Reform in the recent local elections did even better than in 2013 and Starmer is clearly hoping that by showing Labour means business on immigration he can remove a central plan of Reform’s appeal…writes Mihir Bose
Nigel Farage may have mocked Keir Starmer’s speech on how Labour will control immigration, but he knows that immigration could provide him the key to 10 Downing Street. The reason is Labour is trying to play catch up on this issue aware that it has never been honest about the immigration problem in this country.
I have been aware of this problem ever since I arrived in this country in January 1969, seven months after Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech where he saw the river Tiber foaming with much blood if immigration was not only stopped but immigrants repatriated back to the countries they had come from. And by immigrants he meant “coloured “immigrants, then the word coloured not being considered remotely racist.
The speech was hugely controversial, and Powell was sacked by Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative party. Yet Starmer in his speech used the same words as Powell. The Tory politician, speaking of how his constituents felt about immigration, had said, “They found themselves made strangers in their own country.” Starmer said, “We risk becoming an island of strangers”.
Of course, Starmer’s supporters will say that just before that he had said how proud he was that Britain is now marvellously diverse. Powell, of course, did not believe in diversity and his speech was designed to end any chance of Britain becoming diverse. Powell has been proved wrong. Britain is now diverse in the way I could not have imagined in 1969, and this diversity extends beyond chicken tikka masala being considered the national dish. Back in 1969 chicken tikka masala, which maybe considered Britain’s great contribution to Indian cuisine, had not yet been invented.
But what make Starmer’s speech more significant is that, while Powell spoke in Birmingham’s Midland hotel, the Prime Minister spoke from Downing Street giving his speech the stamp of being government policy. In contrast as a result of his speech Powell became an outsider, a status that was confirmed when some years later he left the Tory party and defected to the Ulster Unionists. Ironically, this helped Labour regain power in the 1974 election. Starmer, in contrast, is hoping that his speech will stem the tide of Nigel Farage and stop Reform gaining power. And this is where I think he will go wrong.
The reason I say that is because this tactic of stopping Farage was tried and resulted in the leader who tried it himself being forced to quit Downing Street and one of the essential pillars of this country’ post war edifices being torn down. I refer to David Cameron. It is astonishing the similarities with how Cameron reacted to Farage and what Starmer has now done.
Back then Farage ran UKIP and was campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union. Although the odd Conservative, and even a couple of Labour politicians, had called for it, Britain leaving the EU was considered a ridiculous idea that the British would never accept. Cameron even dismissed UKIP as a party of “fruit cakes”, “loonies” and “closet racists”.
But then came the local elections of 2013 when UKIP, following on from its meteoric rise in the opinion polls during the previous 12 months and some record-breaking parliamentary by-election performances, secured 25 per cent of the vote, the biggest-ever incursion into English local electoral politics by an independent fourth party in the post-war period, easily outstripping the achievements of the Greens in late 1980s and early ’90s.
UKIP outperformed the Liberal Democrats and left Labour trailing in their wake. The party’s vote was far more evenly spread than that of the three Westminster parties and it was second in many seats which because of our first past the post system meant it did not get as many seats. Yet its 24.8% was ahead of Labour, which came third with 21.7%, and only 11% behind the Tories who lost 335 seats while UKIP gained a 139. As the country’s best election analyst, John Curtice, put it, “Ukip’s success has erected a very large question mark over the future of politics in Britain.”
Curtice was proved right. The election results send shivers through Cameron. He was already worried about UKIP and had promised an in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. He now redoubled on that hoping that Britain would vote to remain and UKIP would be vanquished. As we know he failed miserably.
Reform in the recent local elections did even better than in 2013 and Starmer is clearly hoping that by showing Labour means business on immigration he can remove a central plan of Reform’s appeal.
But this is where he is in danger of doing a Cameron. As Farage has pointed out Starmer’s pledge to sort out immigration was not one of the five pledges Starmer had made when he fought last year’s election. Labour for all its talk has done nothing to show it can deal with the people coming over in boats. The Albanian Prime Minister bluntly rejected, and that on live television, to house asylum seekers in Albania.
Also, Starmer has provided no solution to a central problem. That the problem of immigration is not illegal migrants but legal migrants. And this country needs those immigrants to work in many sectors of the economy which cannot find locals for those jobs.
What is more significant is that Farage, a more skilful politician than many people give him credit for, does not just have immigration to woo voters. This follower of Thatcher, who believed in free enterprise, is now talking of government control of many sectors of the economy sounding like he is reading from a script of Jeremy Corbyn. Reform’s appeal to Labour voters at the local council elections has convinced him that private enterprise is not always the only cure and government commanding the heights of the economy has much merit. And this when Starmer is chained to the new Labour idea of looking and sounding like a child of Thatcher.
To make matters even worse for Starmer many Labour supporters who have turned to Farage see little evidence that they are going to better off.
Of course, the election is four years away but in politics when voters turn away from a party it is not easy to bring them back. Cameron discovered that and Starmer might.
Mihir Bose is author of Thank You Mr Crombie Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British
