New Labour thought migration could ‘modernise’ Britain and put the ‘bigoted’ public in their place.
Keir Starmer’s plan to reduce net migration, announced this week, has provoked a predictably outraged reaction among the liberal and left-ish. They have accused the UK prime minister of racist dog-whistling, likening his ‘island of strangers’ speech to Tory MP Enoch Powell’s infamously inflammatory Rivers of Blood speech. As far as they’re concerned, Starmer is just the latest in a long line of politicians to ‘toxify’ and ‘weaponise’ the immigration debate in a desperate attempt to pick up votes and appease the right-wing press.
But they’re wrong. It’s not Starmer or right-wing tabloid owners or Reform UK’s Nigel Farage who have toxified and weaponised this most polarising of issues. No, the weaponisation of immigration, the transformation of it into the most divisive issue of our era, has deeper and altogether different roots.
