The British Prime Minister has attempted to distance himself from his own words on mass migration, stating he was tired when he said Britain was becoming an “island of strangers” and that he regrets saying open borders caused “incalculable damage”.
Sir Keir Starmer is fighting an action to save his political career as the left-wing of his left-wing Labour Party moves against him: this is most obvious in his U-turn on cutting welfare spending. But this bid for survival also appears to find expression in the decidedly left-leaning Observer lending their pages to help the Prime Minister retcon his own recent policy on border control.
Just last month, Prime Minister Starmer addressed the nation to admit that mass migration does not, in fact, drive economic growth and that high numbers of arrivals weakens society. Now he says he was too tired when he gave that speech, his family home had just been firebombed, he had just returned from an overseas diplomatic trip, and didn’t fully understand what his speech writers had put in front of him.
In all, he told The Observer that he “wasn’t in the best state to make a big speech”. In what may be an exercise in legacy management as, suddenly, acres of newsprint is now dedicated to the question of whether the Starmer era is now rushing towards the end, after only a year in power, he said he’d considered cancelling the migration statement altogether, but didn’t.
Of one phrase in the speech, that the United Kingdom was becoming an “island of strangers” because of the pace of arrivals, which became a lightning rod for criticism from the left because erstwhile Conservative Member of Parliament and open-borders critic Enoch Powell had once said something with a passing resemblance in form of words, Starmer said he felt regret.
He said: “I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell… I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either… But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.”
Starmer also insisted he wasn’t trying to pass the buck to the speechwriter who created what he read out to the country, and said he accepted responsibility for not having paid close enough attention to what had been put in front of him. As Starmer expressed it, he claims to now feel he ought to have “held it up to the light a bit more” before delivering it.
In a separate statement at the time, the Prime Minister had also said years of open borders under the previous Conservative Party government had caused “incalculable damage” to the country. These remarks were also in the crosshairs today, with Starmer telling The Observer he regretted this language, too.
Responding to the remarks Nigel Farage, perhaps Starmer’s most consequential critic in the domestic politics scene, noted in particular that Starmer had attempted to distance himself by explaining he’d merely been the vessel delivering the words, not the brain that created them. Mr Farage said: “This is absolute proof that [The Prime Minister] has no beliefs, no principles and just reads from a script.”
He added: “This country needs a leader who has vision.”
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