In two interviews published on Sunday, Keir Starmer marked the end of week of retreats with a regret: he had never properly read the “Island of strangers” speech he gave in May.
The reason given, with an admirable and especially human candour, was that he and his family were still shaken from the mysterious arson attack that occurred at the same time. Who wouldn’t be? He spoke of the temptation to cancel the speech – an obvious choice to most of us – but ploughed ahead. The interviews gave us the chance to remember that Starmer is a human being, but once again one whose weakness is still located in human problems. Problems founded in the deep, cynical opportunism and histrionics of Britain’s political culture and the inability of the media (the humans that run it, and their incentives) to countenance any even-handed response to modern political culture.
The admission that Starmer was not au fait with the speech’s contents won’t have improved his image as a puppet of Morgan McSweeney and other, anonymous Labour Spads. It won’t have improved his image as a man with few strong personal convictions. It also seems barely credible. How can a man who (supposedly) wrote the far more inflammatory phrase “the damage this has done to our country is incalculable” in the Restoring Control over the Immigration System white paper have repeated robotically the accompanying speech without knowing the contents? Surely a man who was involved in Black Lives Matter and came to prominence as an MP during the “woke” political era would understand the taboo around anything – however unfairly it might be seized upon – even vaguely reminiscent of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of blood” speech.
In 2013, polling by Michael Ashcroft found that 64 per cent of black Caribbeans knew about Enoch Powell and what he said. Asian communities were far less likely to hold the memory, but it still remained strong among Sikhs. The wound opened by Powell is still there. To not have been more careful of it was clumsy, but to conflate the two speeches, as critics have done, was so transparently insincere it is a shame the PM has shown only contrition. By declining to speak more about what he was trying to say, he has let the speech die without its merit being properly assessed.
Thus, the Guardian’s letters page claimed another victim: the Prime Minister. Have those who condemned Starmer actually heard the speech he says he didn’t read?
This focus on outrage over the “island of strangers” phrase alone speaks to Labour’s biggest challenge, one year into power. Long cut adrift from its former identity as a party of working-class people, Labour is trying to hold together a coalition of metropolitan middle-class, public sector workers, and a newly re-established group of “somewheres” outside those cities. The latter live in significantly less diverse communities in declining, post-industrial Britain. These “somewheres” are much more influential electorally and will decide the 2029 election – the party is still searching for a politics and economics that doesn’t leave them at the margin. Can the two groups that make up Labour’s coalition ever play nice together?
One would think “the Labour Party” would be delighted to find an electoral pathway running through the poorest parts of Britain. Yet, so far, it seems ashamed to take advantage of this electoral tap-in. It has no politician of conviction to poke the ball into the net. But then, to do so will take a re-assessment of the political culture that has existed inside the party since Tony Blair.
Instead of bowing to the uproar against the “Island of strangers” speech, Starmer should have re-emphasised its substance: these are the political growing pains associated with the reality of the electoral map.
First: the immigration policy Starmer discussed in his speech is in a crisis of democratic legitimacy, a crisis that has reached its apex. Nothing describes the contemporary left’s patrician mindset better than its instinct to sidestep this issue and ignore voting trends that are inconvenient, convinced that they are a product of the plebs’ xenophobia – and therefore fundamentally illegitimate.
Britain has a housing shortage of between 2.5 million and 4.3 million homes (depending on who you ask) and needs to build up to 200,000 more than Labour’s manifesto target of 300,000 a year. It needs to do this every year for six years to start closing this gap – which is probably all too late for the millennial generation whose future fortunes in life will be defined by inheritance.
The average number of houses built since the Brexit referendum is around 200,000 annually, while the average net migration rate is closer to 350,000. In most years the net migration rate has climbed, making it much harder to keep infrastructure delivery at the same level each year. In fact, aside from the pandemic era, net migration has risen every time a government was elected on a promise to reduce it. Labour is – or was – trying to respond to this yawning democratic deficit. That’s commendable in an era when political trust is lower than it has been for a lifetime and voters talk to focus groups in apocalyptic terms about the end of British society.
Starmer’s speech also dove into the relationship between migration and employer apathy – pointing to sectors like engineering, which previously offered Britain’s working class a real chance at social mobility, but are today more likely to issue a visa than they once were to train an apprentice. “Is it fair to young people weighing up their future to miss out on those apprenticeships,” he said, “to see colleges in their community almost entirely dedicated to one-year courses for overseas students? No, I don’t think it is.”
Apprenticeships are the more likely educational route for children of lower-income and/or non-graduate parents (read: working-class people). The British education system has become ever more tilted towards university degrees, ever more towards student debt. It has gifted the newly educated an empty postgraduate labour market, which has reduced their educational premium to essentially nil. It is a broken system that is fundamentally pro-employer and pro-investor. One designed to make it harder for working-class people to progress. The mind boggles thinking of how the left became so enamoured of this system.
Labour’s top team is – or was – beginning to realise that there are winners and losers in the current globalised economic settlement. In a country where social mobility has collapsed and regional inequality has ballooned, it is the working-class people the party was founded to represent who have lost out most. In trying to force business’ hand to bring training home, Labour can both help out the most disadvantaged and train the new generation of trade workers that it will need to build the extra hundreds of thousands of homes Britain needs.
Finally, there is the pathos of both the phrase “Island of strangers” and of Starmer’s ill-advised use of the phrase “incalculable damage” in the foreword to the white paper, which was also published in May. That damage is not being done to Britain, but to other countries that we infrequently hear about.
The liberal immigration consensus has, in fact, caused a form of damage that few have tried to bring as a calculation to the public: damage associated with brain drain from nations with the most to lose.
As of 2023, Britain preys on the “red-list” countries that the World Health Organisation says have critical shortages of doctors and nurses. In March, Wes Streeting described the NHS’s recruitment practices as “unethical” – and he was right. These are countries with fewer than 49 doctors, nurses and midwives per 10,000 people – the darker side of the migration consensus, that won’t be included in platitude-laden conversations about diversity. These recruitment drives again remove the need for the state to train more working-class, would-be doctors and nurses in Britain.
Most of all, Labour is becoming an island of its own, estranged from large swathes of the country where there’s a chronic sense of unhappiness and grief for being dispossessed of something. Binning it would be a mistake, a return to the meaningless, politics-without-any-politics speak of “five missions”. According to polling by More in Common made after the May speech, 50 per cent of Britons feel disconnected from society. Then look closer; this feeling is heavily weighted to the least well-off, who feel the least closeness with their neighbours and whose sense of social trust has collapsed over a generation. The same polling shows that this feeling is most extreme with Reform voters, who also claim to have the lowest levels of life satisfaction. These people are often living unhappy lives, who keenly feel the loss of the world their parents had. They are people Labour should feel a sense of compassion towards, and who Labour must win the trust of if the party is to remain in government. Instead, many have the instinct of the harshest capitalist: adapt or die.
As Michael Young and Peter Willmott wrote in their study of 1950s Bethnal Green, Family and Kinship in East London, community ties were once the precious treasure of a working-class life. They were the traditions that founded the Labour Party. My grandmother knew half of the north-east town of Hebburn. I knew as a child that every trip to the shops for a lollipop would take an age, peppered with stops to catch up with neighbours and other old friends. Friends that had raised one another’s children and grandchildren. Over money and property (she has none), her ability to love others was my family’s great inheritance. My father knew fewer people than her. I know fewer still. “Knowing other people” is a form of wealth that can’t be replaced by AI innovations, GDP growth, industrial strategy, or in a “mission”. The erosion of social bonds is slowly boiling British life to death: it is making life feel less worth living, less hopeful, especially for the poorest.
Forcing Britain to face up to the various, uncomfortable hypocrisies within a failed consensus on globalisation shouldn’t be something Labour apologises for. It is a moral mission that the party was once completely comfortable with. Perhaps Starmer’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t really believe in that particular mission.
[See also: A humbling week for Keir Starmer]
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