Starmer Must Go

[BisiBodi]

I made a lengthy post yesterday (on this thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/politics/5333405-changes-to-immigration-rules-announced-by-starmer?page=2 @ 17:43 if you want to read it) regarding the horrendous "island of strangers" speech by Starmer
Today, Kier Starmer has decided to say that immigration has done "incalculable damage" to the country. My despair and fury over this, and the general direction of labour, warrants its own thread.

Starmer claimed in writing that immigrants have put too much pressure on housing and public services (they don't, and he previously said they don't). He added that the immigration system is “almost designed to permit abuse” and that it risks “pulling the country apart”. He said that he wanted to close a “squalid chapter” in our country’s history (of too much immigration in the last few years), and then he seemed to quote the Rivers of Blood speech and said that without significantly reducing immigration the UK risks becoming “an island of strangers".

He's doing this because he's proposing new laws to make immigration harder and bring net migration down (except they definitely won't). Stuff like increasing it to 10 years before you can apply for indefinite leave to remain (10 years!!), introducing English language tests (in a post that suggests Welsh doesn't exist), reducing social care visas (the system would collapse in a day), being tougher on overseas students and reducing the time they can stay after graduation (if you reduce their numbers at all then Universities will be bankrupt immediately), new ID cards, reduce (oh sorry, "clarify") the amount ECHR article 8 can be used to justify people staying on human rights grounds, etc.

When someone pointed out that high migration helps economies and low hurts them, and that this is true in the EU right now and all over the world, Starmer didn't think so. He said that immigration has been high in the UK but the economy has been stagnant, so there can't be any link. Yes Keir, but the economy was stagnant during A PANDEMIC AND ENERGY CRISIS AND COST OF LIVING CRISIS AND EXPENSIVE NEW WARS AND GLOBAL MARKET TRUMP TURMOIL. If the immigrants hadn't kept us level, your "stagnant" economy would have plummeted like a rock. You cannot possibly be presenting that as X=Y in a total vacuum.

This kind of xenophobia doesn't need explaining, but it's worth saying why it won't work and will lose Labour a lot of votes:

• Conservative and Reform voters do NOT change their vote to Labour ever, so this pandering is worthless. But Labour can lose votes to the Greens and LDs at a high rate. Nearly ALL the Reform votes come from former Conservatives.
• Public concern about immigration is low and goes up and down exactly with how much the press is currently going on about it (see the graph) so is not worth alienating your voter base about
• And it is alienating voters, because you've heard this kind of rhetoric before but it was from the actual NF and BNP
• The Mail's headline today was still attacking Labour because it is impossible to ever go far enough for them, or for Reform voters. Nothing is ever enough.

So, Labour saying "Reform are right actually" won't bring a single voter over to Labour, but it sure will lose you a few. Or, er, a lot. People are resigning their Labour membership and sounding furious. I haven't seen a single event trigger this much outrage from the public (and Labour MPs) in quite a while. Starmer has hugely damaged himself. Germany's far-right AfD are praising him, that's the level it's at.

I already left for the Greens, but today has me going even further. I think it's now worth the potential chaos to get rid of Starmer's version of Labour. In a timely article today, Nesrine Malik called our current elections "hostage politics". You MUST vote Labour or the Tories will get in. Now you MUST vote Labour or Reform will get in.

I don't respond well to threats. Never have. I tend to escalate. And I'm bored of their crap: more cuts, keeping first-past-the-post even though Labour members want PR, refusing to talk about rejoining the EU even though Labour members (and the majority of the country) want full rejoin, this xenophobic shit which goes against everything Starmer said about immigration when he was running for leader (but then he's broken every pledge from that time), the anti-trans bollocks, coming for the disabled PIP and saying all benefits are too high and that people are taking advantage of handouts and all the rest.

Fuck these guys. There's pragmatic politics where you compromise, and then there's this literal far-right shit that means you personally HAVE to be comfortable with saying it in public. It's about the soul of the PM and the party. Today is way over the line of sensible cross-party anything.

And I'm done with hostage politics. What, so we keep Labour in for 8 more years of... this? Of the same or more cuts? I'm rapidly approaching the point where smashing this Labour party so that they never try to be centre- / far-right again would do more good than the short-term harm.

Voters didn't show unwavering support for Labour at the last election, they showed that they will be extremely flexible and vote for whoever can win in their area. If Labour become unpopular in the polls, that will be someone else and not them. Labour's lead is incredibly fragile and changeable and today's performance is EXACTLY how they lose it and deserve to lose it. Yes, some young men went to Reform before the election... and twice as many young women went to the Greens. Labour's share fell 21% in 18-24 year olds. You cannot gain a single Reform vote by going right. It will never be far-right enough.
Saying that Reform are correct and using their rhetoric in speeches and changing your policies to theirs is NOT how you defeat them, or run a country.

Replace Starmer, quickly. At the very least.

And so what is the purpose of this thread, other than to vent into an online echo-chamber? I think it's a request to a call to action. It's a call out to everyone who currently resides - whether you like it or not - in a Labour controlled constituency and has a labour MP.

You can easily find out the details, together with links to their speeches and/or voting records, from service such as They Work For You.
Check the details of your MP, and especially their stance on immigration and other matters important to you, then email them.

@TheHouseofGirth - nobody is anti immigrants who contribute and adapt culturally. That is just the usual press whipping up a frenzy. That is what the British press does and you have to ignore it. Britain is not a racist country on the whole, far from it. Most other countries are far more racist and xenophobic.

I do live in London. I won't be going to Dubai like all the influencers, though I have had offers. I agree London is the most interesting city in the world.

I am just a bit baffled by the contradicting messages to immigrants.
Integrate.
No, leave!
Pay high taxes!
No, don't take the high paying jobs away from Brits!
Do care work for our grannies!
No, don't, our own citizens can do it perfectly well.
Marry a Brit!
Oh, you only did it for a visa!

Depends on what you mean by "need"? Do we really "need" ever increasing numbers of Uber drivers, Just Eat deliverers, Turkish Barbers (money launderers), etc? We'd be able to live without them, so they're a "nice to have" rather than a "need".

What we "need" are genuine care/health workers, IT consultants, professionals, etc. I'd open our borders to that kind of people who we genuinely "need" and who will add "value" to our country.

But we really don't "need" the low skilled, often black economy "workers", and giving work visas to an immigrant to work in a kebab shop (probably money laundering) is absolutely bonkers.

Nail on the head with everything you said.

Trouble is that too many people live in "naice" places where the only ethnic exposure they get is a hospital consultant or a high end ethnic restaurant. What they don't see, nor understand, is the kind of damage caused by low skilled, often alongside criminality, in places like Bradford where no attempt whatsoever is made to integrate nor live an honest life.

@TheHouseofGirth - well if you are in London then you know it is more than 50% international and who actually cares about the conflicting messages on social media and in the press. It is all noise and a lot of people pushing an agenda.
Britain gets a great deal out of highly skilled immigrants who tend to contribute massively, tend to have been educated abroad (expensive phase) or self funded uni here and often then go and retire in their home countries on top of that. All whilst having contributed masses amounts of taxes.

What's the immigration policy and rhetoric about migration in your home country @TheHouseofGirth?

This.

@BisiBodi Conservative and Reform voters do NOT change their vote to Labour ever

Agree with most of what you are saying, but you have got this wrong. I have just got through the area I live turning from a solid Red Wall to Labout being crushed by Reform. And we aren't the only ones. You are assuming a level of political nouse from the average voter that simply isn't there. Shed loads of Reform voters would go back to Labour (and very definitely would never vote Conservative) if they had confidence in Labour. What crushed the Labour vote had some, but very little, connection to immigration. It had a lot to do with the WInter Fuel Allowance, disability benefits and the broad attack on working class people by a government entirely out of touch with their traditional roots and interests. Yes, Farage and Reform can play the immigration fears card in these areas because of all the other fears that people have, in the vein of, we can't afford to live but there are all these immigrants. SImplistic answers for complex issues. Starmer is reputed to be more intelligent than the average voter, but it appears not. He will blame immgration, the elderly, the disabled or anyone else he can when the actual answer is that Labour (and the others) are as moribund and lacking in political ethics as any other party. They are in it for one thing, and that is for themselves.

Parts of birmingham have been like that 30+ years it’s not new. We brought a load of people over to work in industries that then shut down.

It’s completely unnecessary to quote the original post. We all know which post we are replying to.

this is all publicly available data from the office for national statistics. It’s really eye opening and gives insight into just how hard the immigration challenge is, because i went through and couldn’t see any groups we could reduce or remove without massive knock on implications.

want to reduce number of foreign nurses? Fine but then we need to train our own = more investment and takes a long time

want to reduce number of foreign students? Fine but then we need to fund our universities who rely on them for fees.

want to reduce number of foreign care workers? Fine but we need to recruit our own and salaries will need to go up to reflect the importance of the jobs and as most care home fees paid by local authorities / taxpayers, taxes will go up

^^ those 3 groups there are 70% of immigrants.

the challenge is people want immigration down but they don’t understand the result of this will be £££££££ and no one’s talking about it

Did you have to quote that entire post?

I thought this quote from a political commentator in the (yes I know) Guardian sums up why so many Labour supporters are fed up with KS. Replace immigration with benefits, poverty, whatever the latest knee-jerk is. It is hard to trust/believe/hope with someone like that at the wheel, regardless of where you are on the right-left spectrum.

Keir Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ comment is part of a pattern.. his willingness to read out whatever is written for him by clunky advisers ..in this case trying too hard to make him sound like Farage..As a result inauthenticity is a wider problem for him. There are many arguments to be made for border security. He made some of them well…All lost by a single stupid phrase that some right wing populists would think twice before using…and anyway predictably leads to the Mail and co running their usual hostile front pages.

Agree with everything you've said OP. Starmer isn't fit to be labour leader. Cutting disability payments, leaving children in poverty and fomenting racial tension, these things were never previously Labour party playbook. For him to do it while he's PM with a secure majority says to me he's weak and directionless. He doesn't need to bow to this shit, but he hasn't the balls to stand up for anything that he believes in.

None of the old lot, even Blair who was well immersed in dark arts by his second term, would have looked at the crap coming from farrage and thought "well that must be what people want so I'll give them more". What happened to politicians who weren't afraid to say to a fascist "you are wrong and here is why"?

He's going to lose on two levels as you say - anyone who thinks Farrah is a great guy would never vote labour anyway, and he'll alienate the traditional labour party base.

He's playing a dangerous game in the wider sense. We've not had rain in a month, no one's got any money, public services are woeful, public confidence is low. Coming into long days and the pink-headed dehydrated uncomfortably hot and tetchy beer garden drinkers are going to be cutting it out and about. Chat like this from the prime ministerial office is set to fuel all sorts and he is a stupid bastard if he doesn't realise it.

I agree with him. Immigration is out of control and something needs to be done.

That should be in the press. You’ve said it well.

My gob is still smacked how he got in.. in the first place.
Too many gullible people taken in by him.
He made so many false promises.
Family and friends are now regetting voting for him.
They should have listened to me.🤷‍♀️

Yes well of course this kind of thinking is anti ethical these days.

Post Brexit, and indeed as part of Brexit was the implicit restructuring of the economy. If you believe in zero migration then life looks quite different for a lot of people in the UK. There was all this narrative about better pay and security once migrants had left. Sunlit uplands.

in practice it has totally been the other way with high levels of lower skilled migration with deoendency, and increased foreign student numbers. Qualifications and their quality for skilled people lowered. It is the biggest crock, done by design.

The fixing of it will be very difficult. About the only good thing really is skilled labour, financial services, scientific research. This all promises to be well resourced. However it’s not mass employment.

I say back this guy. You can sack him in four years and then put Reform in if you don’t like it.

Thanks. And I agree that it will be difficult to find easy numbers to prune but I think most would agree that training up our own workforce or paying care workers more would be a good thing.

Do you know why the numbers exploded post-2020?

Who would your choice be to lead the Labour Party?

Of course you say back this guy. I think he’s fairly loathed though.

Immigration is an issue in many ways and I see a lot of straw men arguments being made whenever anyone has any issues with it.

I am a second generation immigrant myself with both my secularly Jewish parents immigrating here in the 1950s/1960s. But they were fluent English speakers, admired the U.K, paid (lots of) taxes and brought my brother and me up to fully integrate.

Most importantly they were both high skilled and were part of a wave of immigrants who were small in number and had time to integrate into the community.

Mass low skilled immigration is a massive problem.

Firstly it does displace domestic workers and drives down salaries; great for the wealthy but terrible for the poor. The left talk a lot about redistribution to combat this but it never happens and it is never their money they want redistributing (the asset rich want high income tax but not wealth tax, the childless want high inheritance tax etc etc).

Secondly, there is a quality issue. You might be happy to take a waiting job at 20% less than a native, but if you speak no English, it isn’t the same quality of service or experience.

And, regardless of the economic benefits, if immigrants are unable or, worse, unwilling to integrate, learn the language and embrace our values, society will shatter if we have too many.

It is not about colour or race, but nation states have a history and a culture. This is much disparaged by the left (for want of a better word) but, without these, what is a nation?

So, I think that, although Starmer may be doing it for cynical reasons, he has a point. Immigration is necessary and a cultural and economic positive, but who the immigrants are, their motivations and the pace they arrive all matter.

What a crass and offensive comment.

You clearly haven’t endured the heartbreak of seeing an elderly parent or relative slowly die of dementia. Good luck to them if you do. It’s not quite as simple as putting a hamster to sleep.

I'm not overly fussed with immigration as a topic, it's not top of my list in terms of concerns. I feel that a majority of immigrants do want to integrate and feel privileged to be here. The vast majority want to work hard to provide for their families and are paying taxes as well. Immigrants make up a large proportion of our NHS and care work which would fall over without them.

I think the rhetoric of reform and the cultural wars of blaming others whipped up by the media is abhorrent and has no place in a civil society.

Having said all that, I think people are naive to the fact communities are changing and not always for the better, some immigrants just do not want to integrate and stand behind British culture and values, are not contributing to the country through taxes and people get angry about that. We can't continue to ignore these people and call them bigots and not address these concerns.

I don't think Keir particularly said anything wrong in his speech and the strangers comment has been wildly taken out of context. Comparing him to Enoch Powell is quite frankly ridiculous. Labour always stood with the working families, and this is a start to address their concerns, we should be ensuring our children can get access to housing and jobs - training them to cover the skills gaps. We should improve pay and benefits for our workforce rather than import cheap labour to line big businesses wallets. We should be able to afford to care for the vulnerable in society, our children, disabled and elderly.

This is separate to refugees though, I think we should allow for people to claim asylum outside of the country which would reduce the illegal boats and distressing deaths of people seeking refuge.

Immigration is a classic short-termism which costs more in the long term. Yes, we need to invest more in our own population in terms of skills, training, etc., Yes, that costs money short term, but will pay dividends long term. Our politicians just can't "do" long term.

We've needed to train more doctors since the 1960s when the first wave of immigrant fully qualified doctors arrived. Rather than increasing the number of medical schools/training places, we (politicians) made the choice to continue relying on immigrant doctors. The politicians didn't want to fund the extra training places, and the doctor's union didn't want to dilute the bargaining position of their members so voted to keep supply low and demand high.

In the Noughties, rather than building up our skills and trades training/education, Blair made the choice to open our borders to the Eastern European tradesmen.

Just two examples of disastrous short-termism