A lot more astonishing than the heralded clampdown on immigration figures and a renewed go at illicit small boat-stopping in the English Channel was the Prime Minister’s lexicon. Phrases used this week will define his Government when the reckoning is drawn up at the next election, and thrown back at him in the meantime.
The PM had a difficult pivot in policy to introduce, and one which frays communal feeling in his own Cabinet. Some worry that the turquoise tide of Reform UK’s advance demands a no-holds-barred switch of message on asylum and immigration from a party which has ho-hummed about these matters for the last couple of decades. Starmer himself made shocked noises about Tories’ approach a few years ago: “We must never accept the Tory or media narrative that often scapegoats and demonises migrants.”
This jars (to put it mildly) with the flurry of over-ripe language about the UK being in danger of becoming an “island of strangers”, and, in an even worse choice, the word “squalid” (dictionary definition: “dirty and unpleasant”) to describe liberal immigration policies. It all veered too close to the kind of hateful language often deployed about immigrants or refugees themselves.
The harping on “strangers” ran way too close to the late Enoch Powell’s dystopian vision of an alienated white Britain under siege from ill-intentioned immigrants. Starmer certainly did not mean to signal this – by the time Powell gave the “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, he had crossed from iconoclastic thinking and immigration scepticism to outright racist overtones and panic-mongering.
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Just as glaring to my mind is the use of “island”, which has grandiose, reactionary overtones – and the implication that we prefer living apart from the rest of the world. Not for nothing is the favoured text of Brexit-y historians 1905’s Our Island Story. “Country” would have done perfectly well for most of us but, on the thesaurus of Reform-compliant language, went in many ways further than Nigel Farage, who is rather good at nuances for the different audiences he wants to reach.
The backdrop is not only a panicky electoral spasm inside Labour after voters in the May local elections heavily favoured Reform in many key seats. It is as much about the Government’s terror at the blowback from the riots unleashed by the Southport murders last summer – and how quickly that flamed into sentiment which was hostile to asylum hostels, regardless of their relevance, as well as a glaring lack of trust in official information.
To give him a break, he is a leader who does understand when he has missed the mark and has worked hard to improve his reaction time and tone. Southport and the Faragist advance had instilled in him a desire to connect better with voters – especially those on whom the survival of Labour in Government and the durability of his leadership depends.
Deploying the lazy old argument that it’s just “common sense” to make English the lingua franca of immigrants needs more signs of commitment to make this actually work. Is there a plan in place to ensure people arriving with no English learn it, and by what means – or is it just another tub-thump?
That is the hardest side of the day job, when U-turns or pivots become inevitable. But Starmer this week sounded like an uneasy ventriloquist’s dummy, with words put in front of him to defend his policy switches which he would not use with his family or friends. So why deploy them in front of the rest of us?
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and co-host of Sky News’ Politics at Sam and Anne’s daily podcast
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