PM Keir Starmer giving a press conference on migration, 12-May-2025. | Credit: Flickr/Number 10

OPINION

Starmer’s Enoch Powell moment

Keir Starmer faces a fierce backlash after echoing Enoch Powell’s rhetoric in a hardline immigration speech, fuelling fears he is enabling far-right narratives and betraying core Labour values.

Wee Ginger Dug

May 18, 2025 — 5 min read

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T he fall out continues over Keir Starmer’s gob-smacking speech on immigration on Monday in which he echoed the language of the notoriously racist “rivers of blood” speech delivered by Enoch Powell in 1968 to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham.

At the time Powell was the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in the Shadow Cabinet of Tory leader Edward Heath. The backlash to Powell’s nakedly racist speech saw him dismissed from Heath’s shadow cabinet the following day.

Now we have a Prime Minister who channels some of the language of Powell’s speech, moreover, a Labour one. Powell was on the far right of the Conservative Party in Heath’s day; now, even though Labour would disavow Powell’s unabashed racism, many of his anti-immigration and anti-European views would sit comfortably within the Labour Party of Starmer. That tells you how far to the right the centre of gravity in British politics has shifted. Starmer himself has been a part of that journey from left to right. In 2020, he insisted that migrants were not to blame for housing shortages or failings in public services, but by 2025, he’s sounding like an editorial in the Daily Mail.

Starmer, quite predictably, refuses to back down. The speech and Starmer’s inability to concede that his language and the sentiments he expressed in it were at all problematic are further evidence of just how poor he is as a politician. It really doesn’t matter whether he echoed the most notorious anti-immigration speech in British political history on purpose or out of ignorance. Either way, it demonstrates that he is an extraordinarily unprincipled liar who absolutely cannot be trusted by anyone.

The “island of strangers” line wasn’t even the worst part of Starmer’s speech. The worst part was how he legitimised the claims of the far-right that immigration has done “incalculable damage” to Britain and restricts the access of native born British citizens to jobs, housing, and public services. In so doing, he has raised the white flag and surrendered to far-right populism. He should be making a positive case for migration, just as he should be making a case for the reintegration of the UK into the European customs union and single market, if not for rejoining the EU. Instead, he’s doing Nigel Farage’s job for him, simultaneously detoxifying and normalising Reform UK while toxifying the Labour Party.

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The migrants who keep the NHS going, those who staff care homes, work in agriculture, hospitality, academia or deliveries. They’re not doing damage, and it’s grossly insulting to claim that they do. They keep the UK economy going and we need more of them, not fewer. Immigrants are essential for the NHS, social care, academia and business. Starmer also played into the favourite far-right trope that mass immigration is part of an ‘elite conspiracy’ by referring to the past few decades as a “squalid chapter” in British political and economic history.

Politics is not really about facts and figures; it’s about perceptions, feelings, and above all, stories. As a man who is clearly emotionally illiterate, Starmer is ill-placed to do politics well; he has no instinctive sense for how his words come across, and he has no coherent or compelling story to tell. Starmer is a vision-free zone. No one could tell you what Starmer actually stands for, what he believes in. He has lied and U-turned so much that even if he did, by some miracle, present a vision and tell an attractive story of where he wants Britain to be, no one would believe him. Now he’s in power, his inadequacies cannot be disguised behind attacks on the vile Tory government he purported to be a change from.

Reform aren’t winning a rational argument, but they are gaining ground, by appealing with the help of the media and now Keir Starmer, to our basest tribal instinct, the fear of the other. (See also, anti-trans hysteria.) These fears have been overstated and repeated ad nauseam, but the fact is that the vast, vast majority of immigrants make a positive contribution to society.

What Starmer did on Monday was to tell voters that Nigel Farage’s story on immigration is correct. You do not challenge the rise of the far-right by legitimising them. You don’t challenge an irrational appeal to base instincts by endorsing it. Given Starmer’s tawdry history of lies and broken promises, no one who was tempted by Farage’s racist snake oil is now going to say that they’ll vote Labour instead. They’ll just see a Prime Minister who has agreed that Farage was right all along, and that will only encourage them to vote for a far-right party, which has just seen its core message endorsed by the Prime Minister himself.

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As such, it was a massive own goal which, far from helping Starmer to stem the rise of the far-right, will only embolden and empower them. Starmer’s tin ear for politics continues to astound and amaze. He is a visionless, empty shell of a politician who trades in platitudes and soundbites but is bereft of all substance. His core message is in essence, “Stick with me and my Labour Party, and eventually we will make things just a little bit less crap.”

That’s not at all appealing at the best of times, even less so when it’s delivered by a man as dishonest and duplicitous as Keir Starmer. It is also manifestly untrue, as millions of pensioners, disabled people, migrants, low-income families with more than two kids, and members of the LGBT community will readily testify. Starmer won the Labour leadership by lying his way into the office. He won the general election last summer in the same mendacious way; the difference is that as prime minister, he has nowhere to hide, and his lies are catching up with him. The problem for the rest of us is that what is waiting in the wings is orders of magnitude worse. It’s not just the Tories who are facing an existential crisis; it’s all of Scotland. Within a short few years, we could find ourselves part of a nakedly English nationalist far-right UK.