Keir Starmer’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and performative patriotism are a capitulation to the far right and violate what should be core labour-movement values, argues Chris Nineham

Keir Starmer has a habit of surprising even his harshest critics by just how bad a politician he can be. He has responded to the wave of fascist-organised protests at refugee hotels in the basest way imaginable. This includes a string of tweets threatening to deport ‘illegal’ immigrants and foreign nationals who break laws, and bragging about raids and multiple arrests.

In one particularly tawdry tweet, he recycles the myth that illegal immigrants are a threat to ‘working people who play by the rules’ and boasts, ‘We’ve already arrested hundreds of delivery riders working illegally across the country’. He goes on, ‘We won’t stop there’, trying but failing to sound like Trump, ‘we’ve invested £5 million to boost immigration enforcement teams.’ 

Not a word defending refugees or countering the lies being circulated about them. No attempt to distance himself from the far-right lowlife organising the protests. Just a grubby doubling down on anti-migrant talking points that would have made Enoch Powell proud.

What makes it all especially pathetic is that he is so obviously bending with the wind. One in five of his recent tweets has been anti-immigrant, but does anyone believe this almost daily posting reflects deeply held views? It is disturbing to see a Labour leadership channel such racism. It is also extraordinary that he and his team don’t understand that it will only benefit the hard right and that this kind of hollow gesture politics is part of what people hate about the Westminster elites.

His response to the flag-flying controversy has taken pandering near to parody. Starmer, at least until recently, an archetypal North London liberal, now claims he is ‘proud of our flag as a patriotic symbol of our nation, like lots of people I’ve proudly got one up at home.’ Really?

Whatever people might think of the Union Jack, in my experience, few beyond the hard right fly flags in their home, except around the time of England football matches. Certainly vanishingly few in North London’s Kentish Town, where Starmer has his two-million-pound house.

As the far-right effort to festoon the country in St George’s flags took off, Starmer went a step further. He had himself photographed in front of a mantelpiece decorated with a string of red and white flags, in what many thought was a spoof shot. It turned out to be real and, when asked about the right-wing flag campaign, he told BBC Radio 5 Live that he was a supporter of flags and that ‘I always sit in front of the Union Jack’.

Not to be outdone, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper claimed, ‘We actually have Union Jack bunting on our garden shed!’ As the Metro newspaper in London pointed out, apart from all this being extremely hard to believe, hiding behind the flag is not a serious response to the crisis facing the government. ‘At a time when children are being killed in Gaza, at a moment when millions of Brits depend on food banks to get by and when fascists urge for an uprising, all he can do is talk about bunting.’

This is the deeper problem behind the embarrassing photo ops. Starmer’s clique have no independent politics or convictions. They represent the complete surrender of the Labour Party to the British establishment, who in turn appear to have no idea how to deal with the many crises they face. Mindlessly flying the flag in response to a right-wing surge perfectly captures the emptiness and reactionary instincts of a failed government.

It is also extremely dangerous. The masked activists putting up flags and daubing roundabouts across the country are not riding a wave of patriotism. They are hard racists and fascists intending to threaten and frighten. They are trying to whip up division. It is part of a wider agitation that is being encouraged by much of the media, by the Tories and by Reform. That Labour’s leaders are humiliating themselves by going along with it is shameful, and one more sign that the darkness is descending on them.