KEIR STARMER is playing with fire. Nigel Farage was not wrong to point out the similarity between the rhetoric used by the Prime Minister during his speech on migration and the Reform leader’s own words.
Starmer framed illegal migration as a “national security” issue, rather than one driven by global poverty, wars and climate change, all issues in which the British state is deeply implicated.
It should be addressed, he argued, by the same methods as those used to deal with terrorism. Straight away alarm bells should be ringing, given the determination of the hard right in politics and their populist media allies to connect, without justification, terrorism with immigration — just as far-right rioters did this summer.
The Prime Minister had nothing to say about the benefits to this country of migration and no positive proposals about either the causes or the consequences of its continuation.
Instead, he prefers to pander to the right. It is reported that his chief political adviser, Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, has been telling newly elected Labour MPs, already understandably worried about losing their seats at next time of asking, to talk about immigration.
It is fair to assume that McSweeney is not urging them to go out and tell their constituents about unity in diversity, about how public services would collapse without migrant workers, nor about the importance of challenging racism in all its forms and wherever expressed.
No, he will instead be looking over his shoulder at the Reform UK vote. Farage’s party came second to Labour in 89 seats in the July election and are clearly targeting many for a serious challenge.
On the other hand, the left — defined broadly as Greens, independent progressives, Plaid Cymru and Workers Party candidates — were runners-up to Labour in 59 constituencies.
Yet for McSweeney and Starmer enemies are exclusively on the left. Socialists have been met with anathema, exclusion and harassment throughout their reign in the Labour Party. There is no sign of any reflection on the losses of safe seats to Greens and anti-war independents.
Even now, seven left-wing MPs remain suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party whip merely for voting to abolish the punitive, neo-Malthusian two-child benefit cap.
The Starmer strategy is to turn the government’s back on anyone concerned with social justice and equality.
The hard right, on the other hand, is to be appeased. Truckling to Tory and Reform voters is the only plan McSweeney knows and the government is sticking to it, despite the distinctly mediocre vote harvest it has brought in.
Thus the central theme of Starmer’s migration speech was macho posturing, all new police commands smashing this and that. If that would prevent small boats crossing the Channel it is reasonable to assume that the Tory government, never knowingly outbid on law and order, would have tried it.
In fact, as former immigration service officials pointed out in the wake of Starmer’s speech, it is unlikely to work. The criminal gangs he is breathing fire at are mostly domiciled elsewhere, as indifferent to the new Border Command as they are to McSweeney’s electoral calculations.
Migration is rooted in the systemic crises generated by the imperialist system Starmer champions.
If it is too much to expect him to recognise that, he could at least work to mitigate some of the factors driving people to leave their homes and seek refuge in Britain via such perilous routes, while ensuring proper support for those claiming asylum, including by offering the right to work.
That is not part of Plan McSweeney, it seems. But it is what the labour movement needs to be demanding.
