Nigel Farage is no stranger to hypocrisy. But he took it to a whole new level in his attack on Keir Starmer last week.
In a video broadcast he accused the prime minister of inciting violence against Reform politicians by calling its policies “racist”. Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, then wrongly alleged on air that Starmer called for people to “take up arms and attack” in his Manchester conference speech, despite the fact he did no such thing, and its head of policy, Zia Yusuf, even claimed that if anything happened to Farage, Starmer would be responsible.
This itself was a patently bad-faith attempt to irresponsibly crank up the heat of the political discourse to Reform’s advantage. To claim that calling Reform’s policies racist is to risk inciting violence is preposterous. All Starmer did in his speech was use an admittedly well-worn battle cliche in framing Labour’s electoral fight with Reform, and talk of the need to go into that battle armed with action to tackle the country’s problems.
He is far from the first and almost certainly won’t be the last politician to do so. It’s Farage himself who has a history of dallying in borderline language; in 2016 he said “violence could be the next step” if immigration was not controlled, he threatened to “don khaki and pick up a rifle” in 2017 if Brexit was not delivered, and he has no qualms about using the incendiary language of invasion to talk about immigration.
This attempt to shut down Labour’s criticism of its policies as somehow illegitimate also undermines Farage’s claim to be a defender of free speech; although not as much as Reform-led Nottinghamshire’s council to ban local paper the Nottingham Post from speaking to any of its Reform councillors. The ban was reversed last week, after the Post took legal action.
But in calling Reform’s policies racist I wonder if Starmer has made a real political error. To be clear, this is a justified criticism. In saying they would remove the right to remain in the UK indefinitely from hundreds of thousands of people who live, work and pay taxes in the UK, some of them for decades, there is no doubt that those from an ethnic minority would be disproportionately affected, and the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was right to call it out for the “dog-whistle” politics that it is.
It’s an immoral policy that’s also reassuringly unpopular: just 29% of voters support removing indefinite leave to remain from immigrants who have already been given permission to permanently settle in the UK, and 58% oppose it.
Labour politicians should of course be setting out what’s wrong with the policy and giving examples of the destructive impact it would have on people who have made their lives in this country based on a guarantee that they have the permanent right to live here. But there are real risks to choosing to so explicitly pick the battle with Reform that it is racist.
Public understanding of racism differs quite markedly from understanding among political activists on the left. The concepts of structural racism and institutional racism, and policies that might not explicitly target ethnic minority Britons but which end up disproportionately harming them, are very familiar to antiracism campaigners and policy wonks. In-depth qualitative research suggests that they are much less so among the public at large; the average person tends to view racism more simply as being about individual attitudes and prejudices, and that phenomena like systemic and structural racism really need to be unpacked and explained, otherwise this risks confusion and potentially disengagement.
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Labelling Reform’s policy to retrospectively scrap indefinite leave to remain for everyone as racist could not have gone down better with the party faithful in Manchester. It may also act as a strong motivator for those voters who share Starmer’s view of Farage but need encouragement to get out and support a Labour Party that represents the best chance of stopping a Reform government. But as the most headline-grabbing thing Starmer has done in a long time, the fact that Starmer called Reform racist will be the only takeaway for many people from Labour conference, to the extent they noticed it was happening at all.
Starmer has already had to clarify since then that he was calling neither Farage nor Reform voters racist (a fair question to him might be: if you’re prepared to call a policy with discriminatory impacts racist, why are you not by implication happy to call someone who is pledging to introduce such a policy a racist?).
He has also declined an invitation to label Donald Trump’s claims that London wants to “go to sharia law” as racist (it’s obvious why he would not do this from a diplomatic perspective, but it does rather undermine the moral clarity he was no doubt seeking to achieve in relation to Reform). If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
And Starmer’s comments were ripe for misrepresentation; they generated exactly the kind of headlines in the right-leaning press you might expect: “Worried about immigration? Starmer says you’re a racist”, said the Daily Mail.
This is exactly where Farage wants Starmer: to portray him as thinking ordinary people who are worried about immigration are by definition prejudiced and bigoted. Of course, Starmer explicitly made clear in his conference speech that they aren’t. But by using the word “racist” in relation to a policy, and in a way that wasn’t really necessary – Starmer could have punchily outlined why it is so appallingly immoral without it – he has arguably walked straight into a Reform trap. He was followed swiftly by David Lammy, who for some reason chose to claim on air that Farage “flirted with Hitler Youth” when he was younger, an allegation that Farage denies and which Lammy had to then walk back.
The counter argument is that these attacks on Reform will help to unite an anti-Farage voter coalition that is Labour’s best hope of getting re-elected. But does Labour really want to also risk putting off voters who may be considering Reform with messaging that some may conflate – with Reform’s help of course – with the idea that Labour doesn’t like them or want their support?
The most unifying message of all would have been a distinctive, positive one about the difference voters will see in the next few years as a result of a Labour government. But the lack of that is Starmer’s most fundamental problem. Picking a fight with Farage about racism is a legitimate political strategy, whatever Reform might say. It just may not be a very effective one.
