Keir Starmer has gone for Reform UK’s jugular. Yesterday he described its plan to deport thousands of people who arrived legally in this country as ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’ in a BBC interview at Labour’s conference in Liverpool.
This broadside followed his description of Nigel Farage’s party as an ‘enemy’ hiding in ‘plain sight’. He also called Reform ‘divisive’, and suggested that ‘their politics and their policies will tear this country apart’. In another interview, Farage was dismissed as ‘grubby’.
By the standards of democratic debate this is extreme language of the sort used by parties of the hard-Left and hard-Right throughout Europe. Even Farage was unnerved, complaining that Starmer’s remarks ‘bordered on the inciteful’, while adding that they ‘smacked of total desperation’.
Will the Prime Minister’s new confrontational approach work? Might millions of prospective Reform voters say to themselves: ‘My God, he’s spot on. Farage really is pulling us apart. Starmer is the voice of moderation and decency. We must support Labour’.
No, I don’t think they will.
The reason can be found in a figure released by the Office for National Statistics on Friday. The UK population rose by 755,300 between mid-2023 and mid-2024, equivalent to the population of Leeds. According to the ONS, 98 per cent of this increase was attributable to immigration.
Now it is perfectly true that – for once! – Labour can’t be blamed. The figure of 755,300 covers the 12-month period before Starmer became Prime Minister. It is a legacy of Tory irresponsibility. The Conservative Party recklessly opened the floodgates far wider than ever before in our history.
Levels of legal immigration – though not of the illegal variety – may well have declined since Labour took over, largely thanks to measures belatedly introduced by the Tories in their dying days.
But in a sense it doesn’t really matter to voters whose fault it is. Most people have had enough of uncontrolled immigration of whatever variety. A YouGov poll in early August revealed that half of respondents want a moratorium on immigration, and would support mass deportations of recently arrived migrants.
Interestingly, some 47 per cent of people in that poll thought that most immigrants come to the UK illegally, though in fact the number who arrive legally is about ten times greater. As far as illegal immigration is concerned, those crossing the Channel in small boats account for less than half the overall number.
Many people don’t understand, or care about, these distinctions. What they see is that immigration of all sorts is hopelessly out of control. And they won’t welcome Starmer’s imputation that they are racist for wanting something done about it.
In a Survation poll published in Saturday’s Mail, immigration was rated behind only the cost of living in people’s top priorities for the Government in the next 12 months.
Keir Starmer at the Labour party conference on Sunday. The PM has gone for Reform’s jugular. Yesterday he described its plan to deport thousands of people who arrived legally in this country as ‘racist’, writes Stephen Glover
As far as illegal immigration is concerned, those crossing the Channel in small boats account for less than half the overall number, writes Stephen Glover
Labour may have inherited the problem, but people can see that it’s not making things any better, and in the case of boats coming across the Channel – which have become a kind of lightning rod for all immigration concerns – demonstrably worse.
That is why I believe that, outside the liberal metropolitan elites, Starmer’s depiction of Reform as racist, immoral and divisive will fall on deaf ears. Many will welcome Farage’s admittedly drastic solutions as the only ones that carry credibility.
Moreover, it will be obvious to prospective Reform voters (and many others) how insincere Sir Keir is. The man who calls Farage’s policies racist has himself used language that is arguably just as emotive.
In May, he suggested that, as a result of mass immigration, Britain was in danger of becoming an ‘island of strangers’. To many, this had distasteful echoes of a line in Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood speech’ in which he described a future in which Britons ‘found themselves made strangers in their own country’.
It’s true that six weeks later he said he regretted using these words, but at the time No 10 robustly defended them.
Only a few days ago, he told the Telegraph: ‘Left-wing parties, including my own, did shy away from people’s concerns around illegal immigration. It has been too easy for people to enter the country, work in the shadow economy and remain illegally.’
Quite true – and exactly what Nigel Farage might himself have said. And yet no sooner were these words out of Sir Keir’s mouth than he was laying into Reform as a bunch of racists.
The Prime Minister is a political shapeshifter. In Liverpool, surrounded by the comrades, he sounds very different to how he does in London when reading out a script written for him by his demotic chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
Another example of Starmer’s insincerity is his wrapping himself in the Union flag and pronouncing himself a great British patriot. Does he really believe the British public are so easily deceived?
It’s hardly a surprise that the Survation poll in today’s Mail suggests that Labour is regarded as the fifth most patriotic party – behind Reform, the Tories, the Lib Dems, and even the Greens.
Even Nigel Farage was unnerved, complaining that Starmer’s remarks ‘bordered on the inciteful’, while adding that they ‘smacked of total desperation’, writes Stephen Glover
People intending to vote Reform or Tory, including former Labour supporters, won’t be taken in by Sir Keir Starmer’s implausible contortions. They know where he’s coming from, and don’t believe that he genuinely deplores the effects of uncontrolled immigration.
Labour will be judged by what happens. There’s no reason to suppose that it will significantly reduce legal immigration, or do anything about the hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals who will soon gain the right to stay here indefinitely.
The numbers coming across the Channel seem likely to go on increasing as the Government applies a series of costly, ineffectual measures, and fails to come up with a single deterrent that might actually persuade people not to climb into small boats and undertake a hazardous journey.
The effects of high immigration that have so exasperated the public will probably only get worse: longer waits in getting GP appointments; more pressure on school places; slower NHS treatment (in England an estimated 7.4 million procedures were waiting to be carried out in July, up 34,000 on June); and, of course, a sense of weakening cultural identity.
As for housing, pressures are likely to intensify since there’s mounting evidence that Labour won’t meet its optimistic building targets. According to research by Savills estate agency, the Government will deliver just over half the 1.5 million new homes it has promised to build by 2029.
Shamefully, Labour never links astronomical levels of immigration to the shortage of affordable housing. If Sir Keir Starmer truly wanted to be candid, he would be open about the undeniable connection.
Were the Government to stop the boats coming across the Channel, people might be persuaded that Labour is serious about reducing numbers, and the prospects of Reform UK would be dented. But how likely is that?
Sir Keir Starmer can call Nigel Farage whatever names he wants, although by so doing he sounds like the extremists he intends to demonise, and succeeds only in coarsening political debate.
Bad mouthing Reform, and wrapping himself in the national flag, won’t make a blind bit of difference unless Labour addresses the problem that is worrying more than half the nation – and there’s absolutely no sign of it doing that.
