An Island of Strangers, Led by a Party of Strangers

A Labour government with a historic majority has somehow decided the best way to beat the far right is to imitate its homework. Badly.

I have been inspired by many things in the past – a co-worker doing something in a way I’d never have thought of, an encounter with a particularly good speech and once, very memorably, a cake.

What I have, however, never been inspired by is Kristi Noem - a woman who made her name riding the full menagerie of Trumpist culture wars in the US with a penchant for playing dress-up for attention and an approach to immigration that should chill us all to the bone.

Except, if the Sunday Times is to be believed¹, Noem is now a reference point of “inspiration” for our current Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in her mission to bring in the most sweeping crackdown on the UK’s asylum system we’ve seen in decades.

Not a social democrat from Scandinavia which would be the most obvious fit from a party that brands itself as socially democratic, nor a jurist from the ECHR or even some dusty but worthy Fabian pamphlet about managed migration.

No, no - one of the political north stars for the person leading our immigration policy in this country is a woman whose guiding philosophy is that cruelty in policy is the feature, not an unpleasant bug in the system.

And that, for me, is the rotten little kernel of where the Labour government now finds itself after just about a year and a half in power.

It’s not just that I think that many of the policies that this government has tried to enact so far have been bad - that they really are - but the reference points they seem to be using. It’s that the people that Keir Starmer’s government are desperate to impress, the imaginary focus groups in their collective imagination, all live firmly on the authoritarian right, and I can’t help but feel like they have begun governing and setting the course for the country as if the electorate is the Daily Mail comments section and Nigel Farage’s WhatsApp group chat, while everyone else (read: their actual voters) are just slightly annoying by-products.

In no realm of the government is this more clear than immigration, and it started going really wobbly in May this year with Starmer’s now infamous speech that warned us that without firmer rules in place, we risk becoming “an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.²”

That line in his speech is the sort of thing you think up when you’ve inhaled so much right-wing framing that you can no longer hear how you actually sound. This speech was from a Prime Minister of a party that was built by migrants, trade unionists and refugees, who for some reason best known to himself, reached for a metaphor that lands somewhere between a John Lewis Christmas ad and a lightly laundered Powell tribute act.

And when we pointed out that there was that similarity? We were told - firmly - that any comparison was completely outrageous.

Except when you start putting the rhetoric side by side with that of the far-right not just in the UK, but in Europe, it really does become hard to hear the difference - that same insistence on “control”, that same division between “good” migrants who follow the rules³ and “bad” desperate people in dinghies. That same insistence that keeps getting fed to us that the racism we’re seeing on our streets is actually just “legitimate concerns.”

Over the weekend, we learned that Mahmood would be pushing this even further when it comes to policy, by taking a Denmarkian approach - which on the face of things, would sound good, except that it means that refugee status becomes even more temporary, there would be reviews every four years and the introduction of a twenty-year eligibility timeline before you can even begin to think about putting down roots.

It’s a clear signal that the state’s primary position when it comes to refugees is to make their lives just uncomfortable enough that you’ll give up and go back to wherever you risked your life to escape from.

And now into this already bleak mix, we now apparently throw in a dash of Kristi Noem - not because she embodies any sort of coherent Labour value, but because this government has become utterly obsessed with reassuring the right that they’re “tough.”

Tough on refugees. Tough on protestors. Tough on welfare. Tough on disabled people whose only crime is not recovering from illness or injury fast enough or on a treasury timetable.

At the same time, they seem determined to never be tough on people actually creating the trouble we’re seeing in this country - landlords profiteering on housing chaos, energy companies creaming off excess profits and media barons who swing the front pages to get the outcomes they want.

No, this group gets meetings, summer parties and an unwritten understanding that nothing structurally will truly change, while everyone else gets lectures about responsibility and “hard decisions.⁴”

And herein lies the deeper problem I have with the Labour government to date - the immigration reforms, the “island of strangers” speech, the crackdowns on welfare and now the Kristi Noem fandom don’t seem to be glitches, but rather expressions of a broader political instinct that’s taken hold over the past year and a half in which Starmer and his inner circle have seemingly entirely internalised this idea that governing the country is a hostile interview with a panel made up of Rupert Murdoch, Telegraph columnists and Nigel Farage. That the electorate - you know, you, me, your neighbours, the actual human beings desperately trying to work our way through the wreckage of the past fifteen years - are basically silly bystanders who have no reason for getting involved in a conversation between the centrists and the far-right.

It’s an incredibly frustrating position to be in - watching Labour respond to Reform UK’s surge in the polls not by challenging their overt racism, explaining why migration happens, having honest conversations about our ageing population and the care economy and tie it all back to wages, housing and public services. No. It repeats the Reform UK rhetoric in a slightly more polite voice and desperately hopes that voter will buy Labour’s diet own-brand version of Farage’s policies⁵ instead of the full-fat original offering, leading me to feel like we’re in a place where the Labour Party appears to believe that the best way to defeat hard-right populists is to become slightly more competent at implementing their ideas.

Beyond immigration, there are other issues - specifically in how economic policy is being handled. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen Rachel Reeves road testing tax increases in public, letting rumours swirl unabated about breaking manifesto pledges on income tax and letting the right-wing dominated press frame any decision she makes as a fresh assault on “hard-working families”, before executing what can only be described as a panicked U-Turn a few short weeks before the Autumn Budget because the politics all looks too spicy.

Gilts have spiked, markets have rolled their eyes and the government has somehow managed to look both reckless and cowardly.

And this has been a running theme through this government. First they haphazardly hacked away at support for millions of pensioners only to discover - to their shock - that older people don’t particularly appreciate being told to tighten their belts during an energy crisis, and that their means testing was completely ineffectual while the government, meanwhile, rules out any sort of meaningful windfall and wealth taxes.

Welfare reforms were just as poorly handled - it was all bluff and bluster going in, a crackdown on what the government clearly believe is a far too generous offer to the ill, disabled and those in need of support in society, before a rebellion by their own party, another screeching u-turn and a whole subset of the electorate feeling just a bit more shafted than they previously were, while trusting the government even less.

What’s been consistent in this all hasn’t been any sort of bold strategy (either on the economy or migration), but a deep seated psychological need to appease the right. Every decision by this government so far seems to begin with the question of “What will the Mail say about this policy?” instead of “What will this policy actually achieve?”

And when the tabloids do kick off, which is inevitable as they have a deep seated enmity towards anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher, the government doesn’t argue back, but retreats, apologises and punts the pain onto the people who are less likely to write an op-ed in the Sun about it⁶ - asylum seekers, disabled people, younger renters and people on Universal Credit. Strong with the weak, weak with the strong - the Labour government’s governing philosophy seems to have turned into a posture of permanent flinch.

And the thing that makes me want to scream into the nearest throw cushion?

Buried under all this genuflecting to the right are some genuinely good policies - the expansion of breakfast clubs, stronger worker’s rights against unfair dismissal and zero-hours exploitation, renters reforms that edge us ever so slightly away from Victorian landlordism and a willingness to actually point to the fact that Brexit was not the panacea that we were told it was going to be⁷.

These are proper, good Labour policies - and there are civil servants and ministers in Whitehall and across the country who are doing real thoughtful work on childcare, green investment and the slow rebuilding of a nearly destroyed set of services that barely survived the fifteen brutal years of Tory austerity.

These policies and plans are immensely important because they will make people’s lives better. But instead of expanding these seemingly minority choices and stories - stories about dignity, security and actually giving two shiny shits about whether people can pay their bills or not - the government keeps shoving them deep into the footnotes while they announce more and more policies that are filled with punishment.

The story we’re told instead by this government, again and again, is that they’re a government of discipline and restraint and “grown-up politics” - which in practice means that they’re utterly terrified of being called soft by Nigel Farage, The Telegraph and GB News. What they simply don’t seem to realise is that you cannot inspire the electorate with a narrative that boils down to “we are only slightly less vicious managers of the same decline.”

And the worst thing about these decisions? Politically, it’s a losing strategy - because when you sit there endorsing your opponents’ framing, you validate their story about the world. When you spend all your time telling people that the real problems in this country are immigration, benefits and protestors, you can’t be surprised when those people vote for the party that’s been shouting this ad nauseam for years with actual conviction.

It’s an utterly incoherent way of going about things, and we’re already seeing the results, because Labour is bleeding support from every single orifice - Reform is gathering those on the authoritarian right, the LibDems are sweeping up the middle and the Greens are making away with their voters on the left.

Image Credit: British Election Study

Some people will put up a defence of Labour just doing what’s necessary - but I have to ask, is it really?

The country isn’t crying out for a Utopian revolution - we’re crying out for basic competence tied to basic fairness.

There’s no expectation that every industry will be nationalised tomorrow with pitchforks being sharpened outside the offices of Network Rail, Octopus and O2 - there’s just an ask for wealth to be taxed properly, for obvious loopholes to be closed, for public housing, for a restoration to things like legal aid, for an investment into the community infrastructure that’s been stripped away over the years. The government doesn’t need to run on a Marxian Manifesto - they just need to stop governing like they’re fearful that Camilla Tominey is going to say something sharp about them touching the top-rate of tax.

I would like to clarify that I don’t expect the Labour party to govern exactly as I would - I am a homosexual immigrant democratic socialist who spends an unhealthy amount of time yelling about politics on the internet, and I am fully cognisant of the fact that my personal manifesto is not the centre of gravity for politics in the country. What I do expect though is that a party with a historic mandate would at least attempt to move that centre a bit more towards justice and renewal and not chase desperately after the people who are constantly yanking it to the right.

That it would set some red lines - like not demonising refugees or shrugging at crumbling infrastructure or refusing to let Nigel Farage set the narrative for the country.

Instead we find ourselves in a place where we’re watching what is supposed to be a nominally centre left government terrified of its own shadow and forever looking over its shoulder at Reform and what the front pages are going to say tomorrow. A government that’s inspired not by the best that politicians can be, but by the worst of what it currently is - and at some point, we all have to be able to ask:

“Who are these strangers I voted for?”

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1. And, admittedly, I do take things with a grain of salt coming from The Times - but there is a larger pattern here.

2. The speechwriter was very clearly going through something.

3. Not that this helps very much anymore with the way that this government has been punching down and vilifying legal migrants, but one subject at a time.

4. Hard decisions that always seem to be things done to other people.

5. All the bitterness and punching down with none of the charisma.

6. Just imagine if we had a government that treated the right-wing press like they treat people on Universal Credit - we’d have peace on earth by Wednesday.

7. It’s all still terribly vague, but better than where we were previously.