Cliff Notes – Who PM was really trying to echo
- Prime Minister’s statement about Britain becoming an “island of strangers” has drawn criticism, evoking comparisons to Enoch Powell’s controversial rhetoric from 1968.
- Despite backlash from some MPs and officials like Sadiq Khan, polling indicates a majority of voters resonate with the PM’s immigration stance.
- Tensions over immigration language may complicate PM’s policy efforts, especially concerning economic implications and potential dissatisfaction within his own party and businesses.
Who PM was really trying to echo with island of strangers speech
Sir Keir Starmer is getting used to falling out with some of his MPs over policy decisions – be it on the winter fuel allowance, his approach to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza or welfare cuts.
But on Tuesday the prime minister found himself embroiled in a row with MPs over something entirely different – his language over immigration.
The prime minister’s argument that Britain “risked becoming an island of strangers” if immigration levels are not cut has sparked a backlash from some of his MPs, and the London mayor Sadiq Khan is alarmed that his own leader is using language similar to that of Enoch Powell.
Senior Labour figures distance themselves from PM’s speech
In his infamous 1968 Rivers Of Blood speech, Powell warned of a future where white people “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.
It was a speech that cost him his shadow cabinet job and made Powell one of the most divisive and controversial politicians in Britain. It is also a speech that the prime minister’s team is now frantically trying to distance itself against, with one insider telling me on Tuesday the PM’s team hadn’t realised the similarity and hadn’t intended the comparison.
The politician the prime minister was trying to channel was about as far away from Powell as you could get in the 1960s when the debate of immigration and race relations raged. Sir Keir had wanted to echo former Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins who had always argued that immigration was good for Britain, but needed to be done at a speed the country could absorb.
Take this from Jenkins in the House of Commons in 1966: “Let there be no suggestion that immigration, in reasonable numbers, is a cross that we have to bear, and no pretence that if only those who have come could find jobs back at home our problems would be at an end.
“But it does not follow that we can absorb them without limit. We have to strike a balance. That is what we are trying to do and I feel that we have been reasonably successful in recent months. We cannot lay down absolute numerical quantities, but I think that we have struck a reasonable balance and also that in the past year we have made substantial progress towards producing a healthier atmosphere, in terms of integration, on both sides – amongst both the indigenous and the immigrant community.”