The Prime Minister’s ‘island of strangers’ speech this week was ‘as politically stupid as it is morally bankrupt’, writes ANDREW FISHER
Enoch Powell and Keir Starmer: 57 years apart, but both pandering to the far right
It could all have been so different.
In 2020, Keir Starmer said, “We welcome migrants, we don’t scapegoat them.
“Low wages, poor housing, poor public services are not the fault of migrants … they’re political failure.
“So we have to make the case for the benefits of migration, for free movement.”
Yet in 2025, Keir Starmer was saying, “the damage [inward migration] has done to our country has been incalculable. Public services and housing access have been placed under too much pressure”.
Perhaps the 2020 version of Keir Starmer would dub him a “political failure”?
Rather than make the case for more investment in housing and public services, on Tuesday this week Starmer claimed that we “risk becoming an island of strangers”, talked of “forces pulling our country apart”, and made promises about being “tougher” on migration.
Starmer’s speech railed against higher migration, “a one-nation experiment in open borders” as he called it, inanely. But he didn’t allocate a single pound to boost medical training budgets, not a single penny to boost care workers’ wages, and there was no restoration of public funding for our universities which have, for more than a decade, been forced to attract high-paying foreign students to subsidise courses for British students.
When Enoch Powell made his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, the Tory leader of the time, Edward Heath, did the decent thing and sacked him from the shadow cabinet.
Nearly 60 years later, a Labour Prime Minister – spooked by the rise of grifter Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party – has made a speech with offensive echoes of Powell. And there has not been a murmur of dispute from a single member of Labour’s cabinet.
Lord Alf Dubs, a Labour peer and Jewish refugee to this country on the Kindertransport in 1939, said this week, “I’m unhappy senior politicians are using language reminiscent of Powell and I’m sorry Starmer used some of those phrases.”
Veteran London Labour MP Diane Abbott described it as, “A shameful day in British politics and a shameful day for the Labour party. It will not end well for either.”
Gavin Barwell, the former Conservative MP for Croydon Central, posted, “The current attempt by many in politics and the media to impugn most/all migrants – my friends, my neighbours, my colleagues at work – is utterly disgusting.”
Lord Barwell could easily be describing his former colleague, Chris Philp, the shadow Home Secretary, who has spent recent months parroting far-right myths, including that 48% of London’s social housing is occupied by people who are foreign. The true figure is 14%, and many of those will likely become British citizens in the future.
Philp’s lies: the MP for Croydon South spends much time frothing on social media, often with entirely false claims, such as this one
Both Labour and the Conservatives aping Reform is a reflection of their own feebleness, and the public can see it – which is why both parties lost heavily in this month’s local elections and are falling in the polls.
The reality is that all that Starmer’s offensive speech will have done is further alienate Labour supporters, while voters attracted to Reform will continue to support the real thing rather than the latter-day convert.
It is as politically stupid as it is morally bankrupt.
In a rather unsubtle act of defiance, Croydon East MP Natasha Irons, the first mixed-race MP representing our diverse borough, retweeted Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, who had said, “Generations of migrants have helped contribute to London’s success economically, socially and culturally. Thank you for what you have done – and continue to do – to make London the greatest city in the world.”
Mayor Sir Sadiq did the media rounds to distance himself from the increasingly toxic Prime Minister. In an LBC interview with James O’Brien, he said of Starmer’s speech: “The sort of language I use is different … that’s not the sort of words that I would use.”
Khan is the only London Mayor to be re-elected twice, and he is the first Muslim mayor of any major European city. He is testament to the nonsense that Starmer is talking, but more importantly so is London, and so is our corner of it: Croydon
Data from the last census shows that our borough has one of the highest percentages of mixed-race people anywhere in the UK, giving very visible lie to the claim that migrants make “an island of strangers” and don’t integrate.
Look at our England football team – a team of first- and second- generation migrants. Harry Kane, England’s record goalscorer and the national team’s captain, has an Irish father, who married an Englishwoman. Declan Rice, Jack Grealish and Harry Maguire also have Irish ancestry.
Today, my children’s local school has only 15% of children who identify as “White British”. My own children are mixed race, and those black, Asian and white and mixed heritage children are forming friendship groups as diverse as our borough itself.
Watching those melting-pot gaggles of children play as happily together as I did with my entirely white schoolfriends when I grew up makes me wonder: why would politicians seek to divide those children, demonise some, and tell others something of them is lost because of the heritage of others?
The people I feel estranged from in our society are not my diverse friends, family or neighbours, but the people filled with hate, and those cynical politicians who feed that hate. They are the ones failing to integrate by causing division.
Our communities, our borough, our city, and our modern British culture are the embodiment of a successful integrated and multicultural society – everything that Enoch Powell was scaremongering about 57 years ago, and everything that Powell got wrong.
Those who try to divide us are attacking the families and communities that have made us the diverse and friendly country that we are.
And unlike our charlatan political leaders, I believe that’s something of which to be proud.
- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
- As well as his column, Andrew is also conducting podcast interviews, in-depth and informed with specialists and national figures, sharing their expertise with Croydon, and available on Inside Croydon’s Spotify channel
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- It’s bad for Starmer’s Labour and worse for Badenoch’s Tories
- What a load of old rubbish! And that’s just inside the Town Hall
- Bad for disabled people. Bad for unemployment. Bad for growth
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