Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech was right

New Statesman​

a day ago

Photo by Ben Stansall -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 found in human problems. Problems found 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 has been incalculable' in the 'Restoring Control Over The Immigration System' White Paper have robotically repeated 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 Lord Ashcroft found that 68 per cent of Afro-Caribbeans still remembered Enoch Powell. 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 have not been more careful of it was cack-handed, but to conflate the two speeches was so transparently insincere it is a shame the PM has shown only contrition. By declining to speak further to the context of what he was trying to do he has let the speech die without its merit being heard.
Thus, the Guardian's letters page claimed another victim: the Prime Minister. Have those who condemned Starmer actually read 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 since cut adrift from its former identity as a party of working-class people, Labour is trying to hold together a coalition of a core 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 electorally influential and will decide the winner of the 2029 election – 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 that 'The Labour Party' would be delighted to find an electoral pathway that runs through the poorest parts of Britain. Yet, so far, it seems ashamed to be stood in front of the electoral tap-in that looms before the party. 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 inside the party since Tony Blair.
Instead of bowing to the uproar, Starmer should have emphasised again the substance of the speech: they 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 that has reached its apex. Nothing describes the left's contemporary patrician mindset better than their instinct to try 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 2.5m and 4.2m homes (depending on which think tank you ask) and needs to build 200,000 over Labour's target of 300,000 a year. It needs to do this every year for six years to start closing this gap – probably all too late for the millennial generation whose future fortunes in life will now be completely defined by inheritance.
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The average number of houses built since the Brexit referendum is around 206,000 annually, whilst the average net migration rate is closer to 330,000. In most years the net migration rate has climbed, making the infrastructure delivery requirement just to stay still harder each year. In fact, aside from the brief pandemic era, net migration has risen every single time a government was elected on a promise to reduce it. Labour is – or was – trying to do something 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 ordinary 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, that previously offered Britain's working class a real chance at social mobility, but are now more likely to choose to issue a visa than they once were to train an apprentice.
Apprenticeships are the much more likely choice of educational route for the children of lower income and/or non-graduate parents (read: working-class people). The British education system has become ever-more tilted toward university degrees, ever-more toward student debt. It has gifted the newly educated an empty post-graduate labour market that has reduced their educational premium to essentially nil. It is a broken system that is fundamentally pro-employer and pro-investor. One designed to pull the ladder away from working-class people. The mind boggles thinking of how the left became so enamoured of this system.
Labour's top team are – or were – 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 that have lost out most. In trying to force the 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 much more ill-advised use of the phrase 'incalculable damage' in the foreword to the white paper. 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 mind: 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 itself is becoming an Island Of Strangers. This speech was Starmer's first attempt to speak to the emotional life of our country. 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 speech, 50 percent of Britons feel disconnected from society. Then look closer; this feeling is heavily, heavily weighted to the least well-off, who feel least closeness with their neighbours and whose sense of social trust has collapsed from high to low 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 are people who are often living unhappy lives and who feel the loss of a world their parents had very keenly. People Labour should feel a sense of compassion toward, and who Labour has to win the trust of if it is to continue 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 Hebburn before she passed, over money and property 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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