures and provides a false story or explanation that erases the true reasons and gives a racialised version instead. It is not unbridled corporate capitalism that is tearing us apart. It is someone down the street who looks different, prays differently and doesn’t speak English the way I do. Someone who has just moved in. 

That political and crafted deployment of racism as false explanation for real suffering provides an impetus towards fascist thinking and organisation. It matters little that it might be done by politicians of the centre stupidly believing that they are heading off the far right, or who happen upon doing so because they have no real answers to people’s pain. 

The absence of effective answers to multiple social crises means the pell-mell towards anti-immigration and racist scapegoating is worse under Starmer than under any other Labour leader. 

Previous Labour governments pretended to a ‘balance’ both on immigration policy and, from Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary in the late-1960s onwards, on combining a promise of ‘fair but firm’ control at the borders with tackling racial discrimination and violence within the borders. 

It was contradictory and always conceded to spikes of anti-immigration agitation from the right. But at least it was distinguishable from the threatening anti-immigration brigade. 

No golden age  

That was true under Tony Blair, despite again and again reinforcing myths about migration and immigrants, and with the War on Terror especially about Muslims. So you had the demand to speak English nearly 20 years ago at the same time as cutting provision for learning English as an additional language. There is little left of public English language courses today and education is being cut across the board. 

There was never a Labour golden age. Starmer, however, has gone further than any earlier leader in abandoning a triangulating approach and instead going full tilt against immigration, and in demonising those coming to Britain and thus increasing hostility to visibly immigrant/migrant people already here. He and his government are articulating racialised myths about migration. You wouldn’t know that there are 131,000 vacancies paying just £11 per hour in the social care sector. There were only 10,000 applying for a visa to come last year. The visa already requires English proficiency. 

Starmer is playing divide and rule. It is over immigration and migration. It is also over disabled and not disabled, the pensioner versus the mother of more than two children. 

The answer to that is unity. The same government taking away help for disabled people to have a carer is now to persecute those who wish to come to Britain to work as carers. Worse, to place upon them a sign saying that they need to earn their ‘privilege’ and can be kicked out of the country at the whim of an employer sacking them. 

But we are not strangers to one another. We are friends, neighbours and workmates. There are often differences. That is not the same as the nasty division that is being pushed by this government and the right wing. 

It is the wealthy in their gated communities and those who serve them who are strangers to the vast majority of Britain. It is austerity and bosses’ greed that are the problem. Not immigration. 

This week trade unions in Britain could say that they are suspending all support for the Labour Party and instead spending money on a massive campaign illustrated by people with different histories in this country but explaining their common interest and unity in pursuing them. That includes people whose family migrated, say, from Cornwall to Oxfordshire five generations ago and those who have more recently arrived in Britain. 

You beat divide-and-rule with unity and commonality. And with combat against those trying to divide you. 

This is a critical moment. The People’s Assembly demonstration on 7 June has a banner saying it is austerity not immigration that is the problem we face. That’s a simple message which needs to be taken far and wide and backed up by some popular, effective arguments. 

When Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 it was under a Labour government and the Tory opposition removed him from the shadow cabinet. Today’s incendiary intervention on immigration and race – for the one always entails the other – has come from an appalling Labour prime minister himself. 

There needs to be a popular response that can win the case against Starmer and explain at a mass level why he is fuelling a terrible racist reaction of the kind that most people do not want to see. It is urgent. The Starmer-Labour government is going to do worse. The radical left has to rise to the challenge in a united and intelligent way.  

Kevin Ovenden has a new book coming out – Malcolm X: Socialism and Black Nationalism, buy his book here. Link to the book tour is here.