Why does Keir Starmer suddenly sound like an odd agglomeration of verbal data-scraping from right-wing websites, with a flourish of AI-generated tabloid-speak thrown in?
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.
Something has gone awry when the PM’s doughty spokesperson has to spend the next day rejecting comparisons with Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. The language, as much or more than the substance, has become the bone of contention – and it is not only the usual suspects on the left or the perpetually outraged liberal classes who feel queasy.
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.”
And yet a day on from Starmer’s remarks at the launch of the White Paper, the Labour machine – much of it with clenched teeth – is having to explain that the PM actually thinks incomers have made a contribution to Britain.
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.
Some speechwriter clearly had an overdose of energy drink. But calmer heads around Starmer (who is admittedly run ragged dealing with trade deals, Ukraine, an upcoming EU summit and now this controversy) should have cautioned against going to the wilder end of rhetoric on a subject that inflames more than it enlightens.
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.
No 10 has however been careless in raising the question of similarity – it is so clearly there in the language that a Google search might have issued a warning – only to have to veer away from it with a denial of a similarity it created in the first place.
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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.
All of this will be raked over when, inevitably, there are failures to deliver the upsides of a sweeping White Paper, and we see shortages of care workers, domestic tradespeople and building and farm workers in order to hit a non-specific target of migrant numbers. The result may well be more likely to make Reform’s solutions seem reasonable to voters wondering how far to go in this journey. After all, many might wonder, if the centrists are talking like this, then the problem must be so serious as to make Reform UK – built on hostility to immigration and the asylum system – even more justified.
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.
Starmer knows that he did not handle that dreadful moment in national life well. He sounded distant and failed to capture the appalling magnitude of visceral disgust, laced with anxiety and anger, which so many people felt far beyond Merseyside and especially so in deprived areas.
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.
The skilled lawyer in him probably thought this was a classic case of having to plead the best case you can in the circumstances with gusto. Yet the case wasn’t particularly well made, by his standards – one sentence in his statement does not follow well from another.
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?
The greatest weakness one can show in modern politics is a lack of authenticity. Starmer has a difficult case to convince both centrist voters who prefer not to be alarmist on these subjects and those who are now fired up to think they are overwhelmingly important.
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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