Left-wing politicians moved fast to shut down the British Prime Minister — their own man — after he conceded unlimited mass migration was damaging the social fabric of the country, forcing Sir Keir to insist he stands by his own words.
Cassandra of the Conservatives, Enoch Powell, the precocious academic and British Army officer who turned to politics after the war — and after being crushed by the political establishment he dared defy, was used as a cudgel to crush all dissent on open borders for years — was invoked overnight in a desperate bid to force Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer into a U-turn on migration policy.
Being the leader of the left-wing Labour party wasn’t enough to shield Starmer from the fury triggered by his calling the open-borders era “a squalid chapter”, saying he wanted to cut arrivals, and acknowledging that mass migration doesn’t necessarily cause economic growth, and can be harmful to societal cohesion. The Prime Minister’s remark that “we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together” caused particular outrage.
Quickly settled upon was the talking point that Starmer had echoed Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, a criticism of that year’s Race Relations Act. Zarah Sultana, a hard-left Member of Parliament recently kicked out of the Labour Party, was among those who made such comparisons.
She said: “The Prime Minister imitating Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech is sickening. That speech fuelled decades of racism and division. Echoing it today is a disgrace. It adds to anti-migrant rhetoric that puts lives at risk. Shame on you, Keir Starmer.”
Left-wing-nationalist newspaper The National splashed doctored images making Starmer and Powell seem physically alike, declaring “Echoes of Enoch Powell”.
It is well known that Powell’s speech was overwhelmingly well received by the country at large at the time, with a considerable majority surveyed saying they supported his sentiments. Yet the Westminster mainstream from which he had deviated and the establishment press were enormously successful in attacking Powell and his words, and he was out of a job within 24 hours, ending his career in high-level politics.
Because of the precedent set and powerful association forced between talking about race relations and political suicide, allusions to what became known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech have been used to police speech and thought on the immigration subject for decades. In some cases, this hectoring has worked, and in others, less so.
Labour MP Olivia Blake told Starmer that his speech had been “problematic” because “language has consequences”, saying the words could embolden “the far-right”. She said: “As politicians, we have a responsibility not to pour fuel on a fire by using language that causes division… I think the use of strangers was very problematic, this language of strangers has been used by the far right for generations to make divisions within our communities.”
Even Sadiq Khan, the extremely long-serving Mayor of London, chipped in with some measured criticism. He told London-interest radio station LBC that it wouldn’t be the sort of language he’d have used.
Despite the gale of criticism from his own supporters and fellow-travellers, in the case of hard-left outcasts like Sultana, Starmer appears to have enough of a pragmatic eye on the polling not to fold immediately. After all, the mood of the country seems to indicate that any political party must have a credible plan on reducing migration or face extinction.
Starmer, for his part, signalled his staying on course on Tuesday with several statements in which he said: “Every area of our immigration system will be tightened up, so we have more control. And migration numbers will fall… Settlement in the UK is a privilege that is earned, not a right”.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper swallowed her pride to set aside decades of support for immigration to go to bat for the Prime Minister on Tuesday morning, insisting his new position is a coherent one. She also hit back against the Powell comparisons, which she called “completely different”.
She said that despite the rhetoric, Starmer still loved migration, remarking: “The prime minister said yesterday, I think almost in the same breath, he talked about the diverse country that we are and that being part of our strength. But he also talked about how immigration has to be properly controlled and managed, and it hasn’t been. I actually think it’s OK to have both those views.”
And this is almost certainly right. As already noted in the post-White Paper analysis, strong words aside, the changes promised by Starmer are not sweeping and will not meaningfully reduce the number of arrivals. The Daily Telegraph stated in its review that this “crackdown” would “only cut migration to pre-Brexit levels”, still galloping well ahead of the figures for most of recent British history and well ahead of the “tens of thousands” target repeatedly voted for by the British public in the previous decade.
As things presently stand, new immigration arrivals to the United Kingdom are presently trending well over one million a year, gross.
Read the full article here