A leading politician says we must reduce immigration to “release pressure on housing and public services”. He asserts we bring in too many foreigners who “put downward pressure on wages”. He says we must “finally honour what Take Back Control meant” by making immigration “controlled” and “selective”. He concludes that we must no longer be “an island of strangers”.
You might assume this was Nigel Farage. But no, it was the Prime Minister this very morning. So utterly frit is Keir Starmer of Reform’s meteoric, spectacular and dazzling rise in the polls that he is performing yet another sensational flip-flop, the mother of them all, and aping the language of what only a few months ago he referred to as “the far Right”.
He has some nerve, doesn’t he? This is the man who won the Labour leadership promising to be “continuity Corbyn”. This is the man who once wrote that all immigration law has a “racist undercurrent”. This is a man who, despite his absurd promise to “smash the gangs”, has presided over 11,000 illegal channel crossings this year alone. That’s a gigantic 40% rise.
Yet he is also a man who expects us to believe him when he says, “mark my words” and “this is my promise to you”. You’re having a laugh, aren’t you Sir Keir?
Yes, I know, he got away with it for a while. And it took him all the way to power. That’s because he was outrageously lucky with the timing of the pandemic and with his hapless, exhausted Tory opponents, who allowed immigration to soar, the Chardonnay to pour, and practically rolled out the red carpet right the way up Downing Street.
But that time has long since passed. That small boat has already set sail and has the White Cliffs in its sights. Starmer can no longer take the British people for fools. He’s flip-flopped once too often. They’ve simply stopped believing him.
And therein lies the great danger for him and his party. To his left, he has millions of voters who feel utterly betrayed as he blatantly copies the language and policies of Reform, and who are decamping en masse, as I write, to the Greens and LibDems. Already they’re up in arms about his announcement this morning, with refugee charities describing it as “shameful” and demanding an apology.
Yet, to his right there are millions more voters who see him as a brazen opportunist and pale imitation of what the country desperately needs. Farage must be delighted that the Prime Minister has chosen to play on his turf. Meanwhile, all of us must be appalled that yet another migrant drowned in the Channel today – another life that could have been saved had Labour not abandoned Rwanda on day one in office.
It’s no surprise to me that Keir Starmer has the lowest approval ratings of any prime minister in modern times. It’s been obvious since he won the Labour leadership, then promptly abandoned every single pledge he’d made to Labour members, that Keir Starmer is a politician who can never be trusted. Millions of others are now seeing that too.
His immigration announcement this morning was nothing more than a pathetic rearguard and a despairing appeal to Labour voters who are rightly fed up and abandoning the party for Reform. Well, it won’t work, it’s too late and nobody’s listening. Sorry, Sir Keir, but you only have yourself to blame.
