You will hear much huff and puff today about Starmer promising to cut immigration ‘significantly.’ This is all bullshit, and here’s why:
(a) Starmer’s abrupt interest in immigration is based on the fundamental lie touted by grifters like Farage that bashing immigrants will help the British working class and restore some twisted sense of British identity.
Farage has no more interest in immigration, patriotism, or working-class families than Starmer – he just sees an electoral bandwagon, one that will be backed by the UK’s right-wing media.
Starmer is unable to process that he is deeply unpopular because of his own utter lack of charm, vision, policies, plans, and morals. Starmer is thus threatened by a man who at least APPEARS to offer SOMETHING (however banal, dishonest, and toxic).
Starmer naturally has no ideas of his own to arrest Labour’s slump in the polls; all he has is his own blind obsession with retaining power for its own sake, so he is now trying a new ‘reform’ of the Labour movement.
Not content with destroying its core principles of socialism and internationalism, now Starmer intends to destroy its long tradition of anti-racism as well. Starmer turned Labour into the Tories – now he wants to turn them into Reform – for no reason beyond his own careerism. Labour PR staffers are now pumping out the language once reserved for fringe groups like the National Front.
(b) The word ‘significantly’ is deployed often by politicians because it commits them to nothing specific.
Quizzed by hacks at his latest hollow press briefing, Starmer refused to give any specific numbers and refused to confirm if immigration would fall year on year.
Anything can be said to be ‘significantly changed’—if’ I drop some toast in my kitchen, it can be said to have ‘significantly changed,’ but I doubt he will deliver that much even.
(c) If you look at Labour’s 69-page white paper on immigration, what IS significant is that it contains no actual plans, just a lot of media soundbites stolen from Trump and Farage.
This is the whole point, of course: Starmer and his crew live in a world entirely detached from reality – where only PR gambits and opinion polls matter, only the APPEARANCE of restricting immigration matters, designed to rob Farage of his only USP.
(d) The only idea they seem to have is to attack immigrant care workers. How reflexively TYPICAL of this abomination of a Labour government that they would attack some of the lowest-paid workers in the land and the vulnerable people that rely on them.
The only consistent moral principle Labour has demonstrated since gaining office is to bully the vulnerable, like freezing pensioners, disabled people, UK children in poverty, Gaza’s starving children, and now low-paid care workers, while sucking up to the powerful.
(e) As a gambit, this is all bullshit anyway, because it won’t work. Clearly Starmer’s team thinks people are both utterly stupid and desperate to find reasons to vote Labour.
As Labour tries to reinvent itself as Reform just a matter of months after selling out all its principles to get elected as the old Tories, it will only highlight to people how utterly vacuous and amoral they truly are. A jaundiced electorate will see that Labour stands for NOTHING.
What few socialists and progressives remain in Labour’s camp will leave in disgust as they see Starmer begging for Farage’s table scraps. (i will go back to those sparkly eyed optimists on the day of Labour’s election victory to ask, is THIS the ‘change’ you wanted?)
Those minded to buy into Farage’s rhetoric will simply be affirmed in their racist logic. What Starmer is doing is clearing the way for Reform, because nobody in Labour will now make ANY moral or political argument against them. Pathetic.
Oh, to have Jeremy Corbyn back – a man who would have committed Labour to actually helping working-class families, who would have fought Farage via Labour’s core moral principles, who would have stood up to Israel and Trump, and who would have called out racism for what it is.
Instead we have NOTHING but Starmer’s crew and their empty, bullying, careerist bullshit.
I despair of the UK, but at least this will hasten the desperately needed death of the Labour Party and finally bury the idea that electoral success for left-wing parties comes from adopting right-wing policies and hollow PR mandarins as leaders.
