The British obsession with immigration began as its empire crumbled. When the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America reclaimed their oil, minerals, lands and waterways, it seemed—briefly—that the colonizing nations could no longer subsidize their welfare states on the broken backs of the colonized. The purse strings had to be tightened. The unions were smashed, and the people were schooled in the virtues of Enterprise.
“Englishness” (whatever that is) was severed from its imperial past, which now smelled like a hangover, and patriotism was re-rooted in the values of market fundamentalism. Enemies within—the militant and the migrant—were conjured into an unassimilable “alien wedge,” their collectivism cast as a threat to every Englishman and his castle.
Enoch Powell warned in 1968 that “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” A decade later, Thatcher claimed the country was being “swamped by people with a different culture.” Gordon Brown demanded “British jobs for British workers” in 2009, and by 2011, David Cameron declared that multiculturalism had failed. Last year, the Tory slogan “STOP THE BOATS” was daubed on placards by men in Hull as they stormed migrant hostels in the summer’s race riots.
This week, the UK’s “centre-left” Prime Minister Keir Starmer drew on Britain’s heritage. Warning that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers,” he said his new immigration controls would close a “squalid chapter” in the country’s history. He was reacting to pressure from the right, but not from his expected centre-right rival in the two party system – he now writes off the Tories as a “dead party walking” – but from the new Trump-lite Reform party, which floats ambiguously between the hardline and the outright fascist. After making gains in local elections, this fiercely anti-migrant right is now considered a potential contender for power.
Over the last few months, Starmer has treated them as intellectually serious on a number of moral panics around race—about anti-white bias in the justice system, and supposed terror threats from “undocumented young males”—making such theories look plausible. His speech left many incredulous. Muslims in his own party have asked if he was talking about their parents.
What’s clear is that he believes the only way forward is to pander to anti-migrant politics, based on his assumptions about what people want to hear. But that tells us less about them than it does about him.
