22.05.2025
Starmer among strangers
Conceivably, Sir Keir’s anti-migrant bile might be a cynical manoeuvre. The real target could well be not Reform, but the beleaguered Tories. Setting up a straight Labour-Reform fight at the next general election would, so the calculation goes, see a sure Labour victory. Paul Demarty investigates
So it is now the misfortune of immigrants to float through the frictionless void that is Keir Starmer’s political outlook.
In a bold (or perhaps desperate) attempt to get some purchase on a political situation in which the government, despite having a near-historic majority, is apparently incapable of doing anything remotely popular, Starmer last week launched a White Paper on immigration. He did so with a speech that was processed primarily for containing the Powellite-sounding line that “we risk becoming an island of strangers”.
His defenders rushed to point out, fairly enough, that he referred here to the dire consequences not of immigration as such, but of the lax enforcement of immigration rules. The White Paper itself is a laundry list of onerous regulations and pious promises to enforce the law, crack down on people-smugglers and the black economy, tighten visa requirements, and increase the time to settled status from five years to 10. A cop to his marrow (possibly the only fixed point of his outlook at all), Starmer never saw a problem he did not want to have battered with a night-stick.
The brouhaha over the “island of strangers” quip has obscured many other degenerate features of his big speech. He frames it all effectively as a cheap bit of point-scoring against the previous Tory government:
‘Take back control.’ Everyone knows that slogan and what it meant for immigration - or at least that’s what people thought. Because what followed from the previous government, starting with the people who used that slogan, was the complete opposite. Between 2019 and 2023, even as they were going around our country telling people, with a straight face, they would get immigration down, net migration quadrupled. Until in 2023, it reached nearly one million, which is about the population of Birmingham, our second largest city. That’s not control - it’s chaos.1
This will come as a surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with Starmer’s political history, which involved a long and successful campaign to commit Labour under Jeremy Corbyn to rerunning the Brexit referendum - a campaign widely and correctly seen as an attempt to reverse the 2016 referendum by stealth. He explains his new policy with a series of urgent, vacuous bromides: “On a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.”
Of course, it took Tory hacks about five seconds to compile an extensive documentary record of public statements on his part, implying he believed the opposite.
There is likely no simple explanation for Starmer’s cratered approval ratings, but it is difficult to shake the impression that his pathological lack of principles might have something to do with it. If you are having a rough patch, as a politician you can always launch some big new initiative to try and get on top of things. But there will be a limited upside, if literally nobody believes a word you say about anything, if indeed you sort of look fake, if you always give the impression of having been somehow photoshopped into the surrounding environment, even in person.
Lying
So, yes, we can assume that Starmer is lying through his lawyer’s teeth, and this is “all about politics”, “targeting these voters, responding to that party” - that party being, naturally, not the Tories, but Nigel Farage’s rampant Reform UK - still high on its crushing victory in the recent local elections. Though the main victims in that contest were the Tories, there were worrying signs for Labour as well.
So the question is, given that this is a shabby tactical manoeuvre in response to the threat of Reform, exactly what is the tactic? The most obvious explanation would be that Starmer is attempting to ‘cut Reform’s success off at the ankles’, as Margaret Thatcher was supposed to have done to the National Front with a stringent anti-migrant rhetoric back in 1979. In Thatcher’s case, it really seems to have worked; but then Thatcher was a Tory. In the sweep of political history, this is an easier trick to pull off for parties of the mainstream right, and especially for the Tories, who have ably exploited anti-migrant hysteria and even mob violence for their entire centuries-long history. It seems trickier for parties of the ‘left’ (very broadly defined). True, the Danish Social Democrats have succeeded this way in the last six years or so, but I can find few other examples.
Why? The basic political-science answer seems plausible. Big splashy announcements of this sort have the effect of raising the salience of the issue (in this case, immigration) - that is, the aggregate amount of importance associated with it among voters. However, voters already have a set of pre-existing views about which parties are most to be ‘trusted’ on each issue. In the case of this sort of panicked reaction to the victory of a migrant-hostile far-right party, this is exceptionally unlikely to work, because the issue is already of very high salience: the success of the far-right outsider indicates a very low level of trust in the mainstream parties, the panicked reaction indicates that the Labour Party believes Reform is a serious threat, and so aping Reform essentially amounts to an argument that people should vote for Reform.
There is the alternative ‘four-dimensional chess’ version of the strategy. In this version, Morgan McSweeney and his fellow poindexters do not, in fact, believe Reform is a serious threat to Labour. Amplifying its message will exacerbate the damage Reform is doing to the Tories, and sets up a contest in the next general election which will be a straight Labour-Reform fight. In that circumstance, Labour can expect to draw back the support it has leaked to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, on the basis that they have nowhere else to go, if they want to keep the “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” (as David Cameron famously described the UK Independence Party under Farage) out of government.
This would be an uncharacteristically high-risk move for the over-cautious Starmer, but perhaps not McSweeney, whose machinations in internal Labour politics betray a Kissingerian addiction to excessive strategic complexity and sudden coups de main. Could it work? Sure - it could. It could also not work - this was more or less the approach of Hillary Clinton’s team in 2016, after all, on the assumption that Clinton would have a far easier time against an unelectable, ranting lunatic like Donald Trump than an experienced, canny politician like Jeb Bush. Whoops!
Broken promises
I do not know which of these two strategies is operative, of course (or perhaps there is another one). What I do know is what is not going on: some kind of good-faith attempt to solve the ‘problem’ of immigration by massively reducing numbers. The measures on offer effectively tinker at the edges. Such was also the case with the Johnson-Truss-Sunak parliament; both Johnson and Sunak promised significant reductions in net migration (I am not sure if Truss did, but she hardly had a chance!), which, as Starmer smugly points out, simply failed to materialise.
But then, part of how we got to Brexit was David Cameron’s idiotic promise to reduce net inward migration to the tens of thousands - which, of course, would be impossible, so long as Britain remained in a continental zone of free movement. So it goes on. The pattern is clear: leaders huff and puff about how awful mass immigration is, and promise to deal with it, but all the while the numbers keep going up.
This is not because the politicians are liars and traitors, at the end of the day (though they usually are). The British economy has been thoroughly financialised; as a result, productivity is stagnant and the public sector is in decay. There is thus high demand for certain categories of workers, which coincides with an inability to pay much in the way of attracting them; which tends to push employers into importing lower-wage labour, from south-eastern Europe pre-Brexit and from poorer Commonwealth countries today. It is these workers who make up the bulk of the top-line numbers, and if there were serious efforts to restrict migration, the result would be paralysis of the health service and the long-heralded collapse of the social care system, among other dramatic consequences (particularly at the lower end of the service sector).
Politicians know that, and know they will be blamed, so they do not do it. They amplify the frustrations of backward voters, and then fail to deliver, which all but ensures a ratchet-effect - ever more wild promises to ‘take back control’, ever more grandiose token displays of cruelty to make the point, ever more disappointment. It is conceivable that a Nigel Farage, or a Rupert Lowe, really would pull up the drawbridge and the devil take the consequences; in the meantime, their ability to strike an anti-establishment pose ensures that they will be the beneficiaries of all this.
By the same token, the routine liberal pro-immigration argument - that immigrants contribute considerably to the economy - is both true in a way, and useless. For precisely the problem is that cheap migrant labour is used to compensate for the obvious dysfunctions attendant on the UK economy being wholly parasitical on the rest of the world. Indeed, it is itself one of the ways our economy is parasitical on the rest of the world.
It is incumbent on the socialist left to fight against immigration controls for the very different reason that the only way out of this ‘beggar thy neighbour’ situation is the united action of the working class across sectional barriers - and indeed across borders. It alone has the potential to disrupt the capitalists’ ability to take advantage of the state system.
The immigration hawks of the left are wrong, not on their one substantive factual claim - that mass migration can be used to depress wages and worsen conditions - but rather on this point of strategy. They must seek to replace this alliance - of disparate national sections of the working class - with another purely within the national framework, and are therefore typically driven to the fantasy that there is some meaningful difference of class interest between ‘productive’ industrial capital and finance capital (see, for example, Sahra Wagenknecht’s adoration of the Mittelstand of medium-sized German industrial firms).
The failure of such strategies of class alliance - whether in the post-war popular front programmes of ‘official communism’ in western Europe (the British Road to Socialism and its continental equivalents) or, often, in far bloodier disasters during the decolonisation period in the global south - somehow always goes undigested. We can ill afford such delusions, with political culture in Britain - as in many other countries - increasingly collapsing into vengeful chauvinism: a process exemplified by Starmer’s contemptible opportunism.