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It wasn’t so much the content of the government’s immigration bill as the language. That was what really got to people. Even Nigel Farage said he would have dialled it down a bit. We were at risk of becoming an island of strangers, said Keir Starmer. Going out of the front door had become a high-risk endeavour. Too many foreigners you might meet on the street. Them and their funny languages. Coming over here, working for the NHS, paying their taxes. Whatever next?
Incalculable. That was the damage immigrants had caused. And Keir should know. Because he had spent days – make that weeks – trying to calculate it. And he had had to give up, because the foreigners had made it far too difficult for him to reach a figure. That’s the thing with foreigners. Always trying to shift the goalposts. But if Starmer knew one thing, it was that this country was going to the dogs. And he knew precisely who was to blame.
The fallout had been predictable. Left-leaning media had picked up on the echoes of the “strangers in their own country” line from Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech. A level of nastiness about immigrants that had previously only been the preserve of the hard right. Now it was open season. Want to give foreigners a good kicking? Then step this way. The rightwing papers had taken the opposite line: Starmer hadn’t been nearly unpleasant enough. He didn’t really mean what he had said. Was just trying it on, to fool a few of the dimmer Reform voters. A man not to be trusted.
You can take this one of two ways. Either by managing to piss off the left and the right, Starmer had played a blinder, finding a halfway ground that would sit comfortably with a large section of the population. Or he had screwed it up completely, failing to think through how his language might be interpreted. Or worse, had just assumed that it would be fine. That the entire country would be happy with it. In which case the No 10 comms team needs an overhaul.
On the morning after the day before, it was left to the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to pick up the pieces as she toured the broadcast media studios. Trying to spin the unspinnable. That the prime minister had meant everything he had said, apart from the bits he hadn’t meant to be said. It was all the media’s fault for taking Keir at his word. Serious journalists should know that he talked only in hyperbole.
Nick Robinson opened the interview with Cooper on the Today programme by playing two clips of Starmer talking. The first from 2020, in which he said he welcomed migrants and that they were not to blame for failing public services. The second from Monday. Which was the real Keir?
Yvette often looks as if she’s about to lose it these days. It’s a fate that befalls every home secretary after they’ve been in the job for nearly a year. It comes of realising you have been given a role at which you can only learn to fail better. There are few winners to have emerged from the Home Office. It’s just bad days and even worse days. And this was one of the even worse days. Cooper looked as if she would dearly love to be doing serious damage to something.
It was like this, said Yvette. Both statements were the real Keir. There was no difference between the two polar opposites. The BBC was just trying to stoke up a problem where none existed. Keir did really, really like immigrants. But only the ones – well some of them – who had been living and working in the country for a number of years. They were the good foreigners. But he really, really had it in for all other migrants who were trying to come to the UK now. They were bad foreigners. Really bad foreigners. Put like that, who was to argue?
We then got into the semantics of an “island of strangers”. Cooper insisted it shouldn’t be confused with the Powell speech, because Enoch’s use of strangers had been entirely different even though it had been identical. At which point Robinson took pity on her. Rather than twisting the knife, he concluded that the language problem was one that had been generated by some halfwit in No 10. Who was now insisting that black was white. Besides, he had better things to do than pursue Yvette for something she hadn’t said.
Not that the rest of the interview went much better. Because basically, Yvette and Starmer are as one on immigration. If they see one more foreigner, it will be too many. Nothing against foreigners, mind. Just enough is enough. The acceptable face of xenophobia. A large number of Britons were fed up with foreigners, and who was she to disagree? Besides, it was all for their own good. She didn’t want foreigners coming over here to do jobs the Britons refuse to do, only to be exploited because their English was a bit crap. Much better to leave the job vacancies unfilled.
On the care sector, Cooper couldn’t have been more incoherent if she’d tried. She was going to increase the pay for the social care jobs no one wanted, but couldn’t say who was going to fund the extra costs. It looked very much as if either the councils would be picking up the tab and cutting other services or that elderly people and those with dementia would have to fork out. And if some of them couldn’t afford it, then it was their own fault for having Alzheimer’s. If there’s one thing worse than a foreigner trying to get a job in the care sector it’s a Briton who is a burden on the state.
We ended with Robinson observing that the measures put forward would cut immigration by only 100,000 at most, leaving inward migration still around the 300,000 mark. Way higher than Labour, Tories or Reform wanted. Yvette hummed and hawed. She would need to go further and faster. Internment camps. Arbitrary roundups of undesirables. Keep England for the English. Nothing was off-limits.
Still, even if Cooper was having a tough morning, there were others who were leading their best lives. Meet Thames Water’s chief executive, Chris Weston, who was appearing before the Defra select committee. Chris was asked to justify taking a £195,000 bonus just three months after taking up the job. “Because I’m worth it,” he cooed. The swimming pool and the tennis court weren’t going to pay for themselves. Nice work if you can get it.
