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Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Starmer admits he 'deeply regrets' his 'island of strangers' immigration remark
Keir Starmer said he and his advisors were unaware of similarities between his words and Enoch Powell's vile Rivers of Blood speech - saying he said it hours after his family home was targeted by arsonists Keir Starmer has said he "deeply regrets" warning the UK was at risk of becoming an "island of strangers". The PM made the remark in a press conference just hours after his family home was attacked by arsonists. The words sparked a fierce backlash amid comparisons to notorious Tory racist Enoch Powell, who said white people were set to become 'strangers in their own country' in 1968. In an interview with The Observer, Mr Starmer said he would not have used the phrase if he or his advisors were aware of the similarities. He said using the words "wasn't right" and conceded: "I'll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.' The PM admitted he should have read through the speech more carefully and 'held it up to the light a bit more' before delivering it. He said he was "really, really worried" after the arson attack, and his wife Vic was "really shaken up" - prompting him to consider calling the press conference off. READ MORE: Tory MP launches astonishing attack on Kemi Badenoch after staggering Commons blunder He said he just wanted to "get back" to his loved ones as quickly as he could as he unveiled a white paper setting out plans to drive down net migration. The PM recounted: "It's fair to say I wasn't in the best state to make a big speech." But he said the fault was his own, stating: "I wouldn't have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell." The PM also accepted there were 'problems with the language' in his foreword to an immigration white paper which said the high level of arrivals had done "incalculable damage" to the country. In the days that followed the PM was accused of making "shameful" remarks. Labour peer Alf Dubs, who fled the Nazis as a child, said: "I'm unhappy that we have senior politicians who use language which is reminiscent of Powell, and I'm sorry that Keir Starmer used some of the phrases that you've just quoted.' Three men have been charged over the attack on the PM's family home in North London, which was being rented by the PM's sister-in-law and her partner. Mr Starmer said it could have been a "different story' if his wife's sister had not been awake and able to call the fire brigade. Ukrainian nationals Petro Pochynok and Roman Lavrynovych, as well as Ukrainian-born Romanian national Stanislav Carpiuc are accused of conspiring to endanger life. In the days before the attack on the PM's family home, a flat he had previously lived at and a car close to his home were also targeted.
The National
15-06-2025
- The National
Jeremy Corbyn on 10 things that changed his life
Speaking to The Sunday National, Corbyn reflected on 10 things that shaped his life. One: Hitchhiking home from Germany In 1967, with just weeks of school left, 18-year-old Corbyn joined his brother Andrew on a drive to Germany. 'More fun than staying on,' he thought. His headteacher let him go, saying he would 'never achieve very much'. The two Corbyns set off for Hanover in an Austin Heavy 12/4 – an antique of a vehicle which looks more like a Ford Model T than a modern motor. A file photo of a different Austin Heavy'So, I went with him in this dreadful car, which weighed a tonne and frequently broke down,' Corbyn said. 'It wasn't a sort of pristine historic car, it was a bit of a rust bucket to be quite honest. 'The back seat was taken out to fill it up with the parts we needed to keep repairing the car on our journey.' But despite the slow pace and frequent breakdowns, the Corbyns did make it to Hanover and Andrew headed off to work – leaving the younger brother with the question of how to get home. READ MORE: Pam Duncan-Glancy among Scots recognised in honours list With no money for a return trip, Corbyn hitchhiked. 'It was the first time I'd ever done anything completely on my own,' he recalled. Two: Volunteering in Jamaica Not long later, Corybn was accepted to voluntary service overseas. Initially meant to travel to Malawi, a last-minute change sent him to Jamaica instead. 'That was the first time I'd ever been on a plane,' Corbyn told The Sunday National. 'I'd never been to an airport before, so this was a huge adventure. 'I arrived in Jamaica and I've never forgotten getting out of the plane and suddenly feeling the heat, just the heat, the warmth of it – and also the richness of the vegetation and the culture. To me, I'd never experienced anything like that before.' Corbyn was put to work as a 'sort of outdoor activities teacher' at Kingston College, where he became 'fascinated' with the 'culture, joy, and history' of the Caribbean nation. The late Tory minister Enoch Powell caused outrage with his 1968 Rivers of Blood speech When Enoch Powell gave his infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, Corbyn saw the fallout firsthand. 'That caused the most unbelievable anger,' he said. 'The students were very, very angry because he had actually been the Tory minister who had recruited a lot of Caribbean people to go and work in the health service – and then decided that they were damaging to Britain's social wellbeing. 'Powell is now being repeated. The language used by the Prime Minister about being a 'nation of strangers', that's taken straight out of the Rivers of Blood speech. 'It's appalling, it's disgusting, it's disgraceful.' Three: First visit to Israel and Palestine The conflict between Israel and Palestine is currently in sharp focus due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Corbyn says he has visited the war-torn region nine times – but the first, back in 1998, stands out as 'a turning point in lots of ways'. Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu had been abducted from Italy and locked up in an Israeli jail for revealing secrets of Israel's still-publicly-unacknowledged nuclear weapons programme. Corbyn was part of a group of campaigners intent on securing Vanunu's release. He recalled: 'We had tried to visit the prison – we were told we could and then we were told we couldn't. On another occasion I went with Susannah York and we were again told we could and then told we couldn't. 'So, Susannah, who had an amazing sense of presence about her, she just sat down on the road outside the prison. Now, a Hollywood film star sitting on the road anywhere is news, so all the TV cameras came.' Vanunu was released six years later, in 2004, and Corbyn said the years-long campaign taught him about working with the people of Israel against the actions of the country's government – a lesson which in today's climate could not be more relevant. While in Israel, Corbyn also visited Gaza for the first time, which he says showed him how 'so appallingly treated' the people of Palestine had been. 'That was many, many years ago, and now all those places I visited then and visited many times since have all been destroyed,' he added. Four: First elected to Parliament Jeremy Corbyn (left) pictured with Les Silverstone in 1975 (Image: Getty)Corbyn has been a fixture at Westminster for 42 years – longer than most politicians' careers. He was first elected as the Labour MP for Islington North in 1983 in a moment which he says earned him a unique place in history. 'I was elected to Parliament having gone through an incredibly long selection process which lasted for six months,' Corbyn recalled. However, it was only the start of a 'very complicated campaign'. Michael O'Halloran, who had been the local Labour MP, had defected to the SDP. So, Labour selected Corbyn. But the SDP then selected John Grant, also a sitting MP, to run for the seat. A put-out O'Halloran instead ran as an 'independent Labour' candidate. Corbyn's victory therefore made him perhaps 'the first and only person to be elected by defeating two sitting MPs'. Five: First visit to Westminster as an MP Jeremy Corbyn (left) pictured with Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams (Image: Getty)Getting elected was one thing, going to Westminster as a MP was quite another. For Corbyn, it was a 'strange experience'. 'I discovered a lot of MPs already knew each other and I couldn't work this out,' he told The Sunday National. 'I asked somebody why this was the case. They said, 'well, they were all at Oxbridge together'. Both parties. 'OK, I noted that.' Corbyn then said he was soon threatened with the removal of the Labour whip, particularly for 'supporting the need to have talks with the Irish republican movement as a way of bringing about a peace process'. 'That was like, almost instantly on entering parliament,' he recalled. Six: His parents, Naomi and David Corbyn names both of his parents, Naomi and David, as two of the most influential people in his life. He says he was 'always very close' with both of them, who were 'supportive' and 'quite political'. 'They met campaigning in support of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, and I picked up a lot of their ideas and principles from them,' Corbyn said. 'I learned a great deal from them, not least from a huge quantity of publications of the Left Book Club, which they gave me.' Of his mother Naomi, Corbyn recalled the first time she had ever visited him in parliament, soon after he was elected as an MP. 'I showed her all round, we had tea outside on the terrace overlooking the river and all the rest of it. 'And she then got up to go, so I walked with her to the tube station, and the last words she said to me as she left was: 'Very nice, dear. When are you gonna get a real job?'' Seven: Iraq war campaign Jeremy Corbyn joins well-known faces including Emma Thompson on a Stop The War march (Image: Getty) Corbyn's long political career has seen him attend – or even lead – a lifetime of anti-war demonstrations. But for the former Labour leader, one particular campaign stands out. 'I opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning,' he said. 'After [9/11] and then the attack on Afghanistan, we formed the Stop the War Coalition. 'We had the inaugural meeting – I said to the organisers, I think you're being a bit optimistic, holding it in Conway Hall, you might not fill it. 'They said 'We've changed the venue to Friends Meeting House', and I said, 'Are you mad? It's huge. We've got to make sure we have a room that's full, not a place that's half empty'.' As it turned out, all the estimates had been wildly off. On arrival, Corbyn said he found the venue 'overwhelmed' by the number of people. As well as the main hall, he was asked to address five overflow meetings – 'including one that was at the bus stop outside'. READ MORE: Iran hits Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tehran after Israeli strikes kill 78 people A similar pattern happened in February 2003, during the large-scale protests against the Iraq War. He recalled a meeting with a police team who had asked how many people they expected to march in London. 'I said, I don't know, maybe 400,000. And this police officer said, 'No, no, no, you're completely wrong there. By our calculations, at least 800,000 will be coming'.' On the day itself, the BBC reported that 'around a million people' had marched in London, with other rallies in Belfast and Glasgow, in one of the 'biggest days of public protest ever seen in the UK'. Eight: The allotment Around the same time as the anti-war movement was spreading across the western world, Corbyn got a call he'd been waiting for – he'd reached the top of the waiting list for an allotment. While lists back then weren't quite as notoriously long as now, Corbyn says he had been waiting a year or two for that call – and it came 'right at the start of all the Iraq war protests'. 'I nearly said no,' he added. 'But then I said no, no, I can't turn down this chance, so in between all of this, I had to go and start work on the allotment.' Corbyn calls his allotment his 'joy in life'. 'There's something magical about actually being there. On a winter's afternoon when there's almost nobody else there, and you're just there on your own digging, pruning, or whatever you happen to be doing – and then stealing into the shed and catching up on the football.' But he says he enjoys it in the summer as well: 'Everybody walks past, gives each other advice on what they're doing. 'Usually the advice is very generously saying 'you're doing it all wrong, this is how you should do it'.' That sounds a lot like being in parliament. Nine: Meeting his wife Laura Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn speaking in the Commons in March 2025 (Image: PA) This list is about the 10 things which changed Corbyn's life. But if it was about specific years, it seems likely 2003 would top it. Anti-war campaigns and allotments aside, it was also the year he met his wife: Laura. Corbyn says she likes to try and grow maize from her home country of Mexico in the allotment . That doesn't always work due to London's very un-Mexican climate – 'but it is beautifully coloured when it does come out'. For a lifelong politician, where Corbyn met his wife is perhaps unsurprising: 'It happened in the Red Rose Club in Islington, which was the Labour centre in Islington at the time.' For the next few years, the two maintained a largely long-distance relationship – but they continued to bond over politics. 'It's wonderful being able to visit Mexico and meet people who've been through awful circumstances – but nevertheless have amazing hope and determination to improve their communities,' he said. Ten: The people of Islington North Asked for the tenth and final thing for this list, Corbyn names all the people of Islington North, the constituency he has represented since 1983, which elected him as an independent for the first time in 2024 with just under 50% of the vote. Giving an example of the inspiring people of his area, Corbyn recalls the story of the death of Makram Ali, who was killed in a terror attack in 2017 which saw a van driven into a crowd of Muslims gathered near the Finsbury Park Mosque. Makram Ali was killed in a terror attack in London in 2017Corbyn praised 'the bravery of the imam at the mosque', saying: 'Obviously people were very, very angry at Darren Osborne – who had driven into the crowd and killed Makram – but the imam protected him from the crowd until the police arrived to arrest him. 'He stopped them beating him up, or doing worse. It was an incredibly principled and brave thing to do.' Corbyn said he still attends annual commemorations of the attack with Makram's family, adding: 'You learn from people who've gone through the most amazing adversity.' That, it would seem, is a lesson Corbyn has lived by.
Daily Mirror
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Key move stopped social media liars from endangering peoples' safety last week
When I watched tv as a kid and a crime was reported on the news I'd tense - praying the suspect was not Black. Why? Because the negative stereotyping of Black people back then was the done thing. Anything reinforcing those labels crystallised the false fears that the xenophobes were hell-bent to pushing. We are back there now because of Reform and the Far Right who are determined to do the very same thing. We are there because a Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer's repurposing of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech has helped to fuel it. We are back there now because of the systematic attempts of the extremists in plain sight, determined to frame everyone non-white as a danger to you and this country. The racists and xenophobes want to dress us all up as threats to be feared and fought against. So the speed with which the police revealed the details of a 53-year-old white man, charged after a car was driven through crowds at last week's Liverpool parade, is significant. They did it to get ahead of the liars and troublemakers on social media who would have poured the poison into the breach if, as in the past, the particulars of the suspect had been withheld. The police did it because they knew that without those important facts, the misinformation specialists would have sparked the kind of violence which saw Black and Brown people indiscriminately beaten in the streets after Southport last summer. It was falsely claimed last July that the three young girls killed had been attacked by an illegal immigrant. The lie was amplified millions of times on social media before it could be proven untrue. By then the damage had been done. It is a damning indictment on our society that releasing a person's ethnicity immediately will now have to remain a strategy for UK law enforcement going forward. But when high profile commentators and politicians remain determined to lie and misrepresent the truth as so many are doing on a day to day basis, police have no choice. Starmer revealed in January that the government would look to plug the information vacuum that allowed the blitz-stirrers to wind people up last summer. But it beggars belief too that there is only calm on our streets because the person held after last week's Liverpool horror - the facts of which have traumatised us all - is not Black. We've gone back to the future. We are back to the days when extremists in the seventies put out leaflets warning: 'if you desire a coloured for your neighbour vote Labour'. You wouldn't now suddenly think negatively of every 53-year-old white man but the racist agitators on social media want you to judge every Black or Brown person on the basis of what any single person is suspected of.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Enoch Powell display investigated as hate incident
A shop display showing an image of Enoch Powell next to a copy of his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech is being investigated by police. The framed picture of the former Conservative MP was displayed in the window of ironmongers Mumfords in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire. Shop owner Elizabeth Griffiths has defended her actions, saying it was one small part of a larger collection of images, including Sir Winston Churchill, depicting "a need for strong leadership". "I have had it in there for three and a half months, and the response has been always positive - no negativity at all until this week," said the Reform campaigner, who has now removed it. Powell's anti-immigration speech, delivered by the then Wolverhampton South West MP, caused a national controversy, prompting his sacking from Edward Heath's shadow cabinet. West Mercia Police said enquiries were ongoing after they had received a report of "offensive content displayed in a shop window on Church Street". The complaint had "obviously" come from "political enemies" after she had financed a campaign for two successful Reform candidates at the recent local elections, Ms Griffiths claimed. "Rest assured, since then, I've had knives in my back from left right and centre," she said. Earlier in the week she added an image of Sir Keir Starmer next to Powell's picture linking the prime minister's recent language around immigration to the Powell speech. The text of the 1968 speech, delivered at a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, he said, included observations on immigrants taken from his Wolverhampton constituents. "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country," the MP claimed he had been told. "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." Powell added: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding: like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." The then Conservative Party leader Heath sacked him from the front bench, and he was widely denounced. Ms Griffiths said she had received support from her community, saying many thought it applied to the "present day". A spokesman for West Mercia Police said: "On 16 May, we received a report of offensive content displayed in a shop window on Church Street in Cleobury Mortimer. "This is being treated as a hate incident, and inquiries are ongoing." Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. Enoch Powell: a drama out of a crisis After Enoch Numbers are down - but Starmer will still struggle to win on immigration Cooper backs PM over 'island of strangers' remark West Mercia Police
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Immigration is the albatross around UK politics. Starmer will struggle to break free
Figures released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics are expected to reveal a fall in net migration to the UK. Politicians have long struggled to assuage public concerns over immigration and even with Thursday's expected fall, the issue is still likely to dog the Labour government. In retrospect, 1968 looks like the decisive year. Until then, social class had been what determined the political allegiance of most voters: Labour drew its support from the still strong industrialised working class, while the Conservatives enjoyed the support of middle class and rural constituencies. But in 1968, two events launched a realignment, after which point Britons increasingly started to vote based on another, previously obscure, factor: attitudes to immigration and race. The first was the 1968 Race Relations Act, steered through Parliament by the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan. It strengthened legal protections for Britain's immigrant communities, banning racial discrimination, and sought to ensure that second generation immigrants "who have been born here" and were "going through our schools" would have access to quality education to ensure that they would get "the jobs for which they are qualified and the houses they can afford". Discrimination against anyone on the basis of racial identity - in housing, in hospitality, in the workplace - was now illegal. The second is the now notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which he quoted a constituent, "a decent ordinary fellow Englishman", who told him that he wanted his three children to emigrate because "in this country in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." The white British population, he said, "found themselves strangers in their own country". Powell had touched a nerve in a Britain which had brought hundreds of thousands of people from the West Indies, India and Pakistan in the years after the war. The Conservative Party leader Edward Heath sacked him from the front bench. The leaders of all the main parties denounced him. The Times called the speech "evil"; it was, the paper said, "the first time a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way". But the editor of a local paper in Wolverhampton, where Powell had made his speech, said Heath had "made a martyr" of Powell. In the days after the speech his paper received nearly 50,000 letters from readers: "95% of them," he said, "were pro-Enoch". For a time, the phrase "Enoch was right" entered the political discourse. Powell had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the country. It became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever before. It has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite sentiment. And at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory. Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the annual net migration figures are very likely to show a fall in the number of people moving to the UK - something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for Labour's attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited). Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration? Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated picture. The number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of thousands. Stephen Webb, a former Home Officer civil servant who is now head of home affairs at the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, thinks concern over migration has been driven by the real, tangible impact it has had on communities. "The public have been ahead of the political, media class on this," he says, "particularly poorer, working-class people. It was their areas that saw the most dramatic change, far sooner than the rest of us really realised what was happening. That's where the migrants went. That's where the sudden competition for labour [emerged]. You talk to cabbies in the early 2000s and they were already fuming about this." That fear of migrants "taking jobs" became particularly pressing in 2004, when the European Union (of which Britain was a member) took in ten new members, most of them former the communist states of Eastern Europe. Because of the EU's free movement rules, it gave any citizen of those countries the right to move here - and the UK was one of just three member nations to open its doors to unrestricted and immediate freedom of movement. The government, led by Tony Blair, estimated that perhaps 13,000 people per year would come seeking work. In fact, more than a million arrived, and stayed, by the end of the decade - one of the biggest influxes of people in British history. Most were people of working age. They paid taxes. They were net contributors to the public purse. Indeed, the totemic figure in this period was the hard-working "Polish plumber" who, in the popular imagination, was willing to work for lower wages than his British counterpart. Gordon Brown famously called for "British jobs for British workers", without explaining how that could be achieved in a Europe of free movement. The perception that Britain had lost control of its own borders gained popular traction. The imperative to "take back control" would be the mainstay of the campaign to leave the European Union. A decade on from that Brexit vote, "attitudes to immigration are warming and softening," says Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future. "Concern about immigration was at a very high peak in 2016, and it crashed down in 2020. Brexit had the paradoxical softening impact on attitudes… people who voted for Brexit felt reassured because they made a point and 'got control'. And people who regretted voting to leave became more pro-migration". Attitudes to immigration are, says Katwala, "very closely correlated to the distribution of meaningful contact with ethnic diversity and migration - especially from a young age. So places of high migration, high diversity, are more confident about migration than areas of low migration and low diversity, because although they might be dealing with the real-world challenges and pressures of change, they've also got contact between people." Why, then, did Sir Keir feel the need to say with such vehemence that unrestrained immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the country, and that he wants to "close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country"? Why did he say we risked becoming an "island of strangers" - leaving himself open to accusations from his own backbenchers that he was echoing the language of Powell in 1968? The answer lies in how attitudes are distributed through the population. Hostility to immigration is now much more concentrated in certain groups, and concentrated in a way that can sway elections. "At the general election, a quarter of people thought immigration was the number one issue and they were very, very likely to vote for Nigel Farage," Katwala says. The country as a whole may be becoming more liberal on immigration, but the sceptical base is also becoming firmer in its resolve and is turning that resolve into electoral success. And fuelling that hostility is a lingering sense among some that migrants put pressure on public services, with extra competition for GP appointments, hospital beds, and school places. Stephen Webb of Policy Exchange thinks it is a perfectly fair concern. Data in the UK is not strong enough to make a conclusion, he says, but he points to studies from the Netherlands and Denmark suggesting that many recent migrants to those countries are a "fiscal drain" - meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in taxes. He adds: "If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it's hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we've been getting, it seems likely that we've been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost." So will Sir Keir's plan work? And how radical is it? Legislation to reduce immigration has, historically, been strikingly unsuccessful. The first sustained attempt to reduce immigration was the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath. In 1948, the former troopship Empire Windrush had docked at Essex carrying 492 migrants from the West Indies, attracted by the jobs boom created by postwar reconstruction. Almost a million more followed in the years ahead, from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa. They all arrived as citizens of the UK and Commonwealth (CUKC) with an automatic and legal entitlement to enter and stay. The 1971 Act removed this right for new arrivals. The Act was sold to the public as the means by which immigration would be reduced to zero. But from 1964 to 1994, immigrants continued to arrive legally in their thousands. In 1978 Mrs Thatcher, then in opposition, told a television interviewer that "people are rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", and she promised "to hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration." Not a reduction; an end. Yet today, almost 17% of the population of the UK was born abroad, up from 13% in 2014. Sir Keir's plan does not promise to end immigration. It is much less radical. It promises to reduce legal immigration by toughening visa rules. As part of the changes, more arrivals - as well as their dependents - will have to pass an English test in order to get a visa. Migrants will also have to wait 10 years to apply for the right to stay in the UK indefinitely, up from five years. "It will bring down [net immigration] for sure," says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. "If you restrict eligibility for visas, you will have lower migration. The Home Office calculation is that it will issue 98,000 fewer visas. That's in the order of 10%. It's not radical but it is a change." The White Paper also proposes to end visas for care workers. "This has been a visa that has been incredibly difficult for the government to manage," says Sumption. "It's been riddled with problems. There has been widespread fraud and abuse and so it's not surprising that they want to close it. The care sector will face challenges continuing to recruit. But I think closing the care route may be helpful for reducing exploitation of people in the country." Just a week after publishing the White Paper, the government was accused of undermining its own immigration strategy by agreeing in principle to a "youth experience scheme" with the EU - which may allow thousands of young Europeans to move to Britain for a time-limited period. Champions of the policy say it will boost economic growth by filling gaps in the labour market. But ministers will be cautious about any potential inflation to migration figures. It's another example of the narrow tightrope prime ministers have historically been forced to walk on this issue. There's another sense in which the Powell speech reaches into our own day. It created a conviction among many on the left that to raise concerns about immigration - often even to mention it - was, by definition, racist. Labour prime ministers have felt the sting of this criticism from their own supporters. Tony Blair, who opened the doors in 2004, recognised this in his autobiography A Journey. The "tendency for those on the left was to equate concern about immigration with underlying racism. This was a mistake. The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause genuine tensions… and provide a sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the community has lost control of its own future… Across Europe, right wing parties would propose tough controls on immigration. Left-wing parties would cry: Racist. The people would say: You don't get it." Sir Keir has felt some of that heat from his own side since launching the White Paper. In response to his warning about Britain becoming an "island of strangers", the left-wing Labour MP Nadia Whittome accused the prime minister of "mimic[king] the scaremongering of the far-right". Labour to unveil big immigration plans next week - but will they win back votes? Is Britain really inching back towards the EU? The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered The Economist, too, declared that Britain's decades of liberal immigration had been an economic success - but a political failure. There is a world of difference between Keir Starmer and Enoch Powell. Powell believed Britain was "literally mad, piling up its own funeral pyre" and that the country was bound to descend into civil war. Sir Keir says he celebrates the diversity of modern Britain. But even if his plan to cut migration works, net migration will continue to flow at the rate of around 300,000 a year. Sir Keir's plan runs the risk of being neither fish nor fowl: too unambitious to win back Reform voters; but illiberal enough to alienate some on the left. Additional reporting: Florence Freeman, Luke Mintz. BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
