Strangers in a strange land

Welcome to Starmer's HATE Island

‘Nations depend on rules – fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.’

I’m literally shaking as I read these words, spoken by the British prime minister on Monday at Downing Street, although it might well have been Nuremberg in 1930s Germany.

The embattled PM’s speech came with fresh new plans to reduce immigration, now again the most important issue for the British public and the source of the Reform Party’s runaway success.

One doesn’t need to be the world’s greatest cynic to treat the headline ‘British Government promises immigration crackdown’ with a degree of scepticism, which makes me question whether this is politically astute. The Tories talked tough on the subject but people do notice results; Labour will find it extremely hard to get immigration down to levels most voters find acceptable, and indeed the same goes for Reform. The problem comes down to an ageing population and an electorate unwilling to put posterity ahead of comfort in their twilight years.

Starmer faces an immensely difficult political balancing act, trying to hold onto a large number of moderates alarmed by the intense number of arrivals, and a socially liberal core - overrepresented in the media - who find such language immoral and even threatening.

The latter are a minority within a minority, since some 61 per cent of Labour voters want to see immigration ‘significantly reduced’, and I assume that Morgan McSweeney has some dark data about how furious their voters are. (I have no idea if McSweeney is the strategic genius some believe him to be, but out of ethnic pride I like the idea of a man from Co. Cork being behind the machinations of Westminster).

It would obviously be wise to focus on the most unpopular and enraging form of migration – the illegal kind taking up hotel spaces – but that would entail withdrawing from the ECHR or even the Refugee Convention, which goes against every fibre of Starmer’s being. Eventually it’s going to happen, but the current occupant of Downing Street is not the man to break convention.

For now the best that Starmer can manage is talk tough and do what he can to reduce the numbers - but this does feel like an alcoholic pledging to get his drinking down to one bottle of wine a day by 2030. (Indeed, that analogy doesn’t even do justice to the culminative effects of migration – the more you get, the greater the pressure for more.)

While I’m not the target audience, Starmer’s speech seemed like something aimed at balancing those concerns. More than anything, the term which most offended actually brought to mind Roger Scruton’s phrase ‘a society of strangers’, although Scruton meant it in a positive sense - a high-trust society where people can depend on non-relatives to play by the rules. But even around one in two Labour supporters agreed with Starmer’s speech and a similar number found his language acceptable, numbers which contrast with its reception among Labour-leaning commentators.