Labour and immigration

As Keir Starmer’s Labour Party evokes the rhetoric of the racist MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Pat Stack details how their backwards immigration policy both is more the same and a break from the previous governments

‘But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.’

If you were wondering where Keir Starmer dug up his odious ‘Island of Strangers’ concept, then look no further than the quote above. It is an extract from the notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech delivered by then Tory cabinet minister Enoch Powell in 1968. Starmer’s terminology was so close to that of Powell’s as to be spine-chilling. It also echoed Margaret Thatcher’s famous employment of racist rhetoric with the speech she made as leader of the opposition in 1978: 

‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ 

Many of us had little hope or expectation of a Starmer Government prior to the election, but I think few of us would have predicted that he would mirror the two most blatantly racist speeches made by leading politicians in post-war Britain. This is not because Labour hasn’t had a terrible record on immigration historically, it has, but by and large Labour politicians have steered clear of racist rhetoric of the type Starmer has indulged in. 

Indeed, Harold Wilson, when prime minister, described Peter Griffiths, a Tory who won the seat of Smethwick in the 1964 general election by running a particularly viciously racist campaign, as a ‘parliamentary leper’. Yet Wilson sadly failed to match his words with deeds. Just as Starmer is now responding to the rise of Reform by tail-ending them, Wilson responded to Griffiths’ victory (which had gone against the national trend at the time) by shifting Labour’s position, for the first time, in favour of immigration controls. 

Furthermore, these controls were clear in their racist nature, aimed at Commonwealth citizens but heavily loaded in favour of people from Australia, New Zealand, and so on. To try and dress this up as something more respectable, the argument was put forward that the way to undermine the racists was to set limits on immigration. It’s an argument that is still used today, yet the truth is that every time governments have introduced legislation to restrict immigration, far from dampening down the rage of the racists, it has encouraged them to demand more.

After all, the logic of the argument is that immigration is a problem, and is responsible for some of the difficulties people face related to unemployment, low wages, lack of housing, poorly funded schools, and a creaking health service. Once such points are conceded to the racists, then the logical position is to demand more restrictions, more draconian measures, more deportations. The logic leads to burning down refugee centres, attacking the homes of migrants, victimising and ostracising ‘the strangers’. Powell understood that, and built a career on it. Farage understands it and builds on it. Now Starmer uses the same language. From day one of gaining office, Starmer has been bragging about getting tough on the question of migrants, his policy has effectively been Sunak and Braverman’s minus the flights to Rwanda.

Whilst dressing up his policies in rhetoric about ‘smashing the gangs’, in reality, it is the desperate human beings in the boats he is punishing. No new legal routes to apply for asylum are being opened up, no proper pathways to get your case heard. Instead people continue to be forced to face a perilous journey to try and gain entry. The ‘gangs’ argument was phoney under the Tories and no less so under Labour. Crocodile tears for those who drown at sea, a rant about the gangs, but no measures to prevent the need to put life at risk. It is the equivalent of the police entering an area with a high rate of burglaries, and whilst promising to deal with the robbers, evicting all the potential victims from their homes to ensure there is nothing there for the burglars to steal. The solution inflicts more misery than the crime.

If nothing is done to help those who are trying to get in, what of those who do? Rachel Reeves has announced that they will end the use of hotels for asylum seekers. This, she brags, will save £1 billion a year. Just as the boats have become an obsession for those who seek to whip up racism, so too have these ‘hotels’, which frequently and ludicrously have been described as ‘four star’. The truth is, of course, they are not hotels, as you or I would understand them. If we booked into a hotel we would expect room service, a menu, staff to wait on us, a restaurant with multiple choice menus, a bar, and depending how much we are willing to pay, all sorts of other amenities. We would have complete freedom of movement, and would not expect to be policed, and constantly surveilled. In truth, these are buildings that used to be hotels but are now in effect mini detention centres. However, they tend to be preferable to the more obviously prison-like, bigger detention centres, often providing squalid conditions, and resembling internment camps. That is presumably what Reeves will be offering, and it’s every bit as much about pandering to ‘hotel hysteria’ as it is to saving money. 

If Starmer is offering little or nothing different to the Tories on this front, what of his stance on ‘legal immigration’. Starmer has promised that net migration (what would be deemed legal migration) would be significantly reduced over the next four years and announced a series of measures in doing so. 

Some of these measures were pretty openly racist, some downright cruel. Some would not just have a disastrous effect on the immigrant and would-be immigrant population, but also on the wider society as a whole. Clearly, some measures are designed to intimidate and discourage not just those who would potentially come but also many already here.

At present, if you have worked here and resided here for five years, you can apply for permanent residency and citizenship. This has never been an easy or smooth process. You have to maintain employment throughout that time, and your work visa is tied to the employer who brought you here. You have no access to public funds, if you have children who reach university age they will be treated as and charged as overseas students. You can’t vote, just about the only thing you can do like everybody else is pay tax!

For many though the five years of being a non-person was deemed worth the sacrifice, now Starmer is proposing to double the time you have to wait to apply to ten years. Just to add to the nastiness of this he is planning to make it retrograde; in other words if you’ve been here four years and were planning to apply you now have to wait a further six years before you can be in a position to ‘integrate’ as a fully functioning resident. An interesting measure from a man who demands integration from newcomers; in other words you integrate with us whilst we further ostracise you.

The talk of integration is backed by demands that anyone coming here must speak English. It is not clear what level of English you must have, and who will decide whether you’ve attained it. One only has to think of the ludicrous citizenship tests that ask questions that 90 per cent of born-British citizens would be unable to answer to guess how this might work.

Additionally, there is something hugely and disgustingly ironic about a nation that plundered much of the globe, ruling over people’s whose languages they never learnt to speak, or indeed they banned from being spoken, denying people from many of those same countries the right to live here if they don’t speak the language of their historic oppressors.

At the heart of Starmer’s bluster there is a serious fault line. For all their vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric the Tories witnessed ever growing levels of legal migration, particularly post Brexit. They allowed it because key sectors of society and certain branches of capitalism would grind to a halt if they couldn’t employ migrant workers. This is most obviously the case in the NHS and particularly social care. Following Brexit an acute shortage in social care staff was experienced. Boris Johnson’s government introduced a visa scheme to deal with the shortfall. Starmer intends to scrap that scheme, saying the sector must pay higher wages to attract British workers. 

The problem is much of the privatised social care provider sector relies heavily on local authority contracts. Squeezed of money, local authorities look for the cheapest care they can purchase, and the employers make their profits by paying workers who do this work pitiful wages. The workforce, though often crucial to the lives and well-being of disabled and elderly people, are treated as unskilled, have no career path to advance, work long and unsociable hours, and often have to work beyond their paid hours.

Nowhere is Starmer offering to provide the levels of funding to local authorities required to make the work attractive and therefore avoid the shortfall in staff. Social care has largely functioned (as indeed has the NHS) thanks to the willingness of what he calls ‘strangers’ to work in the sector in unrewarding conditions.

Ultimately Starmer will have to do as the Tories did, and back down on the issue, or allow some of the most vulnerable people in society to suffer neglect or take up desperately needed NHS beds. Starmer knows all this of course but he has decided that dog whistle racism is the best way to respond to his Tory and Reform adversaries.There lies the irony: so disgraceful was Powell’s speech it got him sacked from a Tory cabinet, and made him a political anathema to most, but a hero for racists everywhere and yet here is the famous ‘human rights lawyer’ drawing on one of the most disgraceful speeches in British political history to get his truly tawdry message across.

This speech undoubtedly has made him anathema for many, but ironically, despite his best efforts it will not make him a hero for racists. They already have their heroes and Starmer ain’t one of them. In other words, he has sunk in the filthy racist mire, his words will encourage and embolden racists everywhere, but he will gain absolutely nothing from it. He has sold what was left of his conscience for a pocket full of mumbles.