It is time for anti-populism

But Britain’s anti-Farage majority has a voice too. The ever-decreasing popularity of Brexit remains among Reform’s biggest headaches. Starmer changed tack, from talking tough on immigration, to challenging Farage over his economic plans. Linking the Reform leader to Trump and Truss is a core part of the plan. But the question remains how far Farage’s opponents will be offering a real alternative, rather than an echo. Can they develop a genuine, anti-populist message?

There is majority support for a closer relationship with the European Union, for net zero, for keeping the European Convention on Human Rights, for making the NHS work rather than scrapping it for something new. That need not, as progressives sometimes argue, mean changing the subject away from what Reform wants to talk about. It could mean having a different argument about identity, immigration and integration too, but framed in a way intended to garner mass appeal.

Starmer has already sparked controversy inside and beyond the Labour Party over whether he had, by accident or design, echoed Enoch Powell, by warning that high immigration might turn Britain into an “island of strangers”. For the children of migrants, it is hard not to take Powell’s notorious speech personally. My father came to Britain just a week after that speech. It was not just a speech about how to persuade Dad to go back home. Powell’s most fervent wish of all is that I should never have been born. Each British-born child born to black or Asian Commonwealth migrants was cast by Powell as just one more stick on the funeral pyre of a nation.

Of course, Starmer did not intend to have a row about Enoch Powell, despite stumbling into one. His softer intent was clear from the context in which he used his contentious phrase. “Nations depend on rules: fair rules… Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.” 

Starmer’s celebration of diversity sounded somewhat perfunctory yet signaled a different foundational argument to Powell’s. Starmer was echoing arguments made over the decades by both centre-right and centre-left leaders: that controlling immigration is a foundation for good race relations, and that a high pace of change can make integration more challenging. 

But the historic weakness has been the successive failure of British governments to combine these observations with a viable agenda for integration. The Starmer government risks repeating this pattern: it has not explained how making those who intend to settle wait ten years to do so would help integration rather than hinder it.

Suggested Reading

The charlatans are clearly here to stay

Marie Le Conte

Words matter. Getting the boundary right between engaging with legitimate democratic concerns on immigration and pandering to illegitimate prejudices is not easy, but getting it right is important. Starmer was applauded by progressive audiences when he combined a strong attack on the racism that underpinned the Southport riots with the argument that net migration was unsustainably high, crucially taking much more care to differentiate his critique of the record of the last government rather than of those who had come to Britain.

National leaders should want to be balancers and bridgers – not polarisers – on questions of identity, immigration and integration. How can they do that?
There is a simple common sense “one nation” test. Can leaders talk about identity issues in ways that resonate with white, Asian and black British people alike?

Some politicians fail this test because they simply do not try to meet it. When Margaret Thatcher spoke in 1978 about people “feeling rather swamped by those of a different culture”, her intended audience could only be aimed at the majority group. There is a similar dynamic today when MPs or commentators argue that cities like London, Manchester or Birmingham have become “unrecognisable” to British people. The main message heard there by British-born minorities is that they do not yet have equal voice, status or respect.Most people are balancers on immigration, seeing both pressures of a rising population for housing demand and public services, and gains for the economy, NHS and our universities when people come to Britain. 

It should be possible to take the themes of control and contribution, skills and cohesion – managing migration and integration fairly for those who come to Britain, and the communities that they join – and to meet the one nation test.

Keir Starmer would want to pass this “one nation” test. But the geography of the 2024 general election, and now the intense focus on the Reform-curious Labour voter, add to the tendency for Labour to largely imagine its mainstream audience as a white British majority group. That can lead to it focusing on a minority audience only on special occasions, about distinct issues, rather than finding the voice and narrative to bind them together.
We need to talk about many things when we talk about identity, immigration and integration. Governments tend to focus on policy questions for the Home Office, like “how many”; or for the Treasury, about who to choose to maximise the economic contribution so that “they” are good for “us”.

But the question for our society goes deeper – to how people become us, and what we need to do together, to have both the relationships and stories that make us not simply an island of neighbours, but a society with a sense of the future that we want to share.

That is an argument where the liberals, the social democrats and the centrists should challenge their instinct to either change the subject, or to offer a weak echo of the populist case. Making the case for the society that we want to be is one that the anti-populists should take on and win.