Sir Starmer’s speech
on immigration earlier this week had obvious echoes of the words of Enoch
Powell more than half a century ago, and repeated attempts to pretend that
there is no similarity between the words used by the two men look like simply
digging an already big hole a bit deeper. I accept that it was almost certainly
unintentional. Starmer would have been about 6 in 1968 when Powell delivered
his infamous speech, and the coterie of advisers and speech writers around him
probably even younger. Lack of a direct memory of Powell’s speech – or even of
the man himself – is understandable, even if it demonstrates a certain lack of knowledge
of political history. The bigger problem isn’t about whether he was or was not
aping an odious politician of the past, deliberately or otherwise – it’s about
the extent to which what looked like extreme views in 1968 have become part of
the political mainstream, not just for Reform Ltd but also for the Tories and
even Labour. Starmer’s words would have been anathema to Wilson and the Labour
Party back then, yet their modern-day counterparts are falling over themselves
to justify and amplify them.
There is another
unpleasant aspect to the words used by UK parties when referring to migrants,
which is that it sees them largely in terms of their value (or cost) to the UK
economy. So, low-paid (which isn’t the same as low-skilled, although one would
be hard-pressed to glean that from Starmer’s words) bad, high-paid good. Rarely
do any of our politicians seem to see migrants or would-be migrants as human
beings with aspirations and needs. There’s also an interesting paradox in the
fact that the low-paid are doing work for which it is proving difficult to recruit
UK labour, whilst at least some of the higher-paid jobs are easier to fill
locally. Who is ‘stealing’ whose jobs? Whether the higher-paid jobs can or
cannot be filled locally, and whilst bearing in mind the caveat that high-paid
isn’t always the same as high-skilled, attracting what are seen as being the ‘brightest
and best’ from elsewhere has an inevitable knock-on effect on the society and
economy of those countries losing those people to the UK. It’s a modern form of
colonialism.
Even amongst those
brave souls in the Labour Party who are speaking out against the proposed
changes, there is a degree of objectification of the people involved. Take the
words of a former adviser to Mark Drakeford, quoted here:
“To have a sustainable indigenous population requires a fertility rate 2.1.
The UK rate is 1.4. This means our indigenous population is shrinking and aging
and we are completely dependent on immigrants to remain a viable country”.
What could be more neo-colonialist than outsourcing the responsibility for
maintaining population levels (even supposing that to be a good thing anyway,
but that’s a subject for another day)? And where is the consideration of the
impact on those other countries of losing the people of an age group likely to
be child-bearing? Moving a perceived problem elsewhere doesn’t ‘solve’ it.
Migration is a
complex issue which involves real people living real lives. Reducing it to a
cost-benefit analysis, and treating migrants as units of economic production is
dehumanising. But it’s what we get when politicians decide that playing to
prejudice is more likely to win them votes than attempting to conduct a serious
conversation around the issue. Starmer is part of the problem, and what he has
to offer is no solution.