Sir Keir Starmer’s response to the ONS immigration statistics for the last year of the Tory government took a nasty turn, argues Don Flynn. Denouncing the increase in numbers as a conspiracy to “liberalise immigration” plays straight into the hands of the populist far right.
The announcement by the Office of National Statistics on just how badly the Tories had wandered from their stated objective of driving down immigration numbers put the sort of spring in the step of Sir Keir which has been absent for quite a few months. Suddenly equipped with a message to taunt his opponents with, Starmer’s demeanour radiated the joy of being able to proclaim, “900,000 net migration in a single year? And you’ve been saying we’re not up to the job.”
The word for that is schadenfreude, and who can blame the man who has found the task of getting the right political message across to the public in recent days much easier while enjoying to the hilt the discomfort felt by Kemi Badenoch and her home affairs spokespeople. But he should have stopped at that point, rather than going on to spin the sort of dangerous nonsense that comes from the playbook of right-wing conspiracy theorists.
Failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, he went on to say, “This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed… Deliberately … To liberalise immigration. To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders…”
Anyone following policy debates on immigration over the last few decades will be familiar with arguments of this sort, usually emanating from Peter Hitchens and the luminaries of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph. In that version post-war immigration was a tool used by the liberal elite to transform a stable, monoethnic British society into a multicultural hotchpotch more amenable to so-called progressive experimentation. Books have been written on this theme, proclaiming the folly of “the diversity illusion” or the misguided “British dream” of modernity and racial tolerance which now needs to be jettisoned and replaced with post-liberal realism.
Arrogant misjudgement?
Both these right-wing versions of what went wrong with immigration policy and Starmer’s account have in common a belief that Britain got to the point of facilitating large-scale immigration because of a series of arrogant misjudgements about what was in the interests of the country and its people. Whatever names are offered up for responsibility for the original sin of liberal miscalculation – Harold Wilson for promoting race equality laws, Edward Heath for sacking Enoch Powell, Roy Jenkins for promoting integration as mutual tolerance and respect for diversity, Margaret Thatcher for backing the freedom of movement consequent on completing her beloved single market, (yes, that belongs in this list), John Major for leading the charge to expand the EU eastwards, or Tony Blair for letting all the Poles in, it all screams elitist manipulation – all the way down the line.
Sir Keir Starmer seems to agree that the UK has spun off course with excessive immigration because of a series of people who acted for cynical reasons to bring changes that the British people would not have otherwise approved. He told us that in his speech on the ONS statistics when he said the recent scale of migration was not a part of a “global trend”. This was just silly old Britain, out on its own, doing stuff that you wouldn’t see happening in any other country.
Global trend?
The cloth-earedness of this assertion is stunning. It is precisely because immigration has emerged as a global trend, showing up in region after region, whether we are talking about the circulation of people across Indian and South-East Asia, the massive internal migration which has driven economic growth in China, movements across Africa and the Mediterranean, and the churn of people between the Americas and the Caribbean, which is the crucial fact in explaining what is going on in the world today.
Borders have become porous in all directions (they have always facilitated the movement of people moving from the wealthy Global North seeking opportunities for pillage and profit in the Global South) in the final decades of the 20th century when neoliberal economic policies demanded that global markets extend to all corners of the world, penetrating towns and even villages that once moved at a different tempo. Pitched into a cauldron that required all forms of industry and trade to produce at standards demanded by the Washington Consensus, a larger segment of humanity found themselves having to move when the livelihoods they had been pursuing for decades were judged to be redundant. From rural areas into regional towns, and then on towards conglomeration in cities that became megacities, migration was written into the warp and the weft of globalising society, drawing in both the global elites who benefited from it, and the global poor for whom it has become a survival strategy.
Threadbare Starmer
Starmer denies the reality of this “global trend”. It is more useful to his political project to roll up the statistics which show how threadbare society has become – immigration revealing the closure of opportunities for the well-being of millions in their home regions across the planet – and instead present it as a banal conspiracy that can be snuffed out by the actions of a competent government. No need to consider the legacy of the colonial past and the neocolonial present, the erosion of democratic governance in states which are buckling under the predatory actions of transnational corporations, the staggering inequalities between countries, and the relentless spread of the wars and social tensions that drive millions along the refugee routes. All that complicates things for centrist political governments that struggle to tell a simpler story which says, “it’s all the other lot’s fault – leave it to us to sort out the mess.”
It’s a feasible approach to governing up to the point when its internal contradictions show it up as being a really bad one. That happens when the arguments about conspiracies of liberalising elites fall apart under the weight of deep structural crises which centrist governments have attempted to keep hidden from sight. The globalisation of the past – driven by rapacious appetites sequestering valuable resources and sucking out vast profits – is a busted flush in the twenty-first century.
The populist right bangs on about a “global liberal elite” not because they object to globalism, but because they think liberalism has become a restraint on the policies they favour – a reinvigorated imperialism that won’t balk at doing the necessary to keep profits flowing into their tax-free cash havens. Starmer doesn’t intend it, but to the ears of large parts of the electorate which feels itself on the losing end of the battle for a decent life, condemnation of what is represented as “liberalism” seems a good way to harness their anger and frustration and use it for political ends. He needs a better narrative, and ditch “arrogant elite” conspiracy theory.