We’ve been here before. The leader of a major party gives a speech about immigration, deploys language soaked in nationalist anxiety, and promises that only tough action can restore a fraying sense of national cohesion. But this time it wasn’t Farage, or even a Tory home secretary reaching for the dog whistle. It was Keir Starmer, Labour’s Prime Minister, warning that Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers” unless immigration is drastically curtailed. The speech was billed as a reset. It was in fact capitulation.
Starmer’s defenders say he’s simply responding to voters’ concerns. But this isn’t leadership, it’s capitulation. The phrase “island of strangers” is not neutral. It carries the echo of Powell’s “Rivers of Blood”, of the BNP’s leaflets in Barking, of Nigel Farage’s posters with lines of black and brown refugees marching towards a UKIP-branded abyss. For a Labour leader to pick up that vocabulary and carry it to the despatch box is a betrayal not just of migrants but of Labour’s own historic claim to be the party of the oppressed.
“The risk is we lose the country we know. We become strangers to each other, an island of strangers.”
Keir Starmer, 13 May 2025
This is no slip of the tongue. It’s a calculated repositioning. With Reform UK polling above 25% in some regions, and the Tories collapsing into a hard-right culture war party, Starmer has made the decision to meet them on their turf. The resulting proposals are not just cosmetic. They include tighter English language requirements, a ten-year wait for settled status, and perhaps most cruelly, a blanket ban on overseas recruitment for care workers.
Let that last point sink in. A country with an ageing population, an NHS on its knees, and a broken social care system is choosing to make it harder to bring in people to do the work nobody here is willing, or paid enough, to do. That’s not just short-termist. It’s sadistic. It punishes the vulnerable to win headlines in the Mail and column inches in The Telegraph. And it’s precisely the kind of posturing that will do nothing to fix the deeper crisis: that the British economy is hooked on exploitation, and the political class refuses to detox.
What’s more, this turn has not gone unopposed within Labour. MPs like Nadia Whittome and Clive Lewis have spoken out, as have sections of the trade union movement. Even some Starmer loyalists have admitted, off the record, that the speech was “Powell-lite”. But this, we are told, is pragmatism. This is how Labour wins. By peeling off Reform voters in Lincolnshire and redrawing the centre ground under cover of economic competence. But who defines the centre now? Starmer may think he is triangulating. In truth, he is being dragged ever further right.
There is a political cost to this strategy, and it will not just be paid by Labour. It will be paid by the Pakistani woman denied a visa to care for her mother. By the Filipino nurse barred from working in a Manchester care home. By the child in a classroom who hears the Prime Minister say their parents are a threat to “cohesion”. Language matters. And when a Labour Prime Minister speaks like this, it grants permission. Permission for the landlord to discriminate. For the employer to overlook the “foreign-sounding name”. For the racist to believe he is finally being heard.
The threat, then, is not merely rhetorical. It is structural. This is how fascism begins: not with jackboots but with data metrics, language thresholds, and plausible-sounding policies to keep the “wrong” kind of migrant out. It’s a politics of managed decline. And it comes at a moment when Britain’s real problem is not too much immigration, but too little solidarity. Too little investment. Too little hope.
What Starmer is doing is not new. But it is dangerous, because it confirms a broader trend: that the Labour Party, once the vessel for class politics, has become a manager of national identity. A technocratic custodian of borders. And in doing so, it concedes the moral argument to the far right. That’s how Powellism wins. Not when it’s shouted from the fringes. But when it is murmured from the centre.
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