There has been an undeniable, perhaps still underappreciated, shift in British politics. In just a few years, we’ve gone from James Forsyth – the former Spectator journalist and key Sunak confidante in No.10 – declaring that immigration is no longer ‘a political problem’, to the Leader of the Opposition calling for mass deportations and Reform, the party leading the polls, promising to appoint a Minister for Deportations in the Home Office.
To top it all off, on May 12, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a White Paper on immigration that admits – finally – that the economic orthodoxy around immigration is flawed. Delivering what has been dubbed the ‘island of strangers’ speech, he conceded the so-called ‘open borders experiment’ had not delivered the promised economic boons on which it was sold. His speech, and the Government’s White Paper, also contains overtures to the real, felt impacts of immigration on British workers, ranging from depressing wages to actually displacing workers in ‘6 out of the 10 sectors, seeing this highest change in payrolled employments of non-EU nationals’.
For all the rhetoric, the paper does not lay out any specific targets, either in terms of net migration numbers or visas, merely an indication of what is considered acceptable. Continually, the period 2021-2024 is identified as an outlier of unacceptably high levels of immigration. All this means that the Government thinks the near one million net migration figure of 2023 ought to come down. Quite where to is never made explicit, the level of the 2010s – so between 200,000 and 300,000 per annum – seems to be the intended destination.
The only place I can find any projected figures is in the Technical Annex, where the cumulative effects of the measures is expected to reduce annual gross immigration by just 100,000. For anyone who has forgotten, that was the intended net immigration figure from the Conservative-led government in 2010.
Many rightly welcome the Government’s intentions to alter our migration policies, as they have proven to have both a chaotic and sclerotic effect on our politics. But substantially, the proposals of this paper amount to tinkering with the current policies and system, and does nothing to address the foundational problem of our immigration policy: that we have no policy on integration, no functioning structural mechanisms to manage legal immigration, and practically no capacity to forcefully remove convicted foreign nationals on the scale that is necessary.
How surprising, then, to hear that Keir Starmer’s ‘islands of strangers’ speech was compared to the famous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech given by Enoch Powell. Apparently, any speech on immigration that uses a syntactic ‘x of y’ phrase is resurrecting Enoch Powell’s language.
An Enoch Powell, Keir Starmer is not. Powell was known for his mastery of language. Although he didn’t use the ‘rivers of blood’ formulation himself – that was the newspaper headline – it derived from his rendering of a Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’’. Powell of course was an accomplished classicist, having been the youngest professor in the British Empire when, aged 25, he became Professor of Greek at Sydney University. His speeches were profoundly shaped by classical allusions and the rhetorical arts of ancient Greece and Rome.
Keir Starmer’s language, on the other hand, was rather more formulaic. Whereas Powell began his speech ‘the supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature’, Starmer offered the following:
Nations depend on rules – fair rules… Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together. Whereas Powell reported a constituent worrying that ‘in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. Starmer, quite rightly, stayed away from race, and focussed on how ‘migration is part of Britain’s national story… and they make a massive contribution today’.
One can agree with Starmer or not – that is their prerogative – but clearly he believes the contributions made by migrants to Britain in the past should not be undermined by the chaos of the immigration system today. Such a view is in step with most of the British public, though I think Starmer himself underestimates the public’s perceptions of immigration. Onward found in 2023 that the average response underestimated 2022’s immigration numbers by a factor of ten (70,000 compared to the actual estimate of net 745,000 in the last ONS data release). Powell famously worried about the ‘annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants’. I doubt he’d consider Starmer an ally on this issue.
Moreover, making comparisons between one of the most timid, civic-nationalist speeches on the topic of immigration that has been given in the last few years to one of the most prominent, paradigm-defining speeches of the 20th century, shows two things. First, how ignorant our media class has become that many believe, in the words of Jeremy Vine, that the speech uses ‘almost the same phrase as Enoch Powell’ – when Powell himself did not use the phrase ‘rivers of blood’.
Second, it shows just how totally out of step that media class is compared to the rest of the country – which is especially egregious when you consider recent polling by Merlin Strategy, showing that 85% of the country want immigration below 100,000. Note: not a reduction of 100,000 that the White Paper promises; 100,000 net.
Fundamentally, Starmer is right to reject a comparison with Powell. They are politicians from different ages, with vastly different oratorical skills and distinctly separate intentions for the country. If politicians are serious about addressing our migration crisis, then they should avoid insulting the public’s intelligence by drawing such overblown parallels and instead, actually start listening to people’s concerns about one of the great issues of our time.
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