Starmer and the writing on the wall

The trouble with having your back to the wall is that you can’t read the writing on it.

I’m not sure whether the British Primer Minister Keir Starmer and the rest of the Labour Party leadership has its back to the wall or not. Either way, it certainly has trouble reading the writing. For anyone with the eyes to see it, the message was written unambiguously on 1 May, when the far-right Reform UK party won a sweeping victory in local elections and, more worrying still, captured the previously safe Labour parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby in a by-election. Although it won by only six votes, that overturned a previous Labour majority of nearly 15,000.

Keir Starmer (left) and Nigel Farage
Composite photo: Daily Mirror

And what was the message? That the Reform UK leader and demagogue Nigel Farage, a man who demonstrated in the Brexit referendum his happiness to use lies to gain his political objectives, can no longer be casually ruled out as a contender for the position of British Prime Minister. A ghastly prospect that has just taken a big step towards realisation.

Curiously, we’ve recently seen two other elections, one in Canada and the other in Australia, where disgust over the views of the US equivalent of Farage, President Donald Trump, led to huge swings towards parties of the centre left and secured their victories. The Canadian Liberal Party was languishing so low in the polls that commentators were beginning to write its obituary, but the Trump effect saw it sweep back and win a fourth successive term in office. 

The Australian Labor Party was little better off and expected to lose power, but again with the assistance of the aversion Trump has excited, it surged back into office with an increased majority.

Actually, with a landslide victory.

And what did Australian Labor present as a vision for the future? Quoted in the Guardian, Jim Chalmers,  Treasurer (Finance Minister) in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, summed up the difference between the party’s first term and the one just starting:

The best way to think about the difference between our first term and the second term that we won last night [is the] first term was primarily inflation without forgetting productivity, the second term will be primarily productivity without forgetting inflation

There was also talk about housing and student debt.

And what did British Labour put front and centre in its reaction to its rather different election results? Immigration. It was going to crack down on people in Britain on student visas who applied for political asylum.

Now, I don’t know how serious a problem those students represent. But I suspect that in the scale of issues Britain faces, it probably doesn’t make the top ten. Does it really matter more than the state of the health service? The problem of homelessness or unaffordable housing? The cuts to social security? High prices? Overcrowded prisons? I haven’t even mentioned the problems in defence and international trade that our betrayal by Farage’s friend Trump has created. And there are many more.

So why did the government focus on immigration? Well, whipping up anti-immigration feeling is central to the campaigning stance of Reform UK. Labour is obsessed with winning back voters who have deserted it for Farage’s party. It has somehow managed to convince itself that persuading those voters to come back to the fold would be best achieved by showing it can treat immigrants with at least the same brutal severity as Farage promises.

Setting aside the dubious morality of rounding in this way on an often vulnerable community and scapegoating it for all our ills, there are some massive practical objections to this thinking.

The first is that far from being an evil, we desperately need immigrants. The whole world is suffering from falling birth rates. One answer, much loved by the far right natalists especially in the US, is to increase the number of children being born (and, incidentally, this would also help advance another prized goal of the far right: rolling back what gains there have been for women by having them return to their supposedly ‘natural’ role of rearing children rather than pursuing careers). 

The trouble with trying to increase birth rates is that it only generates economic benefits twenty years later, when the children reach adulthood. If you want to start filling labour market gaps immediately, you need immigrants. Far from being a problem for the receiving nations, immigration creates difficulties for the nations they leave, which are being drained of their young and dynamic people. It solves population shortages for the nations to which they move.

When it comes to politics rather than economics, harping on about immigration is dangerous. Opposing migrants is the Faragists’ big issue. By talking about it so much, we in Labour ensure that public attention remains focused on the theme that most favours Farage’s party. Churchill once said that a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the conversation. Turning that notion around, it’s clear that to combat fanaticism, we have to change the conversation. How about talking about housing, healthcare, productivity or growth instead?

In any case, if we’re trying to win back people from Reform UK, why on earth are we trying to do it by suggesting we’re not much different from them? Why would anyone wanting to attack immigration vote for the lite version, the imitation – Labour – when they can vote for the fully caffeinated version, the original – Reform UK?

Perhaps we can focus, like Australian Labor, on the reforms that would actually change the lives of our lost voters for the better. Increased productivity to grow the economy, generate more jobs and improve incomes. More housing to tackle homelessness and make house prices accessible. Rescue the health service. Fix education. Give us proper defence not reliant on Donald Trump.

That approach seems to be working for the Australians. And what we’re doing isn’t working for us. If you doubt it, just take a look at the Runcorn by-election result.

Let’s learn to read the writing on the wall.