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IF YOU THOUGHT that society had become ‘too woke’, you’ll be pleased to read that in Britain we are now living with the alternative.
Aid budgets have been slashed, the Supreme Court has ruled that trans women aren’t women, and xenophobic sentiment is now so mainstream that even the Labour Party has embraced it. Less than a year in office, and Keir Starmer has been delivering on the kind of conservative agenda that the Tories only dreamed of.
His come-to-Jesus moment on migration came after his party took a beating in local elections at the hands of the far-right Reform UK. Starmer reacted with a new plan to drastically reduce the number of people moving to Britain because the country was in danger of becoming ‘an island of strangers’. No, Island of Strangers is not a new dating show produced by ITV. Although it would probably be a ratings smash. A load of foreigners with hot bods put on swimsuits and fornicate in a villa for our amusement. The winning couple get visas.
The Prime Minister’s ‘journey’ on the subject is pretty remarkable. Only a few years back, he was the Shadow Brexit Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, championing a second referendum and praising the contributions made by migrants. Now he’s a border hard-man, desperately trying to win voters back from Nigel Farage.
I’m reminded of the line in Batman Begins, when Liam Neeson’s character tells a young Bruce Wayne that ‘to conquer fear, you must become fear’. Presumably, an advisor got in Starmer’s ear and said something like ‘to conquer racism, you must become…racist?’
We’ve been here before. David Cameron, the Centrist Dad PM of his day, was so spooked by the rise of Farage’s UKIP party that he called the 2016 Brexit referendum in an attempt to win the argument on Europe. His failure left the Conservatives stumbling further and further to the right, with the whole axis of British politics shifting with them.
Say what you will about Farage, he’s been nothing if not consistent in his views. Immigrants: Bad. Pints and fags: Good. For decades now, he’s been spared the burden of actually having to run the country, heckling from the sidelines while successive governments have collapsed, while the electorate has run out of alternatives. Slowly, the nation has been lured closer and closer to the cliffs by his nativist call. He’s like a siren on the rocks, a Brexit Mermaid. Half fish, half Ladbrokes urinal.
Expecting immigrants to contribute positively to the society they move to is perfectly reasonable. The thing is, the available data suggests that we’re already doing this. The median migrant worker earns more than the median worker of British origin and therefore pays more in tax.
It’s unclear then which societal problem that Labour’s new strategy is trying to solve. The country needs hundreds of thousands of new homes every year and a revived public health service, but how can the government deliver on these objectives without the help of young, motivated workers from other countries?
Of course, a rising population increases strain on existing infrastructure, but Britain’s failure to invest in itself is a mess of its own making. Once an immigrant worker has paid their taxes, it’s up to the State to decide what to spend the money on.
Investing in training for young people and improving pay and conditions for care workers are good ideas, but both can be delivered without lazy rhetoric about ‘cheap foreign labour’. Bereft of detail on how the government expects to boost growth while slashing net migration, this new departure feels like nastiness for nastiness’ sake.
The problem is, no one is better at being Farage than the man himself. If the immigration pivot doesn’t work out, Starmer will have ditched his principles for nothing.
At least Tony Blair waited until his second term to invade Iraq. From 1997 until 2001, he pursued a genuinely ambitious and progressive programme focused on LGBT rights, investment in public services and the Good Friday Agreement. The economic hurdles facing today’s Labour leader are different, and the threat posed by Reform is unprecedented, but even so, what a disappointment he’s been so far.
Perhaps his lurch to the right shouldn’t be so surprising. This is the Internet age, where formerly liberal middle-aged men become radicalised online every other day. Kanye West is releasing music praising Adolf Hitler, the bloke who wrote Father Ted is an anti-transgender activist.
I’m not suggesting that Starmer has been spending too much time scrolling through Facebook in his underpants, but that seems to be the trend for men of his vintage. Much of the public discourse recently has been about how vulnerable young men are to extremist ideology on social media, but not enough has been said about how online wormholes can turn older men’s values to mush.
Peter Flanagan is an Irish comedian and writer. You can find him on Twitter @peterflanagan and Instagram @peterflanagancomedy.
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