Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech that had been widely trailed beforehand as the launch of his fightback against poll-topping right-wing-sovereigntist Nigel Farage, calling himself a true patriot and his opponents miserable, joyless, and poisonous.
Britain will be subject to a regime of mandatory identity documents by the end of this decade, the Prime Minister said on Friday morning, making the policy the key plank of his fightback against Brexit pioneer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
Farage, who now likes to remind the public that he has come first in over 100 consecutive national opinion polls, has been treated to a suite of positive headlines of late, including from the Daily Telegraph that he is poised to hand the Labour party its worst electoral defeat in a century at the next general election. Starmer, whose party faces electoral oblivion — if the polls are to be believed — and personal relegation given the growing talk of a coup against him from within his own party, portrayed himself as the positive, unifying patriot against the forces of darkness he identified on the right.
As well as general criticism of the world view of the right, Starmer also honed in on some particular narratives, including that some European cities are losing their formerly high-trust society feeling by rising crime and mass migration. Telling his audience and particularly addressing world leaders from the political left including the scandal-hit Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada, and Anthony Albanese of Australia that if they found London safe and welcoming, that must truly disprove the crime narrative.
Starmer did not, of course, interrogate why VIP political travellers enjoying the services of diplomatic protection officers might find London’s best hotels and restaurants to be crime-free and the city “not the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe”.
Fresh from these assertions, Starmer moved on to accuse the “toxic” right of peddling “lies that have taken roots in our societies”. He said his political opponents were portraying places, institutions, and communities in ways that are “a million miles from reality, an industrialised infrastructure of grievance. An entire world, not just a world view… that is miserable, joyless, and demonstrably untrue.”
Making an oblique reference to the recent large Unite The Kingdom protest hosted in London, Starmer said: “at its heart its most poisonous belief… that there’s a coming struggle, a defining struggle, a violent struggle for the nation… they want politics to be a choice between globalists and nationalists… this is the defining political choice of our times. A politics of predatory grievance, preying on the problems of working people and using that infrastructure of division, against the politics of patriotic renewal”.
Starmer and “centre-left” social democrats are the agents of that patriotic renewal, he said. Using the language of contrition, Starmer acknowledged the political mainstream had got it wrong on migration in the past. He said: “that does mean we’ve got to look ourselves in the mirror and recognise where we’ve allowed our parties to shy away from people’s concerns, and let the politics of purity patronise people… it’s illegal migration… for too many years its been too easy for people to come here, to slip into the shadow economy, and remain here illegally.
“Because frankly we’ve been squeamish about saying things that are clearly true. It’s not just that it’s not compassionate left-wing politics to rely on foreign labour and undercuts fair wages, but the simple fact that every nation has to have control over its borders.”
Starmer has, of course, attempted to steer this course before. Earlier this year he made the ‘Island of Strangers’ speech in another bid to connect with British voters on the issue of migration. The address was hailed as a historic change of course, yet just two months after it became apparent the gambit had failed and as Starmer’s own position began to look fragile against a coup from the left from within his own party, he recanted the whole thing.
Blaming his speechwriter and claiming not to have read the major public address beforehand due to personal fatigue, Starmer said he deeply regretted it.
Starmer’s big idea on how to challenge the right, by returning the country to a wartime system of mandatory identity documents last instituted to seek out German spies and enforce food rationing, is fraught with risk. Clearly it is a policy unpopular with a great many and not just from the right, with several left-wing activists quickly speaking out against it. Among the general public, it is too soon to have had any fresh polling on the matter a petition against the idea has soared overnight and is approaching a million signatures already, with some 750,000 gained in 24 hours at the time of publication.
Explaining his pitch for how converting previously liberty-loving Britain into a nation of digital ID-havers will satisfy public demand for border control — despite illegal boat migrants not being particularly well known for respecting norms and laws on personal identification documents — Starmer told the conference hall of global left-wing-lawmakers: “We do need to know who is in our country.
“Our immigration system does have to be fair if we want to maintain that binding contract that our politics is built on. Otherwise, it undermines trust, undermines people’s faith that we’re on their side.
“And that is why today I am announcing, that this government will make a new free-of-charge ID mandatory for the right to work by the end of this parliament. You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that. Because decent, pragmatic, fair-minded people, they want us to tackle the issues they see around them”.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, responding to the government soft-launching the national mandatory ID system overnight, condemned the idea and said he saw the hand of the “high priest” of ID cards, Tony Blair, in the announcement. Former Prime Minister Blair and his successor Gordon Brown were, of course, behind trying to implement ID cards for Britons during the last Labour government, an endeavour they had all but succeeded in until they lost the 2010 election.
Farage warned overnight that he worried about the security implications for the government having one database to contain all information centrally about everyone in the UK, calling it an obvious target for hacking by “foreign governments, by private companies, by criminals”. The Brexit pioneer said: “I do not see a single benefit to the government having digital ID other than for them controlling what we do, what we spend, and where we go”.
“Frankly for me I saw enough during the pandemic with vaccine passports. It created a two-tier society of those who could go to places, who could travel… I am personally vehemently opposed to this in every single way.”
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