Politics: a declaration of war

RICHARD NORTH

It takes an evil, Machiavellian spirit to so distort and pervert a reasonable argument that it, in itself sounds unreasonable to the point of being extreme. But, in his conference speech yesterday, Starmer achieved just that.

“Controlling migration is a reasonable goal”, he tells us in an uncontroversial opening to his segment om immigration, but he then follows it up with a provocative non-sequitur. “But if you throw bricks and smash up private property, that’s not legitimate – that’s thuggery”, he says.

No one would disagree with that latter sentiment, but what is its relevance? Do people who want to control immigration “throw bricks and smash up private property” – necessarily? If not, why mention it unless, by implication, you wish to belittle, tarnish or denigrate those who want to see immigration controlled?

Playing the same trick, Starmer moves on: “Free speech is a British value – and we have guarded it for centuries”. Fair enough – although his record on that is somewhat dubious. But then another non-sequitur: “But if you incite racist violence and hatred, that’s not expressing concern”, he says: “it’s criminal”.

I think we know all about incitement. Starmer’s goon squads have been all too busy on that front, but why link it with free speech? What is he trying to say, or is he making a veiled threat… watch your step or we’ll lock you in a cage and interrogate you in a police station in the wee small hours?

Then, to a flag-waving audience, thoughtfully supplied with flags on stick of the four parts of the United Kingdom, temporarily replacing the Palestinian flags evidently preferred by delegates, he declares: “This party, this great party, is proud of our flags”.

Actually, giving the Labour conference wavy national flags on sticks is about as meaningful as issuing a troop of baboons with copies of The Times. And foreigners waving St George’s flags no more makes them English than wearing fake Victoria Crosses turns them into heroes.

Starmer, though, is yet again pressing his point to launch another rhetorical trick. If they (the flags) are painted alongside graffiti telling a Chinese takeaway owner to “go home”, that’s not pride – that’s racism”, he says. But who says otherwise, and who does that other than a vanishingly small number of people?

No doubt he has in mind the “raise the colours” activists, who are by and large ordinary, decent people who have placed hundreds of thousands of flags – which is what they do. But Starmer cannot resist the temptation to link the good with the bad, diminishing the former by juxtaposing it with the latter.

With barely a pause for breath, though, Starmer moves on to the substantive part of this segment, captured on this video clip. He offers a long, convoluted sentence, epic in its proportions because it amounts to a declaration of war against the bulk of the nation.

Effectively, what he says is that, if you (the listener or watcher) say or imply any one of a number of things, “we will fight you with everything we have because you are the enemy of national renewal”.

The first of those conditions which turns you into “the enemy” is if you say or imply “that people cannot be English or British because of the colour of their skin”. If for instance, as I did yesterday, you disagree that Pakistani heritage Shabana Mahmood can be an Englishwoman, you become “the enemy”.

Even here, though, there is an egregious distortion. We need, I think, to distinguish between citizenship and nationality. Being British is a legal status awarded by the state (UK). Thus, I will not argue – as some will – that the likes of Mahmood cannot be British.

But to be English is to assume a specific nationality, and it is not within the gift of the state to award that status. And to be English is far more than a question of skin colour, although it is typical of Starmer that he tries to reduce it to that ignoble level.

In fact, there are many breeds of men with fair skin – skin colour is not the defining characteristic of the English. European, North Americans and many others share that characteristic. But there is only one English breed and ancestry is what matters. That is what makes the difference. Without that ancestry, that breeding, people can be British. But they will never be English.

For Starmer, though, I am not allowed to make that distinction. I am presumed to judge people solely on the colour of their skin, notwithstanding that I would deny a German, and Italian, and especially a Frenchman, the privilege of calling themselves English.

Dammit, we’ve been at war with most of the buggers – why would I accept them as English? And yet, first and second-generation coloured people are supposed to be able to call themselves English, by virtue of being resident here, and if I deny that, I am cast as “the enemy”.
For the next of Starmer’s conditions, he would have it that, if you say or imply “that mixed heritage families owe you an explanation”, once again you become the enemy. I’m, not quite sure what to make of that. What sort of explanation are we owed? Who actually wants one?

However, Starmer’s particular venom is reserved for us if we say that people who have lived here for generations, raised their children here, built lives in their communities, working in our schools, our hospitals, running businesses – our neighbours – should now be deported. Then, one more time, we become “the enemy”.

In actuality, this takes us into straw man territory. The number of immigrants who have “lived here for generations, raised their children here, built lives in their communities, working in our schools, our hospitals, running businesses” is relatively small, and such people are largely tolerated, if not wholly accepted.

This being the case, these people are not the target. The problem that rises with mass migration is that, according to the 2021/22 Census, approximately 10.7 million people in the UK were born abroad, representing about 16 percent of the total population at that time. Since then, the number has gone up and may well be in excess of 12 million.

Some of these people make enough of a contribution to this country that their presence outweighs the detrimental effects they may have. Such people, though, are still foreigners in this land. They can “belong”, in the sense that they become part of their communities, and they can be respected for their contributions. But this is a very small minority.

Starmer, however, doesn’t make any distinctions here. He paints all immigrants with the same brush and allows no case to be made that will include deportation of the unwanted excess. We can only assume that to call for any immigrants to be removed is to bring down the wrath of the prime minister.

Whether he knows it or not – or even cares – Starmer created a lot of enemies yesterday. In particular, the man has gone to war with people who hold opinions about Englishness, with which he disagrees, and those who call for immigrants to be deported. Yet neither are against the law or in any way illegal

Elsewhere in his speech, Starmer has a tilt at Farage, mentioning him four times, while asserting that this country faces a choice, a defining choice. Britain stands at a fork in the road, he says, where “we can choose decency or we can choose division”. “Division” is Farage’s way. “Decency”, he reserves for himself.

Farage stands at the wrong side of a line – a moral line. Starmer says, and it isn’t just Farage who crosses it. here are also people who should know better, he says, who are sowing fear and discord across our country.

And just to add icing on the cake, while Starmer is equating Farage with a “snake oil merchant” and the unutterable cretin, David Lammy is accused him of being “someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth”, Mahmood describes his policies as “worse than racist”.

With that, we could be forgiven for feeling somewhat alarmed. As Pete points out, when Starmer talks of fighting us “with everything we have”, we need to take him at his word. Clearly, this does not exclude instructing police forces to drag people from their homes at night for the “crimes” of posting memes, with many other similar crimes on the books.

What Starmer might have forgotten though is that declarations of war work both says, the repercussions of which can be extremely serious and unpredictable. A man who talks about bringing the country together may achieve that in a way he may come to regret – he probably has no idea what he has unleashed.

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